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Alan Fleisig
Ecstasies of Emptiness
Astronomical Perspectives in Wallace Stevens’ “Auroras of Autumn”
Professor Nico Israel
English 759.54 001
Modernist Poetry and Poetics
Hunter College School of Education
25 May 2012
Commentary which impoverishes poems is a disservice to them.
Helen Vendler
Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire
Don’t be shy / you’ll learn to fly / and see the sun / when day is done / if only you’ll see, /
Just what you are / beneath a star / that came to stay / one rainy day / in autumn for free. /
Yes. Be what you’ll be.
Nick Drake
Things Behind the Sun
Somewhere along the line, we have mistaken the simple for the complex. The figurative
is constantly displaced by the symbolic, and in our unceasing efforts at erudition we
dream up ever-increasing networks of purely symbolic meaning that have ever fainter
relations to our actual, lived experiences. Something of this nature has occurred across
the voluminous industry of Wallace Stevens criticism. It strikes me that a sense of “the
thing itself” – of the poem – has gone missing in a multiplicity of apprehensions and misapprehensions, and we would like any critical endeavor of our own to constitute an act of
recovery. Of course this, then, our own so-called act of recovery, runs the risk of being
just another obfuscation, one more piece of imperfectly formed glass standing between
the reader and the thing – the poem – refracting distraction. Or worse yet, this effort will
prove more mirror than glass, another occasion to subject the world to my own intellectu-
al and aesthetic prejudices, taking the poem as mere ground and occasion. Ironically, this
strikes me as closely analogous to the rhetorical and philosophical ambiguities that imbue
Stevens’ poetry at every turn as it consistently confronts the questions of the poem, the
poet, the self, and the world. And so Stevens’ work itself seems to invite us to begin at a
certain level of critical complexity and self-awareness. But there it is: if every act of criticism must begin with the question ‘what is criticism?’ we are going one way or another
to end up tongue-tied, silent on the one hand, insensible on the other. Rather, here we’ll
attempt a reductio, in the spirit of Helen Vendler’s description of Wallace Stevens’ “customary primitive simplicity” (“Desire,” 56), and seek wherever possible to let the poems
speak for themselves, even as we speak for them, in the hope that we might in the end, by
some small margin, illuminate more than obfuscate, and thereby justify our intervention.
We will look, in particular, at canto VI of Stevens’ putative masterpiece, “Auroras of Autumn,” from a Vendlerian stance of “primitive simplicity,” seeking an understanding of
this sequence that is at once more clear and more nuanced than many of the existing exegeses, and from there explore how this reading might inflect our readings of the poem as
a whole, and of certain pivotal moments in other “mature” or “late” Stevens works.
Vendler never goes so far as to theorize Stevens’ “primitive simplicity.” We can
follow her derivation of the idea, however, in her reading of Stevens’ “A Postcard from
the Volcano,” in her second book-length essay on Stevens, the 1984 Wallace Stevens:
Words Chosen Out of Desire. Without reproducing the poem, let us just say that Vendler
here, somewhat uncharacteristically, makes the most obvious and transparent reading of
the poem as a simple message of the present to the future (or the past to the present), elegiacally conveying a small essence of the poet’s being, and most simply, honestly
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communicating a small bit of “what he felt at what he saw” (33). Our concern here is not
strictly with the meaning of the poem, but with Vendler’s approach to it. She avers that
“[t]he poem finds the simplest of equivalents for all its conceptual concerns: death is the
explosion of the ground under our feet; the end of our era is the shuttering of the mansion
we lived in; … The past is autumn; the present is the children’s spring” (34). Even the
classical allusion of the volcano of the title is elided in the poem. This, unlike how we
have often been encouraged to read Stevens, is a poem built of immediate imagist figurations that invite us to make connections on the near side of metaphor and symbol rather
than turning away to build networks of metaphor and symbol anterior to the poem that
only occlude the poet’s simpler intent. Vendler herself confirms the observation later in
the essay when she asserts that “Stevens’ most authentic insights are those of a minimalist poet” (37). She, indeed, rhapsodizes the poem’s very approachability:
Stevens’ continuing wish to write with the utmost simplicity, and to reach
us, his posterity, with his spirit still storming on the blank pages of his
book is nowhere clearer than in this parable of pastness. His stylized universe is made up of the barest and simplest equivalents he can find to
symbolize the death of one culture and the beginning of a new culture unconsciously dependent on the old one. Self-deprecatingly, Stevens calls
his poem a postcard. It says, not “Wish you were here,” but “Soon you
will be here, as I am” – and reminds us of the obligation of each generation to leave, in utterance, a memorial of what it felt at what it saw, to
leave a vestige of its “spirit storming.” Nothing could be simpler, more direct, more intimate, more benevolently ironic toward the children weaving
budded aureoles [a figure from the poem]. (35.)
“Postcard,” while a mere amuse-bouche of a late Stevens poem, captures more
than its weight of Stevens’ mature preoccupations, and should help us approach the more
formidable “Auroras of Autumn.” But “Auroras” comes freighted with an additional critical weight that doesn’t bear on other late Stevens poems, especially the shorter ones.
