WALLACE STEVENS
905
ing in a vocabulary like Eliot's which has, as it were, passed with
the inevitability of the natural world from a chilly spring to a ripen–
ing and abundant harvest. The progression in Stevens' poetry has
been hardly less marked; but the vocabulary and images in his early
poems are not saturated with the human experience that is the sub–
stance of Eliot's, and consequently an attempt to understand some
of his poems is more like a project in archeological reconstruction
than literary analysis. Admittedly the contemplation of pure craft
(whatever that is), has its delight and value, but when the complex
meaning of "Bantams in Pine-Woods" is finally deciphered (if I
have
deciphered it here), its relations to its symbols and images seem
largely arbitrary. On the one hand we have an arrestingly grotesque
visual image, delineated with something like Swift's clean sense of
deformity, and some fantastically exhilarating noises; on the other,
a complex and humanly important meaning. But the hostility be–
tween Azcan and the inchling (the imagination and reality) may, I
think, be taken as an adequate symbol of the ultimate failure of
this poem, (but I am not saying here that it does not have several
remarkable
proximate successes).
If
the poem means what I think
it does, the meaning fails to be realized in the body of the verse. It is
disowned by the very images that should proclaim it.
Before leaving, finally, this question of the interaction of images
in Stevens' poetry, I should like to notice the presence of another of
those "interacting veins of life" in the group of poems already quoted
here. From Stevens' work as a whole we know that one of the in–
trinsic elements of the imagination (as of life) is motion and change.
The inchling identifies himself in the second line . of "Bantams in
Pine-Woods" with his peremptory command to "halt!" And the
principal activity manifested by the inchling
is
that of bristling–
the characteristic behaviour of animals brought to bay rather than
of animals in flight. "Single, certain truth" is in constant motion,
is glimpsed and realized in moments of vital, vivid apprehension, and
this act of apprehension itself may constitute ontologically a part, and
perhaps a large part, of the truth. Turning back, now, to "The Pastor
Caballero," one discovers that the Capitan's flaring hat-brim, itself
the symbol of imagination and spiritual poise, is described as "grand–
iloquent gesture of a hand in rhapsody." We have in an astonish–
ingly literal sense here not "language" but truth itself "as gesture."
