"The Yachts" by William Carlos Williams: Class War in America and the Ongoing War on the Poor

"The Yachts" by William Carlos Williams: Class War in America and the Ongoing War on the Poor


“It’s a Class War, Stupid,” Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi loudly proclaimed in his brilliant and shocking July 15, 2008 column. To back up his claim, he recounted a recent informal survey taken by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders:

He sent out a notice on his e-mail list asking Vermont residents to "tell me what was going on in their lives economically." He expected a few dozen letters at best — but got, instead, more than 700 in the first week alone. Some, like the excerpt posted above, sounded like typical tales of life for struggling single-parent families below the poverty line. More unnerving, however, were the stories Sanders received from people who held one or two or even three jobs, from families in which both spouses held at least one regular job — in other words, from people one would normally describe as middle-class…..

Sanders got letters from working people who have been reduced to eating "cereal and toast" for dinner, from a 71-year-old man who has been forced to go back to work to pay for heating oil and property taxes, from a worker in an oncology department of a hospital who reports that clinically ill patients are foregoing cancer treatments because the cost of gas makes it too expensive to reach the hospital. [emphasis mine] The recurring theme is that employment, even dual employment, is no longer any kind of barrier against poverty. Not economic discomfort, mind you, but actual poverty. Meaning, having less than you need to eat and live in heated shelter — forgetting entirely about health care and dentistry, which has long ceased to be considered an automatic component of American middle-class life. The key factors in almost all of the Sanders letters are exploding gas and heating oil costs, reduced salaries and benefits, and sharply increased property taxes (a phenomenon I hear about all across the country at campaign trail stops, something that seems to me to be directly tied to the Bush tax cuts and the consequent reduced federal aid to states). And it all adds up to one thing.


"The middle class is disappearing," says Sanders. "In real ways we're becoming more like a third-world country."


And please be reminded, gentle reader, that this hideous tale of horror was penned before the recent international economic collapse, thanks to the failure of the ethically-challenged Lehman Brothers. What do you think people are going through now?


William Carlos Williams, the great American modernist poet and author of "The Yachts," would understand the devastation of today’s economic warfare well, and we know where his sympathies lie. "The Yachts" is about class war in America and the war on the poor. He wrote the poem in 1935, at the height of the Great Depression, and it’s as true today as it was back then.

* * * * * *

Listen to William Carlos William recite his great social consciousness poem “The Yachts” here.”

The Yachts

contend in a sea which the land partly encloses
shielding them from the too-heavy blows
of an ungoverned ocean which when it chooses

tortures the biggest hulls, the best man knows
to pit against its beatings, and sinks them pitilessly.
Mothlike in mists, scintillant in the minute

brilliance of cloudless days, with broad bellying sails
they glide to the wind tossing green water
from their sharp prows while over them the crew crawls

ant-like, solicitously grooming them, releasing,
making fast as they turn, lean far over and having
caught the wind again, side by side, head for the mark.

In a well guarded arena of open water surrounded by
lesser and greater craft which, sycophant, lumbering
and flittering follow them, they appear youthful, rare

as the light of a happy eye, live with the grace
of all that in the mind is feckless, free and
naturally to be desired. Now the sea which holds them

is moody, lapping their glossy sides, as if feeling
for some slightest flaw but fails completely.
Today no race. Then the wind comes again. The yachts

move, jockeying for a start, the signal is set and they
are off. Now the waves strike at them but they are too
well made, they slip through, though they take in canvas.

Arms with hands grasping seek to clutch at the prows.
Bodies thrown recklessly in the way are cut aside.
It is a sea of faces about them in agony, in despair

until the horror of the race dawns staggering the mind;
the whole sea become an entanglement of watery bodies
lost to the world bearing what they cannot hold. Broken,

beaten, desolate, reaching from the dead to be taken up
they cry out, failing, failing! their cries rising
in waves still as the skillful yachts pass over.

"The Yachts" by William Carlos Williams: Class War in America and the Ongoing War on the Poor

William Carlos Williams' poem "The Yachts" is a stellar example of how a great artist can deal with a central social theme—the horror of class war in America—and avoid producing propaganda, but instead yield art.