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Harold Bloom, in his 1976 Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate,” makes extravagant claims for the poem (as he continues to do, if perhaps more elliptically, in his most
recent recapitulation, The Anatomy of Influence.) “Auroras” is one of Stevens’ “three finest poems,” Bloom says, and sustains the illusion of closure “better than any other poem
written, in English, in our century [the 20th century]” (Bloom, 253-54). But so intent is
Bloom on investing Stevens within Bloom’s own merely bookish pantheon, and of roping
the poet into his own, cherished historico/critical topography, that Bloom misses altogether the man in the poet, critically misreading images central to this and other late
Stevens poems, and arguably doing more to obscure than illuminate “Auroras”’ fundamental primitive affect along the way. Which is a pity, really, because Bloom is
insightful and learned, and offers some real nuggets of wisdom along the way of his reading of the poem. Unfortunately they remain too localized within Bloom’s own theoretical
frame of interest, literary history and psychology, to help us much understand the cosmic
festival that Stevens presents us.
I depart most radically from Bloom in his reading of “Auroras”’ canto VI,
Bloom’s misreading of which extends outward like a virus, infecting not just his reading
of the rest of the poem and of Stevens more broadly, but the Stevens readings of a generation of critics that have followed Bloom. Certainly, I wouldn’t quibble with Bloom’s
characterization of this moment in the poem as being Stevens’ “grandest realization of
the American Sublime” (269). But I strenuously object to Bloom’s characterization a
page later that the passage is “the most irrealistic in all Stevens” (270), a reading that locates the drama of this most dramatic of poems conveniently back in the mind of the
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poet, making of Stevens in the end not much more than a particularly eloquent Dada
camp follower.
To support this gross misreading, Bloom makes two critical misapprehensions,
one quite intentional, the other seemingly unintentional, and made arguably out of ignorance. Canto V, obviously immediately preceding this passage, on its surface, and without
burrowing too deeply into interpretation, collects images of musicians, dancers, and other
“tellers of tales” in a “house” representing the world, which has become like a “pageant,”
a “theater” and a “festival.”
The father fetches pageants out of air,
Scenes of the theatre, vistas and blocks of woods
And curtains like a naïve pretence of sleep. (CP, 415.)
We are offered the crowd, the “disordered mooch,” in a home and upon a stage, concluding with language highly suggestive of the Shakespearean trope “all the world’s a stage.”
Stevens instead concludes by recontextualizing, without completely overturning, the
Shakespearean sentiment : “That there are no lines to speak? There is no play. / Or, the
persons act one merely by being here” (416). Even mute, by way of the immutable
Shakespeare figure, we are undeniably in the presence of players on a stage that is the
world.
Canto VI then opens: “It is a theatre floating through the clouds” (416). What does
Bloom say about this transition? He says, “the rhetorical disjunction is quite absolute,
despite the thematic link from play to theatre” (Bloom, 269). Why? Well, first of all,
Bloom’s theory of poetic crossing requires a rhetorical disjunction at this point of the poem; the theory – not the poem – requires at this moment the active rhetorical
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displacement from, in Bloom’s words, a “Crossing of Solipsism” to a “Crossing of Necessity” (269, 273). Bloom has occluded not just the thematic conjunction between play
and theater, but their substantive rhetorical and grammatical conjunction literally in the
poem as well. He refuses to read the “It” in “It is a theatre floating through the clouds” as
having anything to do with the “theatre” of the “world” in canto V. The “it” instead,
Bloom asserts, refers to the aurora borealis, reprised from the beginning of the poem. “Itself a cloud” signifying to Bloom that the narrative action of the poem is now taking
place only in the “theatre” of the poet’s mind. “The auroras are seen in a vision of a theatre of cloud, misted rock and mountains … ” (269, emphasis mine). There is an obvious
turning to the vision and the mind of the poet in the canto, but it does not take place until
the final two tercets, and is a turn marked explicitly, grammatically by Stevens’ use of the
ellipsis at the end of the sixth tercet. In the first six tercets, I believe, we are asked to see
something quite distinct from the “vision” of the poet, although we are asked to share
what the poet sees. At this point, it is worth quoting the passage at length, so we can
judge for ourselves whether we can sustain Bloom’s reading.
It is a theatre floating through the clouds,
Itself a cloud, although of misted rock
And mountains running through it like water, wave on wave,
Through waves of light. It is of cloud transformed
To cloud transformed again, idly, the way
A season changes color to no end,
Except the lavishing of itself in change,
As light changes yellow into gold and gold
To its opal elements and fire’s delight,
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Splashed wide-wise because it likes magnificence
And the solemn pleasures of magnificent space.
(CP, 416.)
In Bloom’s reading the theatre is the aurora borealis – which is okay up to that
point – but can the aurora borealis really be “itself a cloud… of misted rock and mountains?” No, the aurora borealis consists of highly charged solar particles of no rock-like
embodiment, that give off light when they interact with the earth’s polar magnetic field.
And following from this physical non-sequitur, Bloom’s reading falls progressively apart.
