AN EPITAPH FOR THE AMERICAN DEAD
Who should dare to write their praise
Do so in the plainest phrase.
Few names last, where many lie;
Even names of battles die.
These will stand for many more:
Wake, Bataan, Corregidor,
Attu, and the Coral Sea,
Africa, and Sicily;
Callahan, who ran his ship
To the very cannon’s lip.
Men, devoid of name and hour,
With direction gathered power;
Stripped of selfhood, each must be
Our hostage to Eternity.
Listen to Wallace Stevens read his poem The Idea of Order at Key West.
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard.
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.
For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
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Insanely slow. Slow poetry.
And why? So that we can attend to the world and what we make of it. Listen carefully. And remember my post about the Yvor Winters poem, The Slow Pacific Swell. Remember in particular this line:
The sea is but a sound.
This seems a theme of the Stevens poem too.
Listen. Listen because there’s something in the Stevens poem that isn’t in the Winters. And that thing is art itself. Winters is all about the mind struggling to impose order on the world. Our rationality, which seeks precision and stability, has to keep its distance from the enigmatic, undermining, powerful chaos that the sea represents. But Stevens introduces another element into our relationship with the world — one that enables us to remain close to sources of chaos and mystery. Listen.
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The Idea of Order at Key West
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
[The poet, walking along a beach, watches and listens to a woman also at the beach, singing. Her singing is brilliant – more brilliant than the singing of the sea.]
The water never formed to mind or voice,
[Why more brilliant? Because the sea is just a sound. It doesn’t have a mind, and it doesn’t have a voice. No words. Just sound. Same formless chaos Winters describes.]
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves;
[The sea is merely its physical reality on the globe. It is a body of water, and when its arms wave to us — when the water moves — its gesture is empty, without content.]
and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
[See how he calls it “tragic-gestured” a few lines down? Although it’s empty of content, we do intuit, in the sound of the sea, the sad futility of human existence. Matthew Arnold in Dover Beach describes it as “the turbid ebb and flow of human misery.” We hear, writes Stevens, a constant cry — emanating from the alien inhuman sea, but nonetheless in some sense our own, because we understand it in a certain way as mimicking the truth of our being.]
The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard.
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.
[Both human artist and inhuman sea, then, are authentic expressive realities. Yet they do not interact. Her song and the water do not, together, make a medley, even if the singer is trying to imitate the sound of the ocean with her voice. She’s using words, after all, and the ocean is speechless, empty gesture. Even if, in a fine low voice, she’s doing Elgar’s Sea Pictures, it’s the human artist we hear, not the ocean.]
For she was the maker of the song she sang.
[In the world of Winters, we are far less powerful than in the world of Stevens. With Stevens, the artist has dominion over the world — the world only has existence in the artist’s work, which shapes the world as something meaningful and beautiful. If we have any idea of order at all, we’ve gotten it from the artist.]
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
[He agrees with Winters that the sea is a permanent and unsettling mystery – ever-hooded – and that it signals to us — or rather we respond to it as signaling to us — the truth of our tragic condition. But it’s not the threatening mystery it is for Winters; for Stevens, the sea is “merely” a location, merely a physical attribute of the world. It needs us – our formal artistic expressivity – to be anything more, really, than a place-holder.]
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.
[To be human is to be unsatisfied with mere physicality. We seek meaning, beauty, spirit; and we seek it in art.]
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone.
[We’ve been contemplating the level sea so far; now our view takes in what’s above and below it — takes in all of the world. And even if we do include all of the non-human, non-aesthetic world, we merely deepen the sense of nothingness – deep air, the “speech” of mere air. And there’s another feature of this physical world. It does not move forward in time; it does not, like our lives, make a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. Rather it is a “summer without end,” a droning constancy that is therefore inhuman, alien to us and our experience. Only the artist can both interact with this atemporal world of nature and convey our temporal humanness to us.]
But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
[The poet walks with a companion. He notes that the artist transcends herself – her singing is more “even than her voice,” and more than whatever the poet and his companion, in their speech, add to her song. Now we get a few lines amplifying the idea that the natural world is merely physical, and that while it can gesture to us in ways we interpret as meaningful, it is only the artist who can take that interpretation as it were back to the world, and vivify and order the world aesthetically. Without her, the world remains meaningless, a stage set.]
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
[As day ends and a spectacular Key West sunset of bronzes emerges, we need the singer to sharpen and clarify and order that sunset.]
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang.
