REFLECTIONS ON WALLACE STEVENS
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are the people," he says in "Loneliness in Jersey City"; the poem is full
of a despairing frivolity, as Stevens looks from Room 2903 out over that
particular countryside which, I think, God once sent angels to destroy,
but which the angels thought worse than anything they could do to it.
And "In Oklahoma,/ Bonnie and Josie,! Dressed in calico,! Danced
around a stump./ They cried,/ 'Ohoyaho,/ Ohoo' .../ Celebrating the
marriage/ Of flesh and air." Without what's superfluous, the excess of
the spirit, man is a poor, bare, forked animal. In "Country Words" the
poet sits under the willows of exile, and sings "like a cuckoo clock" to
Belshazzar, that "putrid rock,! Putrid pillar of a putrid people"; he
sings "an old rebellious song,/ An edge of song that never clears." But
if
it should clear, if the cloud that hangs over his heart and mind
should lift, it would be because Belshazzar heard and understood:
What is it that my feeling seeks?
I know from all the things it touched
And left beside and left behind.
It wants the .diamond pivot brzght.
It wants Belshazzar reading right
The luminous pages on his knee,
Of being, more than birth and death.
It wants words virile with his breath.
If
this intellectual is "isolated," it is not because he wants to
be. . . .
But Stevens' most despairing, amusing, and exactly realized complaint
IS
"Disillusionment of Ten O 'Clock":
The houses are haunted
By white nightgowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.
