The Dao of Wallace Stevens

wallace stevens' anti-war poem

Man and Bottle

The mind is the great poem of winter, the man,
Who, to find what will suffice,
Destroys romantic tenements
Of rose and ice

In the land of war. More than the man, it is
A man with the fury of a race of men,
A light at the center of many lights,
A man at the center of men.

It has to content the reason concerning war,
It has to persuade that war is part of itself,
A manner of thinking, a mode
Of destroying, as the mind destroys.

An aversion, as the world is averted
From an old delusion, an old affair with the sun,
An impossible aberration with the moon,
A grossness of peace.

It is not the snow that is the quill, the page.
The poem lashes more fiercely than the wind,
As the mind, to find what will suffice, destroys
Romantic tenements of rose and ice.

by Wallace Stevens

‘Mind’, ‘poem’, and ‘man’ are one in this poem, and wlling to reduce both the truth and our fond illusions about a peaceful life (‘romantic tenements of rose and ice’) to ‘what(ever) will suffice’ in order to ‘content the Reason concerning war.’ We have to persuade our own reason that war and destruction are a part of life. After all, even the mind destroys, as it supplants one theory with another, one belief with another, one life-enhancing fiction with another. This process of ‘reduction’ is a characteristic of ‘winter’ which blights its terrain.

When reading this poem, one can only think of our present war, and how we’ve had to persuade ourselves that it is about 9/11.

As Labor Day draws near, I’d like to remember all those good working-class families who have sent their boys and young men over there, with all of the best of intentions about supporting and protecting our nation. I pray that this explosion of destruction will soon come to an end.

A friend pointed out that I may be ‘reading into’ WS. Well, ‘reading into’ is what makes great literature 'great' down through the ages. Everyone is ‘reading in’ and it seems to consistently work. We see ourselves, our own thoughts and feelings, our own beliefs. This is the great benefit of good literature. However, eventually, when interpretation gets very far from the original intent of the author, then scholars must attempt to piece back together from the original sources just what the poet meant. They may or may not be successful in doing so.

Anyway, I don’t think I’m entirely off the mark here, with my reading of WS. I often find that I understand his poetry as well as his scholars in many respects, and that their more specialized notations enrich my interpretation and rarely contradict my own sense of the verses. I always read through the poems on my own several times, until I have a convincing sense of meaning and feeling. Then I turn to the scholars to take their 'reading' of the poem. So far, I am not far from the mark, usually. At any rate, I don't think I'm in danger of distorting Stevens' poetry. I love this poetry so much, it would certainly disappoint me if I did.

In some ways, I am perhaps elevating WS's poetry to the level of a scripture, like the great vedantic texts or lovely taoist poetry. I confess that I'm seeking something here. I'll report, as I go along, as to how successfully I am finding it.

THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A BLACKBIRD, by Wallace Stevens, and the Tao

First a short reading from the Tao Te Ching:

“The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.”

(by Lao Tzu, translated by Stephen Mitchell, verse one)

‘The unnamable is the eternally real’ –*fighting words* to a poet, whose aim in life is to express ‘the real’ in words! What is ‘the most real?’ This has always been my own question, personally. Isn’t it the Tao?

“The Tao is called the Great Mother: empty yet inexhaustible, it gives birth to infinite worlds. It is always present within you. You can use it any way you want.” (Tao Te Ching, verse 6) It is mysterious, yet we feel its presence, its ‘reality,’ in our most contemplative and most poetic moments.

In the West, we might call the Tao ‘the Holy Spirit’ if we were religiously inclined. Wallace Stevens called it the ‘blackbird.’

Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Blackbird

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the black bird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

by Wallace Stevens

Commentary:
Stevens believed in an interface between reality and the imagination. Hence the blackbird can be a ‘real’ blackbird in space and time, and can also be the imaginative blackbird who stands for something else: the Tao. Poets come closest to accessing the Dao in its unmanifest form by means of the imagination.

Stanza 1
"Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the black bird."
The Tao is an ordering principle. The Tao as dharma, or moral order. The precision of twenty snowy mountains: numbers must have played a role in the imagination of Wallace Stevens, insurance executive. Mathematical precision and the sharpness of the seeing power of the eye of the black bird.

Stanza 5
"I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
or just after.
How totally Zen!"