Brughel's Hunters in the Snow: subsistence living

To achieve his end, Williams uses two of the oldest tools in the poet’s workshop, symbols and the artful use of language. The yachts, owned by the rich, represent the plutocracy. The "sea which the land partly encloses" (line 1), the "well guarded arena of open water," (line 13) in which they contend, is their sheltered lifestyle that their wealth provides for them. The "ungoverned ocean" (line 3) beyond is the chaos of the rest of the world. The crew that "crawls/ant-like, solicitously grooming them" (lines 9-10) is the class of their servants, tending to the yachts.


The "sychophant" (line 14) "lesser and greater craft" (line 14) that follow the yachts and make them look good in comparison could well be the upper middle classes that can afford some luxury items, such as small craft, but not yachts. The race they are engaged in is the game of status played by the social and economic elite.

Pop star Beyonce relaxing aboard a yacht

And finally, the "sea of faces'' (l. 27) belonging to the "watery bodies/lost to the world bearing what they cannot hold," which the poet recognizes in the last three stanzas, is the mass of people whose bodies the yacht-owners have used and run over to attain their status—the dead poor; "what they cannot hold" (which kills them) is the burden of supporting the yacht-owners.

A gentleman relaxing aboard a yacht with Paris Hilton. Talcum powder, of course

His choice of words communicates his emphasis. Over and over, he stresses that the yacht race is held in a protected environment sheltered from the outside. At the outset, he declares that the yachts "contend" (line1); they do not fight; and they do so "in a sea which the land partly encloses/shielding them from the too-heavy blows/of an ungoverned ocean" (lines 1-3). They are shielded from destructive chaos, so that they can contend "in a well guarded arena of open water" (line 13).


Of an almost ethereal enchantment, they are precious, even fragile ("Mothlike in mists," line 6) and yet glamorous in a way that F. Scott Fitzgerald would have appreciated; "scintillant in the minute/brilliance of cloudless days" (lines 6-7), "they appear youthful, rare/as the light of a happy eye, live with the grace/of all that in the mind is feckless, free and/naturally to be desired" (lines 15-18). Also mentioned are "their glossy sides" (line 19). In their universe, they are worshipped and looked up to. If their elegance is "mothlike in mists," then "over them the crew/crawls ant-like" (lines 9-10). They are "surrounded by/lesser and greater craft which, sychophant, lumbering/and flittering follow them" (line 13-15).


The narrative line runs like this: in the first stanza, the poet establishes the tranquil scene; in the second, he introduces the element of chaos, to which the yachts are impervious, ending the stanza with an idyllic description of the yachts sailing, as if to dispel the fear of chaos. The third develops this mise-en-scene, the swollen sound of "broad bellying sails" (line 7), enhancing the image it describes. The fourth details the duties of the crew, the swift succession of particples communicating their antlike scurrying.

Self-portrait by a young William Carlos Williams: as Herman Melville said, be true to the dreams of thy youth

The capital letter beginning the fifth stanza (“In”) sets it off from the previous four, which have all begun with lower-case letters, signifying the start of a new section of the poem. Where the first section, composed of stanzas 1-4, set the milieu, the second section, stanzas 5-0, introduces the race and describes its beginning. Stanza five elaborates on the superior status the yachts hold among the other boats; stanza six tells of the state of grace the yachts enjoy.


Stanzas seven and eight stress the perfection of the yachts—"[the sea] is moody, lapping at their glossy sides, as if feeling/for some slightest flaw but fails completely” (lines 19-20). "Now the waves strike at them but they are too/well made" (lines 23-24). In stanza seven, where the yachts are standing still, the rhythm of the first two lines mirrors the quiet mood of the sea, as the short sentences of the third line mirror the sudden change in mood when the wind comes. The quick rhythm of the language of the eighth stanza follows the progress of the race with all the tense excitement of a racetrack announcer.