[Again, the artist owns, lives inside, the temporality that makes the world something other than a grinding pointless redundancy. As she sings, she forms the world in which she sings.]
And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town,
[The poet turns to his companion to ask a question as they walk away from the beach and toward town at the end of the day and as the singer concludes her song.]
tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
[We make songs, but we make other things too. Those lights in the boats also represent a form of ordering the world. They aren’t charged with artistic brilliance, like the singer’s song, but they are another powerful form of human creation — the lighting up of the dark world — and they have a similar effect: They master the night. They portion out the sea. They make the world. And they order the world. So even when the singing ends, we remain in a beautiful humanized world.]
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
[Gorgeous writing. See how the word zone playfully inheres in the word that precedes it? We make of the otherwise undifferentiated world zones; we mark these zones with fiery poles, always arranging, deepening, clarifying darkness. This is a poem not merely about the triumphal powers of the artist; it is about the powers of all human makers.]
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
[Our divine fever to be makers of a world whose vastest and most powerful attributes seem disorder — in this mania we discover that the “spirit” the poet sought in the singer is his own spirit, our collective human creativity. The world comes at us obliquely, fragrant with implicit meaning, dimly starred with significance. We are always, as with the boat’s lights, illuminating and setting in motion and speaking the dark mute lifeless stage set of the world. But aesthetic creation is the very best thing we do, for it confronts the sea, the sea that repels as much as it attracts Yvor Winters in his own slow poem.]
The idea of great American poetry on inauguration day’s a good one. UD thought she’d share a great American poem — one that says things about the sea she’s been trying to say in her own writing. It’s The Slow Pacific Swell, by Yvor Winters.
Far out of sight forever stands the sea,
Bounding the land with pale tranquillity.
When a small child, I watched it from a hill
At thirty miles or more. The vision still
Lies in the eye, soft blue and far away:
The rain has washed the dust from April day;
Paint-brush and lupine lie against the ground;
The wind above the hill-top has the sound
Of distant water in unbroken sky;
Dark and precise the little steamers ply-
Firm in direction they seem not to stir.
That is illusion. The artificer
Of quiet, distance holds me in a vise
And holds the ocean steady to my eyes.
Once when I rounded Flattery, the sea
Hove its loose weight like sand to tangle me
Upon the washing deck, to crush the hull;
Subsiding, dragged flesh at the bone. The skull
Felt the retreating wash of dreaming hair.
Half drenched in dissolution, I lay bare.
I scarcely pulled myself erect; I came
Back slowly, slowly knew myself the same.
That was the ocean. From the ship we saw
Gray whales for miles: the long sweep of the jaw,
The blunt head plunging clean above the wave.
And one rose in a tent of sea and gave
A darkening shudder; water fell away;
The whale stood shining, and then sank in spray.
A landsman, I. The sea is but a sound.
I would be near it on a sandy mound,
And hear the steady rushing of the deep
While I lay stinging in the sand with sleep.
I have lived inland long. The land is numb.
It stands beneath the feet, and one may come
Walking securely, till the sea extends
Its limber margin, and precision ends.
By night a chaos of commingling power,
The whole Pacific hovers hour by hour.
The slow Pacific swell stirs on the sand,
Sleeping to sink away, withdrawing land,
Heaving and wrinkled in the moon, and blind;
Or gathers seaward, ebbing out of mind.
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Any reader can sense, even on a first reading, the writer’s effort to convey something about how the mind works. Maybe the way awareness comes and goes. Sometimes we experience very sharp precision of thought, and sometimes we float into vagueness; sometimes we’re mentally agitated, and sometimes we’re very calm — pacific, if you like. Sometimes we drift very close to the truth; sometimes we’re kept infinitely far away from it.
More interestingly, sometimes consciousness feels like both of these states at once. Like the seawater that washes up on the poet’s ship, consciousness can be a “loose weight” — which sounds like an oxymoron, but water is very heavy, and at the same time without structure. Our thoughts have weight, perhaps, but they are after all merely thoughts.
So, to wade through the poem…
Far out of sight forever stands the sea,
Bounding the land with pale tranquillity.
[Note the last phrase of the poem: “Ebbing out of mind.” The land is where we walk through our lives, grounded, in a familiar world. The sea remains, in its vastness, looseness, and distance, ungraspable, incomprehensible, to us. So say it conveys here the realm of intellectual and spiritual mystery — all that we’ll never understand, however advanced we become. We gaze at it and listen to it because we’re enchanted and intrigued by what we don’t know.]