Stanza 6
"Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause."

‘barbaric glass’ – have you ever seen the old medieval glass used for ordinary purposes, thick and wrinkled, not unlike a pattern of icicles?

Stanza 7
"O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?"

One of my favorites; ‘thin men of Haddam’ ie hungry for gain, ‘golden birds’ – the human tendency to desire riches, to find the expensive, the ‘fabulous’ as valuable. Stevens adjures them to find the wealth all around them in ordinary things. The ‘feet of the women,’ the feminine principle, is the true wealth.

Stanza 8
"I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know."

The tao is the source of his poetry.

Stanza 9 –
"When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles."

‘worlds within worlds’

Stanza 10 –
"At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply."

“In X, the blackbirds represent an image from reality striking enough to impress even those who evade reality in order to indulge the beauties of language alone. The blackbirds would suddenly cause the bawds to ‘express themselves sharply: naturally, with pleasure, etc.’ (LWS, p.340).” (Ronald Sukenick, WS, Musing the Obscure, pp 75 and 76)

Stanza 11
"He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds."

The ‘glass coach’ represents someone who lives in the world of ‘mere artifice’, of ‘fancy’ and not imagination. ‘Imagination’ is one of the faculties of humankind that brings us closer to the unmanifest nature of the dao, hence it is unique and blessed.

Stevens writes and speaks a great deal about the interrelation of ‘reality’ and ‘imagination,’ especially in the experience of the poet. By reality, he means what philosophers used to call the ‘common-sense’ realm of reality, where a stone is ‘really there’, is cold, hard, gray and is really heavy to lift, etc. Stevens is particularly interested in the interrelation between ‘reality’ and ‘imagination’, and perhaps recognized that both spring from the same source. I believe he states this recognition in his prose writings as well as communicating it to us through his poetry. The Tao Te Ching says, “Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations. Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source.” (verse 1) We can substitute ‘imagination’ and ‘reality’ for ‘mystery’ and ‘manifestation.’

Stevens believes that, for a poet, imagination is the most important thing, yet if the poet’s imagination veers too far from reality, it loses its ‘vitality.’ In his view “It has the strength of reality or none at all.” (The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words’). The Tao is self-ordering, and I agree with Stevens that this is why ‘mere fancy,’ if too far removed from the real, loses its power to entertain and charm.

Sukenick goes on to write that “the coach (is) artificial, in contrast with the blackbirds, which are natural." (WSMTO, p. 76). I’ll have to write more in this blog about the relation of the Tao and Nature, and Wallace Stevens, but for here, I just want to note this.

My own feeling about this stanza, is that Stevens is alluding to the fear that those who attempt to control life (‘his equipage’) will feel when confronted by the thought of the unknown, by the mystery of it all. And that’s all of us, right (?), most of the time, anyway. For example, we may be a very successful musician, safe, secure, well-funded, but then, if popular taste in music changes, we may suddenly find we have fewer and fewer gigs. The Dao may go on to create something new, of which we may not be a part. Just the mere thought of that can be quite frightening. “The Tao doesn’t take sides; it gives birth to both good and evil.” (TTC, 6) There is a sudden fright factor that can arise for any of us when we ‘mistake the shadows of (our) equipage for blackbirds.’

For another example of this concept see Hafiz' poem 'Burglars Hear Watchdogs' cited under the June 30th entry in this blog, 'Hafiz and Amma.' (from before my dedication of this poetry blog to WS).

Stanza 12
"The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying."

again, how very zen.

Stanza 13
"It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs."

‘it was evening all day’ – the time of contemplation, the time of poetry. ‘It was snowing, and it was about to snow’ – the deep peace, the ‘interiorness’ that accompanies the writing of certain kinds of poetry. The snow creates that mood, and it will continue to create it. ‘The blackbird sat in the cedar limbs.’ Yes, the Dao is present, accessible by means of the poet’s imagination. The blackbird, like all ancient and primitive bird oracles, sits in the tree, preparing to speak. The poet listens.

(A ‘perfect’ closure to this poem.)

