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Wallace Stevens' "Peter Quince at the Clavier" |
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If "Harmonium" is still the most impressive debut of any poet writing in
English in the twentieth century (and it probably is), that status need
not imply that it is anything like a flawless book. For one thing, it
is a big book--about 6 dozen poems in the original 1923 edition, about
a dozen more in the 1931 revision--and impeccability is much harder to
sustain over such a broad sweep, as even the "selected poems" of an
entire career generally makes obvious. For another thing, it is full of
what Robert Frost called "bric-a-brac"--lines within poems, and even
complete poems, that invite one to wonder if Stevens was a Dadaist.
When a weak poet writes weakly, the product is no surprise. But what
are we to make of those other weak poems--poems written by the finest
poets, and which the finest poets saw fit to lay beside their finest
poems? Thomas Hardy addressed this issue more or less directly when he
excused his own collecting of poems he cared less for by noting that one
can never predict what the public may like and respond to. But is such
a position the wise decision to let posterity call the shots, or an
abrogation of the poet's responsibility to present only his best work to
the audience? Or does the poet have such a responsibility?
* "Peter Quince at the Clavier" certainly sets before us a clear example of strong and weak Stevens intermingled and bonded together. This four-part poem (a sonata?) begins by introducing both its theme and its subject: first, that music is not mere sound waves, but rather the emotion stirred by those waves; and second, that the old tale of Susanna and the elders exemplifies this theme. The poem begins with elevated diction: Just as my fingers on these keys But is elevated diction necessarily poetry? No. Nor is the opening to "Peter Quince" poetry--it is statement of theme, presumably because Stevens did not trust his reader to be able to deduce the theme on his own and because he (Stevens) considered the theme to be too important to leave to "chance." And yet this theme is clearly implied in the title--the musical title as a metaphor for what happens in the poem itself--and, furthermore, the idea is not any sort of intellectual breakthrough. Isn't the symphonic music of the Romantic period an embodiment of this theme? Stevens might have begun the poem, then, halfway through line five, where the first "new" information occurs--where Quince tells his beloved that what he feels, desiring her, is music. And yet even here, the reader may as well wince--for this "new information" is itself already cliche. Why not leave it all off then, and begin with the subject of the poem, the lust of the elders for Susannna? Nothing essential is lost if Stevens deletes the first three stanzas (nine lines) and begins the poem-- Of a green evening, clear and warm, The basses of their beings throb Here, in these lines, is all the content of section one. If we like, we
can pick at these lines too (Why do we need such a bland description of
the evening? Is not "witching" rather over the top? What about
"pizzicati"?), but there is at least meat to these lines, and we are
reasonably moved by Stevens' presentation and drawn into his tale.
In the green water, clear and warm so closely echo stanza four of the first section? For "musical purposes" only; for reiteration of melody.) As Susanna bathes in the water, she seems to discover her own sensuality-- She searched Though the rhyme nears the jangle of light verse, Stevens has found a
relatively effective manner of introducing sexuality without offending
the mores of the time. He also raises a question he does not answer--
whose concealed imaginings did Susanna find? Context almost demands
that the imaginings be Susanna's, even if the legend (and the poem's
subsequent development) allow one to suggest that Susanna has in some
manner already encountered the elders. One pictures Susanna pleasuring
herself (in sight of the elders), thus explaining her return to the bank
"in the cool / Of spent emotions." Stevens' re-creation of this scene
also hints at something less pleasant--the possibility that he links
Susanna's "devotions" to her subsequent rape. He places her in a sort
of Eden, through which she wanders nude, with the wind's caresses as a
simile of her maids' attempt to dress her, "Fetching her woven scarves,
/ Yet wavering"--hesitant, that is, to clothe her, as though she
resists.
A cymbal crashed, The cymbal is of course Susanna's shock and fear; the horns, the virile elders. Perhaps the most effective use of language in the poem, however, comes just before the musical connotation of the rape--in Stevens' description of the pivot, the moment in which Susanna's "spent emotions" shift into terror as the elders confront her-- A breath upon her hand This image works partly because it adheres to Stevens' overriding
metaphor--that is, as Susanna's music of pleasure is "muted." But more
effective by far is the simple narration--touch, not sound--of the
breath upon the hand, because for most of us a breath upon the hand
suggests the approach of a dog. It is perhaps only here that Stevens
adequately relieves Susanna of complicity in her rape.
And as they whispered, the refrain The image of the blowing willow branches is conventional, but Stevens
has pitched his conventional verse exactly right--he has avoided
unnecessary adjectives and adverbs; he has left off any nod to the
conventional need to read "willow" as "sorrow" (although the cliche
certainly fits here); and he has limited himself strictly to the issue
of sound. It is up to us to read into the simile the suggestion of
undone hair, as in mourning; of wet undone hair, as in Mary washing
Jesus' feet; of the mirroring effect produced by the sweeping willow
here and the wind-blown scarves of section two.
Beauty is momentary in the mind-- which is merely elegant because it does not, finally, cohere. How, we are permitted to ask, is beauty immortal in the flesh? Stevens notes, in the very next line, "The body dies; the body's beauty lives," and he follows this bald statement of abstraction with a sequence of images of mortal death. He seems then to be deliberately contradicting himself, though in fairly lovely (if cliched) language. But his final image, in this sequence of natural deaths, is Susanna's image--his attempt to make his abstraction sensible. He tells us-- So maidens die, to the auroral "Ah!" we are supposed to sigh, "each death leads to the birth of a new
thing. The maiden becomes the wife." But Susanna's maidenhood was not
sacrificed to a husband--it was sacrificed to gang-rape. Having
written himself into this corner, Stevens struggles mightily to escape.
Susanna's music, which "touched the bawdy strings / Of those white
elders," brought about death, and then immortality--its own. The
unclear antecedent of his pronouns in the last lines make it impossible
for us to explicate Stevens' final attempt to harmonize his unruly
material. What "plays / On the clear viol of her memory"? Death?
Death's music? Susanna's music? And what does "her memory" mean?
Susanna's own memory, which must by now either be dead or with her in
the "beyond"? Or our own remembering of Susanna? And finally,
whichever Stevens intends, how does it create "a constant sacrament of
praise"? Susanna, after all, was raped.
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1996 © 2004 |
However one chooses to answer those questions, Stevens clearly decided
to include in his debut lots of flotsam. If he could not tell it was
flotsam, then what--we must wonder--allowed him to create the other
lines and poems, the lovely, the essential ones? How does it happen
that a poet writes utterly eternal lines at one moment, and worse then
merely temporal lines a few minutes later, and cannot tell the
difference? Only, I suppose, the muse knows for sure.