The doctor is in: pediatrician Williams in his office in Paterson, NJ

Abruptly initiating the third section of the poem, the ninth stanza describes with blunt, brutal phrases cut short by periods the mass of have-nots, literally "a sea of faces,” which the poet sees the yachts running over in the progress of the race. In the tenth stanza, the poet expands his focus from the yachts to the surrounding sea, in a rush a words swamping the reader with the scene. Stanza eleven ends the poem with a blast of words devastating in their finality; the string of adjectives begun at the end of the previous stanza is carried over, swelling, until the second line of the stanza, where the poem reproduces the futile cries of the lost ("they cry out, failing, failing!” line 32), which rise in waves—the waves holding the yachts buoyant—"as the skillful yachts pass over," (line 33) skillful for having remained afloat so long, ending the poem on a depressing note. In the end, Williams sees the haves ignoring the have-nots even as their yachts pass over the sea of faces.

If viewed against the body of Williams' work, "The Yachts" is a continuation of his concern with the forces he saw shaping America, the theme of which he dealt with at length in Paterson. It reflects an awakened social consciousness that, through the art of poetry, brings to our attention the daily situation of the world's silent majority of sufferers, which we—or at least I—all too often forget.

In his attitude toward class war in America, Williams takes a position between two other American writers. Poe, writing "The Masque of the Red Death" from a moral standpoint of a century before Williams, saw to it that the aristocratic revelers who sealed themselves off from the world while it was wracked with plague received due punishment, even if it had to come from a supernatural source. F. Scott Fitzgerald, writing in his fiction from his standpoint abetted by a Princeton education, viewed the rich as a class of beings set above the rest of humanity. Even though he exposed their viciousness, emptiness, and uncaring destructiveness in The Great Gatsby, he remained enamored of them to the end.

The young WCW

Williams wrote "The Yachts," significantly, in 1935, when the American intellectual's social consciousness was waking up. At the beginning of the poem, in the first section, we view the lifestyle of the rich as the official culture wishes us to, idyllic and glamorous. By the end, when we see their crushing ascendancy over the masses, we are bristling with horror, disgust, and indignation.

A burning yacht

A sinking yacht

One may ask why Williams bothered to write the poem as a work of art, and not as a piece of propaganda, if he believed that injustice would triumph. I think he wrote it merely to bring the situation to our attention. From there, it's up to us to finish the poem.

* * * * * *

Afterword: William Carlos Williams on "The Yachts"

"I wrote the whole damn thing with a change," Williams noted later. "I was thinking of terza rima, but gave up rime—the very vague imitation of Dante. I was quickly carried away by my own feelings." So Williams told John Thirwell.

From notes Williams filed in a folder with his letter to Henry W. Wells dated July 27, 1955 (now among the manuscripts held in Columbia University's rare book and manuscript library): " . . . the yachts do not sink but go on with the race while only in the imagination are they seen to founder. It is a false situation which the yachts typify with the beauty of their movements while the real situation (of the poor) is desperate while 'the skillful yachts pass over.'"




A University of Pennsylvania English professor has created a fascinating Webpage, The Reaction Against" Modernism: The Radical Thirties, that demonstrates how the Great Depression transformed the avant-garde literary experimentalists of the Twenties into fiery left-wing social activists. “The Yachts” is offered as a prime example, and a host of other brilliant poems are showcased as well. In fact, several of them are so brilliant that I can’t help but reproduce them in full here, to share with you.


If you saw Kevin Costner and Gene Hackman in the hit 1987 Washington, D.C. political thriller No Way Out, then you’ve been exposed to the work of Kenneth Fearing. No Way Out was based on poet Kenneth Fearing’s famed 1946 thriller The Big Clock.


Kenneth Fearing’s poem “Green Light” is confusing. It’s meant to be. I didn’t understand it when I first read it—the subject of the poem keeps changing, and its identity is always especially vague. Fearing was trying to capture the frenetic fragmentation of twentieth century life, its lack of differentiation, its ephemerality—and thereby dramatize our alienation.

