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Helen
Fendler
Hennessy
Stevens'
"Like Decorations
in a Nigger
Cemetery"
title
is an ellipsis: it should be read [My Poems Are] Like
in a Nigger
A flagrant
Decorations
simile for a
Cemetery.
The
wilderness of poems, fifty of them, an experiment in poetry as epigram,
or poetry as fossil bones: "Piece the world together,
boys, but not with
a
token
of
your hands" (192). The
poem,
things to come, is, like
the poetry of discon
many foretastes, perversely experimental. Though
nection is Stevens' most adequate form, and the gaps from "stanza" to
"stanza"
in the long poems will always challenge
the best efforts of
critical articulation, still the discontinuity will never again be so flagrant
as in this example. There
are no bridges here for the magnifico;
he
must
cynical,
migrate
some
from
bitter,
one
"floral
some
reconstruct
ruses
that
refusing
shattered
by
some
Each
comic.
some
visionary,
is a "nigger
itself,
were
some
to another,
tribute"
prophetic,
the
attempt
a whole
to make
was
Harmonium
large.
by
the
from
no means
harmony: all of Stevens is in it, and not in embryo either, and its
tonal spectrum is as diverse as the one we find in Decorations,
but it is
less
because
shocking
the
are
tones
in
presented
separate
not
units,
each
Grand
1
Noted
other,
Poem:
of
course;
Preliminary
inWallace
Stevens
he
once
Minutiae,"1
Checklist,
to
wanted
and
call
he
ed S. F. Morse,
Harmonium
thought,
p.
"The
as Samuel
10.
136
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Stevens9
in aNigger
"Like Decorations
Cemetery9
morn,
have
the Whitman-sun
on
chanting
the
ruddy
shore
of
an
mo
day. He is a Jovian figure, moving with large-mannered
on
lumi
"A
and
the
tions,
horizon, glistening"
"rugged
giant,
(442),
nous" (479), one of Stevens' many chanting figures:
autumn
in
Like the "new resemblance of the sun" in An Ordinary Evening
New Haven} this sun is "a mythological
form, a festival sphere / A great
bosom, beard and being, alive with age" (466), with all the equivocal
sentimentality still attached to our images of Jehovah. From this rather
flame, the poem proceeds to snow, and the immortality
self-indulgent
of
the
chanting
sun
gives
way,
in
the
end,
to
the
stoic's
revenge
shoes. Human
lopping off his feet, as Blake said, so as not to want
no defense against
is
in
the
stanza)
penultimate
solidarity (advocated
process; only wis
decay, since there is no strength that can withstand
dom, by its slyness, anticipates destruction,
slipping from the grip of
can winter do to one who has
winter by anticipating
its clasp. What
already forsaken casinos for igloos?
137
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The Massachusetts
Neither
One
of
the
But
the wise
leaves
man
nor
sand
. . .Can
all men,
that have
fallen
avenges
as
rock,
Review
his
by building
the
in
avenge
together,
in autumn?
city
but
Bible,
in snow.
(L)
and
not
snow;
house
but a city; and not "on," but "in," with its diffuseness of reference.
is stated as a proverb, and the suggested
This
preventive
avenging
it is phrased.
It
in which
is
reaffirmed
vengeance
by the dactyls
is a remark,
an
not
however,
mations
of
despair,
to regret
not
palace,
decorate
the
to
counter
the
autumn;
to
write
To
cemetery.
of
erosions
be
of
it means
what
accomplishment;
process
snow
the
man,
build
own
by one's
in short,
is not
that
nothing
to
and
there
is almost
for the
impossible to Stevens with his gift for nostalgic reminiscence,
poetry of the vanished, but to write of the nothing that is there ismore
possible to him, and accounts for some of his most brilliant poems ("The
"No Possum, No Sop, No T?ters,"
"The Plain Sense of
Snow Man,"
"The Course of a Particular").
The
rhetoric of nostalgia
Things,"
and the rhetoric of the minimal are at war in him (profitably) ; sadness
and
stoicism
listlessness.
the
the
joyless
It was
We
have
scarcely
to
as
irony
close
and
language
stoicism
that redeems
becomes
the
when
the
trees were
come.
poetry
it from
There
or
indifference
inveterate
the
norm,
leafless
their
blackness
became
the
eccentric
to be
Knew
of
particulars
aesthetician's
change
And
the
forth
in Stevens'
As
remarks
eye
and
contend,
is a curiosity
a name
for
extreme
tone
dryness
detachment
impersonal
first
in November
of
can
this
sort,
as
verging,
it, grafting
bring
a sinister
onto
paradox
as
it does,
schoolmaster's
of
disorder,
the
"one"
first
and
person
"he"
dramatic monologue.