Ronald Sukenick does not discuss the tao in his book of specifically literary criticism, but he says of this poem, “If the poem can be considered a series of instances of how the imagination works, the fact that the sections are insistently cryptic implies the assumption of a certain relation between the rational mind and the imagination. Rationalists confine themselves to one kind of perception. There is a more extensive kind of perception available through the imagination. One finds in this poem that there are degrees in kind of imaginative statement, from those which are figurative, but whose meaning may be specified, to those whose meaning is ultimately ambiguous, but which for that reason are highly suggestive.” (WSMTO, p.72, 73)

wu qi, and THE SNOW MAN, by Wallace Stevens

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves.

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

(by Wallace Stevens, Stevens, page 8)

I felt intuitively that it would be all right to take oriental lenses to Stevens’ work, (as well, of course as western lenses, Christian, classical and other, which are rather more difficult for me to track down). I was hoping to uncover some exposure on his part to eastern thought or perhaps, aesthetic culture, and I have already discovered that in his college years, specifically between 1897-1898 he “develops interest in Chinese and Japanese art which he shares with his Harvard friends Arthur Pope (future director of Fogg Museum) and poets Witter Bynner and Arthur Davison Ficke.” (WS, Collected Poetry & Prose, p.960) I believe this influence cannot be underestimated for even a moment.

In classical Daoism there are three dimensions to reality, Wu Qi, Dai Qi and Yin and Yang. These are also to be found within creation, and may also be called the San Ching, or the Three Pure Ones, Yu Ching (or Jade Purity, the Wu Qi principle), Shang Ching (the Upper Purity or Dai Qi) and Tai Ching (the oppositional, organizational principle of Yin and Yang). Yin and Yang are the organizing principles of the material world, the world of our physical experience. Dai Qi is, roughly, the mind principle or consciousness. Similarly, in the Sankhya philosophy of India, we begin with an undifferentiated source, and the first emanation from this source is the principle of Mahat, or Intelligence. (from lecture notes, Jeffrey Yuen, A Brief Introduction to Daoism, November 18, 2000, San Francisco, page 5)

Wu Qi, or Yu Ching, is the potential, or Prakriti, from which everything arises, initially as a kind of ‘thought-form’ or mental formation, something like Plato’s archetypes, the Pure Ideas. In the West, Wu Qi is sometimes called ‘the Void’. It is the radiant emptiness from which everything comes. It is the realm of all potential. Similarly, in the Shiva Shakti tradition of South India, it is Shiva, pure consciousness. Yet this trans-elemental void contains, strangely enough, the element of Desire, because within it is the initial impulse of creation. It desires to become.

Daoist teacher Jeffrey Yuen, 88th generation lineage holder in the Jade Purity School of Daoism, says “the emptiness wants to be something. Wu Chi decides, ‘I want to see what it would be like to be…’ and creation arises. (from lecture notes, Morphology and Physiology, July 15, 2000, San Francisco, page 4). In India, that desire is described as a small vibration, something akin to today’s ‘butterfly effect,’ that sets in motion the entire creation of the cosmos. We have the same story in the West, although we personify the creative principle, and ultimately anthropormorphize it. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was a vast waste, darkness covered the deep, and the Spirit of God hovered over the surface of the water. God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” (Genesis 1:1-3) Something that seems paradoxical to us, is that, in the mystical tradition of the west, and in the daoist tradition, this Great Radiance is called ‘Dark’, because, in fact, it is dark to us; it is beyond our capacity to perceive. But in the West, the first element of creation is ‘Light,’ something perceptible by the human body, something usable by all organic matter, and in a certain sense, a first principle, a harbinger of transcendence, a symbol, if you will, of our ultimate source. Beyond that, there is only a radiant darkness, an unknown, but ultimately self-ordering principle, that in the daoist tradition is called Wu Qi.

More on the other Pure Ones in future postings. But for the moment, let us turn to one of Wallace Stevens’ poems, The Snow Man. Helen Vendler says, “it may be that Stevens will be forever anthologized as the poet of ‘The Snow Man,’ (H. Vendler, On Extended Wings, p. 1), implying, at least to me, that this may be one of his most accessible poems, and therefore, perhaps a good place to start our study of the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Stevens must have known a great deal about winter, and had not a little of the ascetic in him, from the look of this poem. Asceticism, of one or another sort, is often found in the 'philosopher's man,' the poet, and the contemplative. And now, let's read the poem again:

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves.

