anecdote of the prince of peacocks, by wallace stevens

in the moonlight
I met Berserk,
in the moonlight
on the bushy plain.
oh, sharp he was
as the sleepless!

and, “Why are you red
in this milky blue?”
I said.

“why sun-colored,
as if awake
in the midst of sleep?”

”you that wander,”
so he said,
”on the bushy plain,
forget so soon.
but I set my traps
in the midst of dreams.’

I knew from this
that the blue ground
was full of blocks
and blocking steel.
I knew the dread
of the bushy plain,

and the beauty
of the moonlight
falling there,
falling
as sleep falls
in the innocent air.

(from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose, p.46)

*           *           *           *           *

There will be a lot to say about this poem, as many scholars have commented on it.  I’ll begin with James Baird from ‘The Dome and the Rock:’ “The ground, he knew, was blue."  I shall not purpose to review Stevens’ symbolism of color.  Every reader knows it well.  Blue, of course, is the sign of a potentiality of or for the imagination.  A little farther on in Harmonium [from ‘Ploughing on Sunday’] the poet observes in ‘Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks’: ‘I knew from this /that the blue ground / was full of blocks / and blocking steel’ (CP 58).  Two personae figure in the poem: Berserk, who is the endless imaginative faculty in man, his power to make poetry, and the beginning poet, who is challenged in the dialogue.  The potential is at his feet, the earth of the ploughman.  It is full of materials for a structure, materia poetica, as Stevens was later to call them (eg, ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,’ NA 33)  There is ‘blocking steel’ here, as well.  It is a material to carry the weight of an art.”  (p.2)

Baird’s chief metaphor for Stevens’ achievement is ‘architectural:’ Stevens has created an edifice of poetry; and Baird develops this idea quite well.  He did a lot of research and the book is extremely well written and well thought-out.  It was published in 1968. 

My own initial take on this poem is that Stevens was confronting the almost out-of-control creativity (‘Berserk’) of his poetic and imaginative gift.  And of his realization that the sometimes insane energy of inspiration would be blocked at times by, as he put it himself (and I’m paraphrasing) the fact that writing poems isn’t easy.  It’s hard to get just the right word, to get the sense and the rhythm and the levels of meaning to converge. (I'll see if I can find the quotation, in the Letters).  Baird has shown me that the expression ‘blocking steel’ comes from building, and that changes the meaning entirely, I suppose, because Baird interprets the poem quite differently.  Still, the figure of ‘Berserk’ sounds and looks kind of scary. He is preternatural, like the cactus-man, Mescaline, in Carlos Castaneda's first volume.  As Stevens wrote in one of his letters, after a night spent writing poetry, one is almost happy to hear the milkman at the door.  Stevens loves to walk in the 'moonlight,' but the return of the quotidian world is quite welcome at times.  Besides, the best poet needs both.

minutia: ‘sharp as the sleepless’ –does this mean the narrator is sleepy?  no, I think the use of the military name ‘Berserk,’ (because the berserkers were a famous military force, out of Scandinavia according to Daniel Schwartz), indicates that he had the hyper-vigilance of a soldier.  Without knowing it, Stevens may have been describing the kind of insomnia that both creativity and kundalini-awakening bestow on their votaries. This is 'creativity' as a force that can't be controlled, not just sitting down with a mug of cocoa and a sketchpad.  People who are having these kinds of spiritual experiences often have vivid dreams, and vividly colored hypnogogic visual experiences (visions) during the night, waking them up or keeping them awake, respectively.  I'm calling these 'kundalini' experiences, and apparently Wallace Stevens had them.  (And just for the sake of authenticity, I want to mention that I've been engaged in my own kundalini process, and have studied for five years with Olga Louchakova at her Hridayam School of Yoga, from 1999 til 2004)

The excitement of this ‘dream’ encounter winds down and dissipates just as sleep finally comes and carries off the formerly sleepless dreamer.  The poem itself recreates that experience, with its incantatory final verse.

