WALLACE STEVENS
The human ocean beats against this rock
Of earth, rises against it, tide by tide,
Continually. And old John Zeller stands
On his hill, watching the rising and falling, and says:
Of what are these creatures, what element
Or-yes: what elements, unreconciled
Because there is no golden solvent here.
911
The ocean in this poem is a symbol of chaotic human experience,
composed, as we learn in an unquoted part, not from one element,
but from the traditional four that are unreconciled among them–
selves because there is no golden solvent-that is, no fire of the imagi–
nation. Now
in
"The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad" the ocean that
is envisaged is really a human ocean in which the discords must also
be reconciled-but instead of a "golden solvent," a different image
is
used-"obsidian horizons." Obsidian is volcanic glass, and there–
fore suggests the fiery fusing power of the imagination in the Cole–
ridgean sense, and it looks forward to that lovely recurrent image
of "transparency" in the later verse. The field of the imagination is
not confined within the palings of time, and therefore the reality which
it creates would naturally move through timeless seasons-and we
see the world and life and time itself caught and crystallized
in
the
moment of imagination, just as the mid-ocean is completely and
eternally surrounded and defined by the encircling radiance of the
sky. "The vivid transparence that you bring is peace"- that line
provides an answer to the kind of dejection and longing in this poem
on whose morals Mr. Winters has been so severe.
But if Mr. Winters and others have frequently thought of
Stevens as an aesthete, and even a Hedonist-Stevens has not always
been prudent about the poetry he has allowed to be published.
Stevens used to be thought of as an unvoluminous writer, but in
recent years, despite the excellence of
Transport to Summer
(un–
doubtedly his best volume), and what he has published since, he
has allowed too many of his practice poems to appear.
Parts of a
World
seems to me to number among its sixty-five titles very little of
genuine distinction. For one thing, Stevens had progressed far enough
