Friday Night Reading

Here we are, Friday night, and I find myself stewing on Wallace Stevens, probably the best poet most of you have never heard of, except perhaps from that freshman English course in university where you read "Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Blackbird." There's something about Stevens' romanticism that warms me.

Re-statement of Romance

The night knows nothing of the chants of night.
It is what it is as I am what I am:
And in perceiving this I best perceive myself

And you. Only we two may interchange
Each in the other what each has to give.
Only we two are one, not you and night,

Nor night and I, but you and I, alone,
So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,
So far beyond the casual solitudes,

That night is the only background of our selves,
Supremely true each to its separate self,
In the pale light that each upon the other throws.

Poems like this appeal to an idealism that reality tends to snuff out of most of us in adolescence, while of course being sternly resistant to the pull of 'cheap' romanticism. Or how about this, a kind of Stevensian version of a villanelle?:

The Brave Man

The sun, that brave man,
Comes through boughs that lie in wait,
That brave man.

Green and gloomy eyes
In dark forms of the grass
Run away.

The good stars,
Pale helms and spiky spurs,
Run away.

Fears of my bed,
Fears of life and fears of death,
Run away.

That brave man comes up
From below and walks without meditation,
That brave man.

Simple, n'est-ce pas? Or how about this?:

Autumn Refrain

The skreak and skritter of evening gone
And grackles gone and sorrows of the sun,
The sorrows of sun, too, gone... the moon and moon,
The yellow moon of words about the nightingale
In measureless measures, not a bird for me
But the name of a bird and the name of a nameless air
I have-- shall never, hear. And yet beneath
The stillness of everything gone, and being still,
Being and sitting still, something resides,
Some skreaking and skittering residuum,
And grates these evasions of the nightingale
Though I have never heard-- shall never hear that bird.
And the stillness is in the key, all of it is,
The stillness is all in the key of that desolate sound.

"Skreaking." What a wonderful word, a word I've only ever read in Stevens' poetry. I realize I'm not writing anything substantial here. I guess I'm just enacting bits of my reading for the night, sharing some of the stuff I'm savouring.

I prefer Stevens, I have to confess, when he's at his most romantic and his most sensual, and at his best, he can coalesce those impulses with an intellectualism that is as strong as any writer in the past hundred or so years. Here I think of "The Idea of Order At Key West," of "Sunday Morning," poems both which stir so profoundly and yet so immediately. He's a stunningly good poet.