("We
of
an
are
"we"
to
the
options
Stevens'
of
are
avoidance
as
as well
favorites,
many?
the
"I"
of
"We"
: it
belongs
sentence"
of moral
the
and
singular,
and
rhetoric
of
sermons,
of
and
oratory,
political
verse. Though
Stevens is fond of its oracular potentialities
live in an old chaos of the sun") he uses it chiefly as a signal
experience
not
peculiar
to
the
poet,
reserving
for
that
special
138
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case
the
in aNigger
"Like Decorations
Stevens9
"he."
particularized
at will.
the
In
this
as
poems,
long
is uncomfort
Stevens
poems,
long
the
In
Cemetery99
respect
the
Decorations
again,
metamorphoses
speaker
the
is
from
most
detached
to a man alone
to one of us ("we")
aesthetician and scholar ("one")
a
man
to
I
with
my destroyers?")
grapple
having a dialogue
("Shall
to a commentator on someone else ("It needed
with a servant (XXVI)
the heavy nights of drenching weather / To make him return to peo
extreme
The
ple").
single
variation
"behind"
sensibility
of
compensations
statement
thematic
of
This
the
temptation
natural
tendency
at
cost
the
of making
to
and
age, death,
order
impose
to reduce
manner
by
Stevens
in such a
of some kind
the
can
we
of whom
on middle
assume
in defense,
us,
puppet-master
thoughts
even
styles,
revolving
explains
makes
speakers
a
scene,
creation.
of
the
en
disappear
tirely.
The
white
death
is the question
(we
the
vestments;
to cheat
that
and
with
maimed
rites
our
to redeem
how
triumph,
cemetery
and
coffin
pine
of the poem,
the
decorate
of
the answer
grotesque
of
the
own
of course
pauper.
ignominy,
is both pitiful
and
poem-bouquets)
stern
indifference
to
the world,
its
self-sustenance
("It
must
create
its colors
Stevens
visualizes
his
fifty
stanzas
as
so many
sausage
links,
pre
sided over by the "god of the sausages" or possibly an even more insig
a mere patron saint
nificant Muse,
sanctifying himself by a complacent
self-regard (XLII).
2
VII, VIII, XV, XXII, XXV, XXIX,
XLVII, XLVIII, inmy reading.
XXX, XXXII,
XXXIII,
XXXVI,
139
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Review
The Massachusetts
What
we
What
to write
truly
about
is
experience
is> Not
) But
the ocean
the ugly
Things
of
the virtuosi
the mask
alien,
that
speaks
stanza could imply any of the previous beginnings, but its strength
formula used in this stanza (Not X but Y)
lies in not needing them. The
and
is one of Stevens' commonest
(derived perhaps from Wordsworth),
or "he saw." The ab
is frequently preceded elsewhere by "he wanted"
The
sence
here
of
to
perception"
a verb
such
the
creates
reader,
with
the
phrase
no
as
intervening
an
immediate
subject,
of
"object
as Stevens
album
of Corot
is premature.
The
mist
but
still
if he waited
manticized]
of Corot
lets
some
he
[because
He
would
linger.
that
(XXXVIII)
is golden
pretends
really
it might
read:
to be
painting
mist
be painting
is not wholly
mist.
140
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Stevens9
chiasmus?mist,
supervenes
Cemetery"
dismissal
truncated
The
in aNigger
"Like Decorations
on
the
of
foreboding
the
line.
second
of
One
the
continuing
of
the
stanzas
of Decorations
that
suggest
all
its
exertions
intimations,
these
stanzas,
fifty
of
all
almost
responses
possible
to
it does not
the decay that is its topic. If this is a poetry of meditation,
have the sustained progressive development we know in other meditative
of intimation and dismissal, of fits
poets: it is the staccato meditation,
and starts, revulsions and shrugs, lightenings and sloughs, the play of
the mind and sensibility over a topic.
are of three or four
Except for two sections (I and IV), the stanzas
on
very simple rhetorical figures for
lines, and depend almost entirely
for instance, in the dominating contrasts of sum
their form?antithesis,
mer and winter, rich and poor, the mechanical
and the human,
the
social and the private :
A bridge above the bright and blue of water
Such antitheses
ing
the
the
living
speaker
the
Rich
Tweedle-dum,
bridge
when
the
river
The
apparel.
dead,
is frozen.
poor Tweedle-dee.
