WALLACE STEVENS
909
tion only in some impossible emotional finality of no matter what
kind. In fact, the figurative opposites of summer and winter here of–
fered suggest the opposites of the moral and the anti-moral which
appear in 'A High-Toned Old Christian Woman'." Here is the poem
in its complete version as Mr. Winters reprints it:
The time of year has grown indifferent.
Mildew of summer and the deepening snow
Are both alike in the routine I know:
I am too dumbly in my spirit pent.
The wind attendant on the solstices
Blows on the shutters of the metropoles,
Stirring no poet in his sleep, and tolls
The grand ideas of the villages.
The malady of the quotidian .
..
Perhaps if summer ever came to rest
And lengthened, deepened, comforted, caressed
Thro ugh days like oceans in obsidian
fl
orizons, full of niKht's midsummer blaze;
Perhaps, if winter once could penetrate
Through all its purples to the final slate,
Persisting bleakly in an
ICY
haze;
O ne might in turn become less diffident,
Out of such mildew plucking neater mould
And spouting new orations of the eold.
One might. One might. But time will not relen't.
The ennui which
is
being described here is something more than
the punishment meted out to Hedonists. The "malady of the quo–
tidian" which Stevens expresses with such deep poignancy
is
a char–
acteristically human state that occurs at intervals in the best-regulated
lives-and in spiritual writers its occurence, or the occurence of
something very like it in a vastly aggravated form, is usually regarded
as one of the more unpleasant symptoms of interior progress. But
without wishing even to imply an analogy in that exalted direction, I
would, at any rate, suggest that a comparison might profitably be
made between this poem and Coleridge'S
Dejection Ode,
which
it