Or maybe the poem’s subject is not protean, but instead unchanging. Maybe the subject is Reality—and how it smacked you in the face in the Thirties.

Kenneth Fearing, "Green Light" (from Angel Arms)

Bought at the drug store, very cheap; and later pawned.
After a while, heard on the street; seen in the park.
Familiar, but not quite recognized.
Followed and taken home and slept with.
Traded or sold. Or lost.

Bought again at the corner drug store,
At the green light, at the patient’s demand, at nine o’clock.
Re-read and memorized and re-wound.
Found unsuitable.
Smashed, put together, and pawned.

Heard on the street, seen in a dream, heard in the park, seen
by the light of day;
Carefully observed one night by a secret agent of the Greek
Hydraulic Mining Commission, in plain clothes, off
duty.
The agent, in broken English, took copious notes. Which he
lost.
Strange, and yet not extraordinary.
Sad, but true.

True, or exaggerated, or true;
As it is true that the people laugh and the sparrows fly;
As it is exaggerated that the people change, and the sea stays;
As it is that the people go;
As the lights go on and it is night and it is serious, and just
the same;
As some one dies and it is serious, and the same;
As a girl knows and it is small, and true;
As the corner hardware clerk might know and it is true, and
pointless;
As an old man knows and it is grotesque, but true;
As the people laugh, as the people think, as the people
change,
It is serious and the same, exaggerated or true.

Bought at the drug store down the street
Where the wind blows and the motors go by and it is always
night, or day;
Bought to use as a last resort,
Bought to impress the statuary in the park.
Bought at a cut rate, at the green light, at nine o’clock.
Borrowed or bought. To look well. To ennoble. To prevent
disease. To entertain. To have.
Broken or sold. Or given away. Or used and forgotten. Or
lost.


And now for another dose of reality. You get the uncomfortable feeling the poet was writing from experience. A shoutout for Sarah Palin!


Ruth Lechlitner, "Lines for an Abortionist's Office" (c. 1936)

Close here thine eyes, O State:
These are thy guests who bring
To gods with appetites grown great
A votive offering.
Know that they dare defy
The words of law and priest---
(Better to let the unborn die
Than starve while others feast.)
The stricken flesh may be
Outraged, and heal; but mind
Pain-sharpened, may yet learn to see
Thee plain, O State. Be blind:
Accept love's fruit: be sleek
Fat and lip-sealed. (Forget
That Life, avenging pain, will speak!)
Thrust deep the long curette!


Lastly, a view of the Korean War, the beginning of the postwar Endless War that Orwell envisioned in 1984, in which the U.S., Russia and China would forever be contending. Hint: the “piano-movers” are American bombers dropping napalm on Korean civilians. See Norman Mailer’s The Deer Park (1955); the narrator Sergius O’Shaughnessy, Korean War hero and ex-U.S. Air Force pilot, is haunted by the fact that he was “an orphan burning orphans.” In the poem, “Pak Yip” is a Korean.

George Hitchcock, "War" (1952)

The piano-movers come in the morning
the piano-movers come in the afternoon
the piano-movers come to the house of Pak Yip
their bellies filled with roses.

In his gloss dome, over his comic book
sits my insouciant brother.

The sky fills with teacups
and doorknobs
the tibia of children
with ashes
with needles
& floral rembrances

What do you think, my brother?
Awaking at four sweating, the sudden erection?
The fat man at the hamburger stand?
The death of Mickey Mouse?

The sky fills with spoonhandles
eggshells
testes
Fire engines scream in the forest.

In the house of Pak Yip my sister lies,
flaming rosebuds in her loins.

from George Hitchcock, The Wound Alphabet: Poems Collected & New, 1953-1983 (Santa Cruz, CA: Jazz Press, 1984), p. 4.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Williams, William Carlos. "The Yachts," American Poetry, ed. Gay Wilson Allen, Walter B. Rideout, and James K. Robinson. New York, 1965.



Note: I originally wrote an earlier version of this essay as a sophomore at Princeton in November 1974 for an English class in American Poetry taught by Prof. Richard Ludwig.