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

wallace stevens, contemplative

When I read Wallace Stevens, I feel as if he were writing these poems just for me. By that I mean, I feel that we are sharing a very close communion. I feel almost as if I had written them myself, or I could have. I don't mean these words as any kind of conceit, but simply that when I read the poems, I feel I am somehow reading something that is bubbling up from within a very deep part of me, from something deep within myself. Helen Vendler, his very able critic, writes, “he is the poet whose poems I would have written had I been the poet he was. I would not have known it possible to have this peculiar standing with respect to a poet had I never come across Stevens’ work.” (WS, Words Chosen Out of Desire, p.3).

I believe this illusion of communion, that is felt in Stevens’ work, stems from the fact that he is writing from a contemplative experience. In a sense, this experience is universal. It’s what we do with our solitude. Of course, it is colored and varied by the differences in our experiences: places, language, lore and myths, access of various kinds, or the lack of it, etcetera, making it particular, individual to a certain degree. And Stevens’ allusions and synecdoches jar me awake from this dream of union with the poet, spurring me to seek greater understanding of this master of the inward state as it meets ‘the outer world’ in that zone Stevens' called 'the imagination.' The imagination I can experience for myself. So, perhaps, because of the kind of poet I happen to be, Stevens’ work is experienced by me as extraordinarily intimate.

Stevens says, in essence, that he wrote these poems for himself. I love this about him. Vendler cites two examples of his attitude towards other people's response of 'understanding' his poetry. She quotes ‘Parts of a World: WS Remembered’ by Peter Brazeau, “in which a friend or colleague of Stevens tries to read Stevens’ poetry, only to retire baffled: ‘Talking about his poetry, I said, “Mr. Stevens, I just can’t understand your stuff." He says, "Chawlie, it isn’t necessary that you understand my poetry or any poetry. It’s only necessary that the writer understand it…I understand it; that’s all that’s necessary."' To another acquaintance who asked him to explain a poem, Stevens said gnomically, ‘I don’t think you’d understand this unless you wrote it.’” (ibid)

I believe that because Wallace Stevens wrote these poems from, and for, such a core part of himself, his awareness, (filtered though it was by his extensive knowledge and reflection on western culture), he was, in a palpable sense, writing it for that same part of ourselves: awareness (a buddhist term), human consciousness (a modern western term), the Self (a vedantic term), the Spirit (a Christian term). To whatever degree we have ‘cultivated’ (a daoist term, btw) contemplation in our own lives, and cultivated ‘poetry,’ we will resonate with the poetry of Wallace Stevens.

I invite readers to come along with me on this journey as I attempt to uncover and 'understand' more of Wallace Stevens, through this project of study and interpretation. I will begin with a few key daoist concepts, and include poems of Wallace Stevens that represent these concepts, at least to me. And then I will probably begin at the beginning of his collected poetic work and make my way through them one by one, for the most part. I can only apologize in advance for the meagerness of the language and conceptualizations I am capable of bringing to the subject.

the dao of wallace stevens

I’ve decided to dedicate this site entirely to the poetry of Wallace Stevens. For other poetry, please now look to my ‘Healthy Daily Living’ weblog, under ‘My Other Sites.’

I have a master’s degree in theology and another one in traditional chinese medicine, and have been a student of Daoist healer Jeffrey Yuen for six years. I’m currently exploring Wallace Stevens’ poetry more extensively than ever before in my life, and also certain approaches to poetry, especially the notion I first encountered in 1974, when reading Owen Barfield’s book, ‘Poetic Diction,’ that a function of poetry is to change our consciousness.

Whenever I read Wallace Stevens, I find myself thinking of the difference between daoist and confucian perspectives on life. So, I thought it would deepen my understanding, on more than one front, to comment on his poems, prose - and on his critics - from the daoist point of view, as near as I can come to it. Daoism is a vast, highly developed tradition, and I will only be able to comment on the basis of my limited exposure to daoist thought, but also from my deep resonance with it, especially with the text of the Dao De Jing. The literary critic I will rely on most often will be Ronald Sukenick, whose major work on this subject, ‘Wallace Stevens, Musing the Obscure’, is available in a hypertext version at the site of Middle Tennessee State University, under the auspices of Dr. David Lavery.

Below you will find the complete text of ‘Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas.’