qualitative
and
the
stands
same
And
and
between
the
Between
farewell
decorations
the
systems
and
(XXIV)
not-yet-dead-but
of antitheses,
the
absence
a mediation
between
no-longer-quite-alive
of
farewell,
(X)
Sometimes the rhetorical figure will come from logic, as in the deliber
ately trivial arithmetic by which one ascertains the density of life by divid
or in the more enig
ing the number of legs one sees by two (XLIII),
:
matic series of instances followed by an induction of section XXIII
141
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The Massachusetts
are
The
fish
The
grain
hunter
The
Consider
Review
in the Ashman's
window,
is in the baker's
shop,
falls.
shouts as the pheasant
of regret.
the odd morphology
members
sorts
all
no
alone;
but rather we
the pheasant,
without
every
regret
on
is expended
regret
day.
the
But
the
deaths
of
compression
the
of
in death
verse
the
forces us to leap from the three instances to the antithesis of the final
ironic line without the gliding smoothness of conventional logic.
The
internal
vanished
poverty,
ous
birds)
but
are
in Decorations
echoes
reference
of metaphorical
religion
there
set
again,
the
against
is no particular
with
casual,
in the ascendant
certain
spheres
and
new
sung
hymns
consistency.
the
by
There
vari
for
are,
rather
tion
than
of
of
metry
than
absence
The
morally.
next
the unmated
bird,
the
a
female
leaden
have
she would
of possible
leaden
mate.
been
in
who
pigeon
he
her,
Imagining
reality,
is the
lasciviousness
not
her
makes
misses
makes
leaden
depriva
the
sym
her
better
but
silver,
not mortal
on the entrance
gate
pigeon
of a leaden mate,
the symmetry
see her fans of silver undulate.
(XIV)
The
leaden
Must
miss
Must
and
Oriole
crow,
like
:
the
extremes
of music
in
the
natural
world,
form
fowls
androgynous
night
creature,
are
obscure
of
section
XXX,
in reference,
one
but
a
they
day
are
creature
perhaps
and
allied
3
XIII, XIV, XXV, XXX, XXXIII, XLVI.
142
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one
to
Stevens9
sun
the
and
"Like Decorations
two
those
moon,
elements
in aNigger
Cemetery99
between
Crispin
which
voyages.
Singly,
The
hen-cock
crows
The
cock-hen
crows
Hen
shudders:
the
at midnight
all day. But
copious
egg
and
is made
laid.
The final fertility, Stevens might say, is in the journey back and forth
between the antithetical states, not in any imagined confluence of oppo
sites. Only with the interp?n?tration, but no identification, of the anti
thetical elements can the shrill vocalism of crowing become the copious
an
egg,
exhibit
here
scrutinized
at arm's
length.
Of
that
All
that
expects
enough,
as
the
like
a clock. The
cabinet
cuckoos,
Stevens
tainly traditional
understood
ticks
gone
of
his
reader,
is a
then,
context
differs,
so will
hazy
the
bird.
cer
notion,
for poetry,
but
a
In
it is
context
yellow
patios,
an
anonymous
figure,
"meaningless
natural
effigy"
image
clusters
Stevens' metaphors
in
the
theatre,
poem?the
are extremely
provisional
the
weather,
and
so
on.
143
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The Massachusetts
Review
to
alternative
the
varying
still abounds
of
species
bird
is of
in forms, as
course
to
vary
may
say,
certain
kind
of
language,
to
opposed
euphony,
to
the
aesthetic
who
of Crispin
arrant
chose
stinks,
the
anti-aesthetic.
The
Or
know
to
which
prefer,
beauty of inflections
the beauty
of
innuendoes,
be better off.
It is, rather,
the things
relates:
A man
Are
and
a woman
and
a woman
one.
A man
and
a blackbird
144
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it
Stevens9
the man
Between
in aNigger
"Like Decorations
the woman
and
is the
blackbird,
Cemetery99
one
with
them
; be
The
river
is moving.
all afternoon.
evening
It was
snowing
it was going
And
to snow.
But
is our
line
of
thought:
we
when
are
two
of
minds
(or,
as Stevens
presses
twenty
the
mountains,
autumn
winds,
the
snow?but
though
only
of
the
spare
and
the
eccentric,
as
it arises
from
flaw
and
145
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The Massachusetts
A man
and
a woman
and
a woman
Review
one.
Are
A man
and
a blackbird
snowing
. .. accents.
..
But I know
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know. (VIII)
Like
for
much
more
than
thirteen
stanzas.
The
increased
represent
together
voluminous
self,
daringly
later
poem,
varied meditative
to sacrifice
finish
Stevens'
a new
form,
for
most
asperity
remarkable
of
language
and a willingness,
experiment's
of
expanse
perfections
these two
compression
a
over
long
of
span,
his
a
sake.
146
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