Number 5 in Gold, a very famous abstract portrait of Williams by Charles Demuth (1883-1935), inspired by a Williams poem about a red firetruck, "The Great Figure"

"Sunday Morning": The Mass of Wallace Stevens

"SUNDAY MORNING": THE MASS OF WALLACE STEVENS

I originally wrote this essay for the exacting eye of Professor Carlos Baker of the Princeton English department in March 1975 while a sophomore. The leading Hemingway authority at the time, Carlos was teaching a course in Modern Literature, and I chose to write about one of the greatest and most beautiful poems of the twentieth century, Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning,” a poem that ranks with Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and Yeats’ “The Second Coming" as a masterful achievement of literary modernism.

Stevens was totemized in the emerging yuppie Seventies as the poet who wore a business suit and went to the office every day. (This Vincent Van Gogh bohemian thing just isn’t working out.) There are two stories about Stevens’ dual career as a prominent Hartford insurance executive and poet. Factoid One says that no one at the office knew he was a great poet. Factoid Two asserts that everyone in the office knew he was a flaming genius, and he was a terrible insurance executive to boot, but they kept him on out of respect and awe of his amazing talent and his international stature as a great artist.

According to his kids, he came home from the office, closed the door to his private study, and wrote poetry; they never saw him.

Strangely enough, my mother’s family might have known him. Her family, the Merrows, were fairly prominent in the Hartford area at the time; they owned the Merrow Sewing Machine Company in nearby Merrow, Connecticut, almost as big as Singer, known for its over-and-under stitch. Virtually any article of clothing with a spangle on it bears a Merrow stitch. During the Civil War, the family made its fortune manufacturing socks for Union soldiers, and as a result, my great-great uncle Joseph was eulogized in the New York Times as “the last of the self-made men.” The Merrows purchased Nook Farm from the Twain estate after Samuel Langhorne Clemens died, and my mother grew up playing in Mark Twain’s house.

To make my essay easier to understand, I’m reproducing Stevens’ actual poem “Sunday Morning” both before and after my essay, so you’ll have a chance to appreciate what I’m talking about when I refer to specific passages. “Sunday Morning” is a supremely beautiful poem, and I think you’ll enjoy reading it.

In 1975 at Princeton the poem went a long way toward shaping my emerging worldview. It illuminated two issues that were and are of vital importance to me—the death of Christianity and the death of God, and now what is to be done—and you'll see that thematically this essay ties in with my previous posts dealing with religious and spiritual subjects. You’ll certainly see Wallace Stevens’ visionary secular humanism reflected in my novel Saint George and the Dragon (see the chapters Confrontation, Apocalypse in Pennsylvania, and Phoenix on this blog.)

* * * * *

Sunday Morning

1
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound.
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

2
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.

3
Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

"The Palm at the End of the Mind" is both the title of one of Stevens' most famed poems and a popular collection of his works

4
She says, "I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?"
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured
As April's green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow's wings.

5
She says, "But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss."
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

6
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

7
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.

8
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.

* * * * *

Listen to Freddie Hubbard's beautiful jazz composition "Sky Dive," which captures the rapture and tenderness of "Sunday Morning." The birds swoop

"SUNDAY MORNING": THE MASS OF WALLACE STEVENS

"After one has abandoned a belief in god [sic]," Wallace Stevens wrote in the "Adagio" section of aphorisms published in Opus Posthumous, "poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption." (1) Nowhere does he better express his conviction that art is the religion of the creative personality than in his 1915 poem "Sunday Morning."

"In an age of disbelief, or, what is the same thing, in a time that is largely humanistic, in one sense or another, it is for the poet to supply the satisfactions of belief, in his measure and his style," Stevens wrote. (2) How does he supply these satisfactions?

Largely, “Sunday Morning” is the artistic realization of the poetic dictum he set forth that constitutes the credo of his artistic religion: "The relation of art to life is of the first importance especially in a skeptical age since, in the absence of a belief in God, the mind turns to its own creations and examines them, not alone from the aesthetic point of view, but for what they reveal, for what they validate and invalidate, for the support that they give." (3) In "Sunday Morning," the mind's search for these supports is as much Stevens' as the woman' s.