When a small child, I watched it from a hill
At thirty miles or more. The vision still
Lies in the eye, soft blue and far away:
The rain has washed the dust from April day;
Paint-brush and lupine lie against the ground;
The wind above the hill-top has the sound
Of distant water in unbroken sky;
Dark and precise the little steamers ply-
Firm in direction they seem not to stir.
That is illusion. The artificer
Of quiet, distance holds me in a vise
And holds the ocean steady to my eyes.
[Everything here goes to precision, clarity, the ability to hold something steady in order to see it, analyze it. No dust in the eye; a clear April day; the sky’s unbroken by cloud. Dark and precise the little steamers ply – / Firm in direction they seem not to stir. Glorious poetic concision here, stating something I’ve thought too, gazing through my binoculars at cargo ships in the afternoon, so geometrically clear, heading somewhere full of goods… And yet – he’s right – they don’t seem to be moving. They’re so far away. Sometimes I’ll stare them a long time just to measure their forward progress from place to place; but it’s so hard to see them actually moving as they get somewhere! So another paradox beloved of poets — firm in direction but not stirring.]
Once when I rounded Flattery, the sea
Hove its loose weight like sand to tangle me
Upon the washing deck, to crush the hull;
Subsiding, dragged flesh at the bone. The skull
Felt the retreating wash of dreaming hair.
[Cape Flattery’s “the farthest northwest point of the contiguous United States.” Here all the clarity, precision, and stillness dissolves as the poet’s thrown to the deck by the force of the waves. He’s lost consciousness, briefly, and lies dreaming.]
Half drenched in dissolution, I lay bare.
I scarcely pulled myself erect; I came
Back slowly, slowly knew myself the same.
[The slow pacific swell. So much of our lives we spend dreaming, half-conscious; and then the slow pacific swell of thought and feeling overwhelms us, rouses us to awareness. I came / Back slowly, slowly knew myself the same. Yet the act of awareness — the formation, the swell, of thought — will be maddeningly slow. We’ll be getting somewhere, perhaps — like those steamers — but it’s going to feel as though we’re stuck.]
That was the ocean. From the ship we saw
Gray whales for miles: the long sweep of the jaw,
The blunt head plunging clean above the wave.
[The poet’s skull; and now the whale’s head: The theme of awareness, of consciousness itself as it tries to understand and act upon the world, seems dominant to me in this poem. The whale is a kind of perfection of consciousness; it can lift itself clean above the wave.]
And one rose in a tent of sea and gave
A darkening shudder; water fell away;
The whale stood shining, and then sank in spray.
[Same paradox of consciousness: A shining moment of clarity, triumph over the ungraspable infinite; and then it sinks in spray, back to the deeps.]
A landsman, I. The sea is but a sound.
I would be near it on a sandy mound,
And hear the steady rushing of the deep
While I lay stinging in the sand with sleep.
I have lived inland long. The land is numb.
It stands beneath the feet, and one may come
Walking securely, till the sea extends
Its limber margin, and precision ends.
[I prefer to live on land, where I can feel somewhat secure in my world, though I know that by keeping a distance from the rushing of the deep I remain only half-awake. I don’t confront, or try to take into account, that deeper enigmatic realm that undoes our sense of precision.]
By night a chaos of commingling power,
The whole Pacific hovers hour by hour.
[There’s something frightening – and hence evaded – about the powerful realm of chaos the sea expresses to us constantly.]
The slow Pacific swell stirs on the sand,
[This line wins the alliteration award.]
Sleeping to sink away, withdrawing land,
[Here again things feel pretty ominous. The sea doesn’t merely remind us of the erosion of our certainties; it withdraws land… It actively undermines our sense of solidity.]
Heaving and wrinkled in the moon, and blind;
[Heaving – like the poet himself heaving on the deck under the water’s influence; and – blind. The poem ends with that ultimate image of darkness… And the sea is under the influence, after all, of the moon; and so it is passive, and unable, like the little steamers, to set its own direction. You might have at some point in reading this poem been reminded of Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, which has a similar theme — the sea in its circular powerful chaos is both a figure for our own sense of spiritual and intellectual futility, and a challenge to us to struggle toward greater clarity.]
Or gathers seaward, ebbing out of mind.
[The poem concludes with the final escape of the sea and all its philosophical challenge; or, rather, with our banishment of the sea, our insisting that it ebb out of our minds so that we can regain a sense of uprightness on solid ground.]
[Maybe you didn’t think of Arnold. Maybe you thought of Elizabeth Bishop – At the Fishhouses. This is how that poem ends.]
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
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