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PARTISAN REVIEW
Any schoolboy (of the superior Macaulayish breed) more or less feels
what this poem means, but it is interesting to look at one or two details.
Why
ten o'clock?
They have all gone to bed early, like good sensible ma–
chines; and the houses' ghosts, now, are only nightgowns, the plain
white
nightgowns of the Common Man, Economic Man, Rational Man-pure
commonplace, no longer either individual or strange or traditional;
and the dreams are as ordinary as the nightgowns. Here and there a
drunken and disreputable
old sailor
still lives
in
the original reality (he
doesn't dream of catching, he
catches): sailor
to bring in old-fashioned
Europe, old-fashioned Asia, the old-fashioned ocean;
old
to bring in the
past, to make him a dying survival. What indictment of the Present
has ever compared, for flat finality, with "People are not going/ To
dream of baboons and periwinkles"? Yet isn't this poem ordinarily
considered a rather nonsensical and Learish poem?
It is not until later that Stevens writes much about what America
has in common with the rest of the world; then he splits everything
differently, and contrasts with the past of America and of the world
their present. In
Harmonium
he still loves America best when he can
think of it as wilderness, naturalness, pure potentiality (he treats with
especial sympathy Negroes, Mexican Indians, and anybody else he can
consider wild); and it is this feeling that
is
behind the conclusion of
"Sunday Morning":
She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, "The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay."
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
Here-in the last purity and refinement of the grand style, as perfect,
in
its calm transparency, as the best of Wordsworth-is the last wilder–
ness, come upon so late in the history of mankind that it is no longer