"Sunday Morning" takes the form of a woman's musings on a Sunday morning. Stevens uses her as the projection of his consciousness as he used the Third Girl to voice his feelings in "The Plot Against the Giant." She leads a life of comfort, as did Stevens and as do many of his middle-class readers, and so she feels guilty enjoying the breakfast: "Complacencies of the peignoir and late/Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair” while the devout attend Mass.

While her thoughts drift and she reflects on the Passion, her mind focuses on Via Dolorosa’s morbid aspects, which make worship distasteful to her: "She dreams a little and she feels the dark/Encroachment of that old catastrophe" and, "The pungent oranges and bright, green wings/Seem things in some procession of the dead” as she reflects on "silent Palestine, /Dominion of the blood and sepulchre." (Italics mine.) As the poet asks at the beginning of Stanza II, "Why should she give her bounty to the dead?"

Stevens offers fragments scattered throughout the poem that, when pieced together, present a cohesive picture of the moral universe in which the poem is set. As he writes,

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. (Stanza VIII)

In other words, having inherited a civilization no longer supported by religion and so operating on total insecurity, we live in a ruined world where we are forced either to blindly live every day as it arrives, or exist trapped in a prison of isolation if we choose to search for meaning. As a result, we yearn for something to fill our vacant souls; as Stevens expresses it, in terms of the objective correlative, we are forced to become like

rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang. (Stanza VI)

How does the poet propose that this spiritual hunger be fed? In Stanza II, rejecting sacrifice to "the dead"—meaning both Christ and the religion He founded—he provides for her "Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven" in the secular joys of the "balm and beauty of the earth." "All pleasures and all pains," "These are the measures destined for her soul."

When the poet begins Stanza III with the assertion, "Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth," he means, "The people, not the priests, made the gods." (4) Absorbing the force of our own creation ("our blood, commingling, virginal/With heaven"), we so hungered for another, newer god that we created one in Jesus Christ, and our wish "brought such requital to desire/The very hinds discerned it, in a star."

"Now that myth, like all myths, has lost its compelling force,'' Stevens observed. (5) So that when he says,

Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?

he is drawing from the line in the preceding stanza, "Divinity must live within herself," in the hope that man will realize that his blood, without the intercession of any deity, is so precious as to be divine. If only we can realize that, then

The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

Again Stevens employs the objective correlative. Unpeopled by gods, the sky seems indifferent; and serving as a barrier to heaven, it appears dividing.

In Stanza IV, the poet answers the woman's doubts of an afterlife by discarding the "silent shadows and dreams" of past paradises in favor of peaceful memories and the enduring cycle of the return of spring. In Stanza V, in answer to her need of "some imperishable bliss" in the present, he offers the pleasure tinged with sadness we receive from enjoying life, which we know will pass so quickly, and which is full of things we love that we know will also fade:

Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires.

Like Eliot in "The Fire Sermon" of The Waste Land, Stevens identifies sex as the force through which life expresses itself; and one of life’s great pleasures is desire, which we feel when confronted with its opposite, death.

Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Son"

Regarding Death, he says,

She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

"Lady Lilith" by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

It is as if the plums and pears, products of the fertility that nature has brought to the spring, served as an aphrodisiac for the maidens. Unspoken is the comment that the "dead" religion of Christianity has failed to provide a fertility rite to serve as an outlet for these natural impulses.

Carrying the image of fruit as a symbol of life over into Stanza VI, Stevens mocks our idea that paradise must embody eternal perfection and will manifest itself in terms cozily familiar to us.

Is there no change of death in paradise
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging...
Alas, that they should wear our colors there....
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes:

The idea becomes the more ridiculous when we realize that the laws of nature present such a mystery to us that we must ask the question, "Why set the pear upon those river-beds/Or spice the shores with the odors of the plum?" But Stevens understands why we form such misconceptions:

Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

In the face of the mystery of death, we can only create comforting illusions based on earthly sights and scenes.

