… who died today.
Curtains forcing their will
against the wind,
children sleep,
exchanging dreams with
seraphim. The city
drags itself awake on
subway straps; and
I, an alarm, awake as a
rumor of war,
lie stretching into dawn,
unasked and unheeded.
This small lyric lacks the florid, sentimental feel of a lot of her other work (prose, poetry, music). In its place there’s the held-back powerfully suggestive contents of an interesting consciousness. A consciousness coming to consciousness in the big city, feeling the drag of sleep against the imperative to wake, feeling the temptation not to get up and struggle, not to take up arms in life and try to fight your way to clarity, to fight against the world’s injustice. And feeling too the larger futility of being “unasked and unheeded” by a world of passive indifferent strap-hangers. Yet she will “force her will” on the world, will be the winds of change, a “rumor of war.” The line “lie stretching into dawn” is wonderful, especially the word “stretching,” implying as it does not just physically stretching as one awakes, but increasing in understanding.
The poem puts UD in mind of a famous Henry James statement:
Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong: beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake up to it again for ever and ever; we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.
May 28th, 2014 at 3:00PM
This got me thinking a little about the meaning of the James quotation and its relationship to the last four lines of Stevens’s The Poems of Our Climate. Two sides of the same coin or two different ways of looking at inevitable imperfection? Or is Stevens, unlike James, not really referring to anything that might count as imperfection in the world of the truly possible.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.