906
PARTISAN REVIEW
This theme of truth (or as Stevens prefers to call it, "fiction") as
motion, change, gesture, recurs repeatedly throughout his poetry in
varying degrees of complexity. We get it in its simplest form in a
lovely early poem, "Infanta Marina" (
Harmonium)
:
She made of ,the motions of her wrist
The grandiose gestures
Of her thought.
And thus she roamed
In the roamings of her fan,
Partaking of the sea,
And of the evening,
As they flowed around
And uttaed their subsiding sound.
The sea of which Marina partook is unmistakably the same sea
that taught Azcan and the Arabian their hoos, and the evening
throughout Stevens' verse has an even more suggestive connotation
than the sea. One even feels a certain "prophecy" in that word
"subsiding." To confine oneself to the quotations already given here,
it surely carries a faint heralding of "the green flauntings of the hours
of peace." But the important thing about "Infanta Marina" is that
a delicate, trivial motion of the wrist is a means towards symbolizing
the major end of life, and this end is conceived in terms of a motion
that, from one point of view, is hardly separable from the moving
wrist by which it is symbolized.
II
It
was inevitable that in discussing Stevens' interaction of
imagery the meaning of his poetry should have been considered; and
it will be equally inevitable now that in examining primarily his
meaning, a good deal will have to be said about the interaction of
his images. Much has already been written on Stevens' meaning, the
best article being R. P. Blackmur's; and if there has been radical
disagreement among critics, there has been a consensus on certain
important points, which should be enough to start the reader on his
way.
It
is) of course) the early work that chiefly calls for elucidation.
