WALLACE STEVENS
903
ence and its consequent moral isolation. When the tea guest of Hoon
proclaimed:
I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange,
he meant that he had recreated the external world in his imagina–
tion, and in doing so had elevated it onto a plane in which the world
of fixed objects escaped its static and excluding definition in space.
And so in the world of his imagination he was at last able to emerge
from his moral isolation in himself. But the inchling, being the enemy
of Azcan, although he may mistake his servitude for something else,
is really held incommunicado in his own identity.
Apropos of this moral isolation in the material world, it is rele–
vant to turn back to another early poem, "Metaphors of a Magnifico"
(Harmonium),
which Mr. Winters described as "willful nonsense":
Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,
Into twenty villages,
Or one man
Crossing a single bridge into a village.
So far from being "willful nonsense," this is a deeply penetrating
statement about the horror of such isolation. It means much the same
thing as Eliot's
Dayadhvam:
I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, eacli in his prison
Thinking of the key.
...
The key for Eliot is Christianity, the key for Stevens is imagination,
and in
Dayadhvam
(meaning "sympathize," as Eliot has told us)
both keys fit the same lock. For sympathy is a kind of common
ground between the "vivid transparence" of the imagination in which
Stevens meets his friend in the poem quoted below, and the Christian
charity of Eliot's later work. The poetry of both is an attempt to
overcome the moral isolation imposed by the modern world: and
..