Daniel Schwarz, in Narrative & Representation in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, sees Berserk as Stevens' libido, and mentions associations of 'peacock' with 'strutting and lecherousness.' (p.91) He approaches the poem as eliciting an experience of 'insomnia,' 'stress,' 'sexuality,' 'nightmares.'  This group of experiences represents a very high level of stress.  He writes, "the unwelcome appeareance of Berserk - who represents the libido, the excluded world of potential chaos, and carnival - is a threat to the speaker's order.  Berserk is also the intensified reality that the speaker comfortably excludes from the 'blue ground' of life and art.  Berserk is that dimly-acknowledged other self that cannot be denied; he is the spirit of gluttony, of libertine behavior, and he is a threat to the speaker's composure.  'Sharp' implies the threat of violation, but also the promise of wit and irony that will penetrate through the metaphorical layers of blocking steel in which we imprison ourselves.  Thus imagination and reality are not poles, but part of a continuum." (p.93)  Well said.

I can't help but notice the term 'blue ground' and its potential relationship to the Blue Mountains of Pennsylvania where Stevens grew up.

I also want to say a few more words about the peacock.  I've been looking around for various associations with peacocks, and I've found a few relating it to sexuality, for example from the Jatakamala, the story of Prince Visvantara: "

The Jatakamala (Garland of Birth Stories): IX: The Story of Prince Visvantara. ... the dances of the peacocks whom Lasciviousness has taught that art, ... www.borobudur.tv/jataka_09.htm - 65k - Cached - Similar pages" and elsewhere: ", it is peacocks that bring messages to Prince Rupert. Peacocks symbolize the orient in this song, and, specifically, the land of Persia"

Schwarz also mentions that in some cultures peacocks are used to warn against intruders.  In relation to their role in 'Domination of Black,' I found this: "Peacocks and other structurally colored animals and things, ... For peacocks, the colors are green, golden yellow, brown and a very bright blue. ...
www.crystalinks.com/peacocks.html - 22k - Cached - Similar pages"  this line makes a great deal of sense of Stevens’ use of peacocks ‘the colors of their tails / were like the leaves themselves,’ in 'Domination of Black.'

In my class on classical Chinese texts this past weekend, we came across this passage: "If one wants a child who will be beautiful and without reproach, look frequently at rings of white jade and excellent jade, look at peacocks and eat carp." (from the Zhu Bing Yuan Hou Lun)  Included just to show that there are other ways of looking at the peacock other than in terms of sexuality.  In my own upbringing, we associated the peacock with vanity and strutting (strutting, as in the Philadelphia Mummer's parade, where men wore costumes very similar to the spreading fan of the peacock's tail), but also with all-knowingness, due to its many eyes, and exotic beauty.

Thomas Lombardi, in his wonderful book, Wallace Stevens and the Pennsylvania Keystone State, relates this poem entirely to Wallace Stevens' experiences in Pennsylvania. He remarks that the 'blue ground' is Berks Country, home of the Blue Mountains (what my grandmother called the Kittatinnies) of Pennsylvania, and Stevens' boyhood terrain.  Lombardi notes that in Souvenirs and Prophecies, (p. 186), it's mentioned that in 1914 Stevens "walked out to Wiley's Farm near Leesport", and that it is known there was a peacock kept at Wiley's.  So, interestingly enough there was a real peacock in Stevens' life, and not just an imaginary peacock on the bathroom rug of his first (or second) boarding-house.  Perhaps that's how he knew that 'the colors of their tails / were like the leaves themselves.'  (p.69)

Lombardi relates the nightmarish 'Anecdote' to the falling out Stevens' experienced over his desired engagement to Elsie, making several possible connections, especially between 'red' and the rage expressed between himself and his father at that time.  I particularly like these sentences: "Berserk, then, proceeds to explain his behavior vis-a-vis the poet's.  With ominous words he warns the poet, who between1908 and 1912 had become a wanderer far from home, though he occasionally frequented 'the bushy plain,' not 'For(gotten) so soon.'  The fact is, the 'traps' of the past - set 'in the midst of dreams' (when Stevens' new life with Elsie was at its inception) - exist in the present.  Privy to such knowledge, Stevens instinctively knows that the 'blue ground' is 'full of blocks / And blocking steel,' in other words, riddled with obstacles, even possibly with the grime of industrialization.  Doubtless, Stevens experienced 'the dread / of the bushy plain' (CP 58), associated with the loss of home and family.  The poem concludes with a half-nostalgic allusion, presumably, to Reading's 'innocent air' (CP 58)." (p.69)

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