Stanza VII, presenting Stevens’ only substitute for paradise that has religious overtones, provides his idealized alternative, in symbolic form. Our new object of devotion, he is saying, should be as the sun god is to his worshippers; he is a source and a symbol of life, and they as votaries are "Supple and turbulent," not rigid and reserved, in their celebration. Stevens offers the source of consolation they turn to as an example for us. It is

Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky....
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they come and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.

For them the sky is "A part of labor and a part of pain." They shall know the fellowship of men that have perished, because they are men that have lived. As for the two cryptic lines that end the stanza, the men have dew upon their feet because their bare feet (their naked freedom) have trod the earth in the morning, during the new day they are setting out to create. Their progress can be charted by their wet footprints, because these are men who live in the physical world and who are concerned with the present, not with life after death. Stevens hints that we should live with the same attitude as these men.

With Stanza VIII, the woman's mind returns from the realm of her imagination ("that wide water without sound") with a dramatic realization from within that dispels any mystical trappings from the Passion. As it dawns upon her, after her concentrated reverie, that she is living in an age whose idols have passed their twilight, where she must choose between existence in a quotidian world and spending a life alone, she comes to accept the wonders of life that nature has surrounded her with, and she accepts the ambiguous fate of the swallows, which is tied into two preceding images.

First, she realizes that she enjoys "the green freedom of the cockatoo" of Stanza I. Second, in the last stanza, the pigeons, like the swallows of Stanza IV, are diving into the evening (the "darkness" of Stanza VIII). In Stanza IV, the wings are in a state of "consummation"; in Stanza VIII they are "extended." In both cases, the birds are making their descent into the darkness with wings spread out like outstretched arms, a symbol of acceptance.

Justin was meeting his fate. For a brief moment I caught a fleeting glimpse of the Lamb of Wilmington as he shot over the crashing falls in the deepening dusk. In that second his rippling body was perfectly outlined against the violet twilight. His arms were flung out in a generous embrace, like wings outspreading. Head thrown back, he was still belting out his exultant cry—a rebel yell, almost a joyous alleluia! That moment is forever imprinted in my memory. I will never forget the wonderful sight of Justin rushing to his death, unafraid, triumphant. That's how I'll always remember him—rearing back, poised on the brink of the waterfall, like an ecstatic Cowboy astride a bucking bronco he has just broken. Then the stop-action frame jerked and he vanished and the rolling thunder of the water swallowed him up.

Apocalypse in Pennsylvania, Saint George and the Dragon

Like the birds in flight, plunging into the unknown, Stevens is saying, we too must move into the dark mystery waiting for us, whether it is the future or death. The old gods are dead; and we, privileged to live in an age where we can mold the gods of the age to come, must grope through the shadows, accepting life as justifying its own worth, in search of our personal gods who will make our lives worth living.

Many believe Wallace Stevens wrote his acclaimed poem “The Man With the Blue Guitar” after viewing Picasso’s “Old Guitarist”

For Wallace Stevens it was enough to impart this belief to us in beautiful, vivid, compressed language that produced a magnificent poem. He made his muse—poetry—his god. His art was his religion. And the finest example of his devotion is "Sunday Morning."

* * * * *

ENDNOTES

1. Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous (New York, 1957), p. 158.
2. Ibid., p. 206.
3. Ibid., p. 259.
4. Ibid., p. 208.
5. A. Walton Litz, Introspective Voyager (New York, 1972). p. 47.

"Sunday Morning" originally appeared in Stevens' landmark 1923 collection, Harmonium

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Litz, A. Waiton. Introspective Voyager. New York, 1972.

Stevens, Wallace. Opus Posthumous. New York, 1957.

Stevens, Wallace. The Palm at the End of the Mind. New York. 1971.

Sunday Morning

1
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound.
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

2
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.

3
Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

4
She says, "I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?"
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured
As April's green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow's wings.

5
She says, "But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss."
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

6
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

7
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.

8
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.