six significant landscapes (continued)

I've found some lovely Song dynasty paintings, and thought I would include one here: 'Magpies and Hare.' 

On this post, I will write some of my own thoughts about this poem, but on the next post I will include some lovely excerpts of an article from the Wallace Stevens Journal on the subject of this poem, along with an illustration from my own collection that I think may be the original inspiration for this poem.

So the poem begins in verse i with a poetic version of the original painting, titled 'Listening to the Wind in the Pines,' (look for a copy in the next post).  Then it goes on in veness of poetry, in the metaphor of woman and night.  Verse iii notices the inherent powers that the artist always notices: 'I reach right up to the sun, with my eye.'  The poet also observes the discomfiture  he feels over the less-well-known, less honored chthonic powers of the ants who 'crawl in and out of my shadow.'  Very Jungian.

In verse four, he discusses the imagination, bringing in his significant 'star,' whose creative powers are further extolled in verse v, comparing them to the lesser creativity of industrial man, with his domes, towers, 'chisels of the long streets,' and lamp-posts (artificial illumination).  Verse six characterizes those who cannot access the imagination and intuition as 'rationalists, wearing square hats.'  Since I've begun studying the stoics, I'm beginning to believe we don't properly understand the word 'Reason,' or perhaps it's just that it's been used to mean so many different things.  Certainly for the early stoics 'reason' did not refer to what we call the thinking mind: calculating, analyzing, constructing, figuring out, etc,' but mean the faculty for creativity and intuition, or perhaps came closer to what used to be meant by 'intellect.'  This is the problem with words, they keep changing their meaning!  Anyway, an artist friend and I were recently discussing this poem, and we both agreed that the donning of the sombrero suggests the capacity to take in more of the world, more of 'reality.'  The wholeness of it, relative to human experience.