What happens if we take the poet more at face value, attempt to read him in the
spirit of primitive simplicity? “It is a theatre” here suggests rhetorically, grammatically as
well as thematically that we are speaking of the world, or planet earth. Earth, “itself a
cloud, although of misted rock,” is a simple, economical and primitive (dare we say
“beautiful”) statement of a basic astrophysical truth. “And mountains running like water,
wave on wave, / Through waves of light” reaches for something of a higher rhetorical
plane and is somewhat more challenging to interpret. The last part is the easiest: the earth
– the physical globe – simply does move through waves of light. Meanwhile, there are a
couple of ways that mountains can “move like water, wave on wave.” Physics teachers
famously love to compare the surface of the earth to that of a billiard ball, in order to reinforce the idea that the earth is neither a sphere, nor perfectly rounded on its surface.
Were one to lay the surface of the earth flat upon a table or a graph, the peaks and valleys
of its mountains, both above and below the surface of the ocean, would in fact look quite
wave-like. Although I suspect that rather than this topographical view, Stevens is figuring
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the earth in motion, spinning; wave upon wave of mountains passing through the universe’s waves of light, made momentarily visible by the aurora.
“It is of cloud transformed / To cloud transformed again” is – should we say, ‘can
be read as’ – a simple, again economical, poetic phrasing of the lifecycle of planets.
Gravitational and electromagnetic forces collect and concentrate cosmic dust and debris
into relatively dense “clouds” that over time on the order of magnitude of billions of
earth-years, coagulate into planets and stars, and upon the eventual implosion of stars (the
inevitable result of the continuing action of those same gravitational and electromagnetic
forces) return to cosmic dust, possibly to start the cycle anew – although this theoretical
cyclicality remains a point of contention, physically contradicted by empirical evidence
that the universe is constantly expanding.
This planetary cycle is then compared to the cycle of the seasons, as the operation
of planetary laws with which we are most familiar, and of which we have most direct evidence (“transformed…idly, the way / A season changes color”); and the notion that the
motive force behind all these celestial metamorphoses might be aesthetic – or might as
well be aesthetic for all we know – is introduced (“transformed…idly…to no end, / Except the lavishing of itself in change”). Taking the word “space” in the middle of the
fourth tercet at face value, in its most evocative mid-century meaning, as the place beyond the terrestrial, we take the fourth tercet to be a description of the ‘milky way,’ our
galaxy that is indeed “[s]plashed wide-wise” in space. The lines simultaneously aestheticize and anthropomorphize the galaxy: “Because it likes magnificence / And the solemn
pleasures of magnificent space,” lines that, predicated upon the rhetorical “because,”
begin to tie the physical universe back to the poet’s, and our own, troubled understanding
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of it. The last line of the tercet makes that connection explicit: “The cloud drifts idly
through half-thought-of forms.” Again, on its surface, the cloud here is the world, the
galaxy, and the universe simultaneously, all seen now in their interpenetrating unity, and
expressing the fundamental truth that we still don’t know – may never know -- the shape
of the universe, but that we can’t really help ourselves from trying to imagine it.
The fifth and sixth tercets return us to “The theatre,” explicitly situating the earth
in the universe:
The theatre is filled with flying birds,
Wild wedges, as of a volcano’s smoke, palm-eyed
And vanishing, a web in a corridor
Or massive portico. A capitol,
It may be, is emerging or has just
Collapsed. The denouement has to be postponed …
(416.)
The earth may be as “a web” in a universe that may be a “corridor” or a “massive
portico.” The simplicity yet sophistication of these architectural metaphors for the universe is stunning. Two, possibly more, competing and equally valid conceptions of
astronomical time and space are summed up in a mere five words. Stevens would return
and expand upon the subject in canto VI (coincidentally) of “An Ordinary Evening in
New Haven,” – a poem on similar themes, if absent the apotheosis of the “supernatural”
setting of “Auroras” – and its Alphas and Omegas representing the two competing theories of astronomical time (where “alpha” is the portico that “continues to begin” and
“omega” the corridor that is “refreshed at every end” (469)), but nowhere else would he
capture this concept whole with the same poetic intensity and economy. And what is this
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physical universe, this reality here – for that matter, what is the world or the galaxy? A
capitol? May be. Emerging or just collapsed? Astronomical theories support both. “The
denouement has to be postponed …” because we just don’t know, and because we must
at all costs postpone our mortality. And our knowledge of the physical universe ends, not
with a bang but with a whimper, as the canto drifts into that beautiful closing ellipsis, silenced by its own ecstasy of emptiness.
Which ellipsis brings us to the turn back to the poet, the man, in the concluding
two tercets, and the meaning of all this to him personally.
This is nothing until in a single man contained,
Nothing until this named thing nameless is
And is destroyed. He opens the door of his house
On flames. The scholar of one candle sees
An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame
Of everything he is. And he feels afraid.
(416-17.)
Auroras, especially when seen in non-Arctic latitudes, are manifestations of solar
“effulgences,” solar storms made visible “flaring” across the night sky, and as such a
premonition of the inevitable end of everything made visible, a graspable preview of how
the world will end. Inherent in them, too, is the everything of which we are a part. We
are, in the cliché, like the world, the galaxy and everything, made up of cosmic dust,
pieces of stars, perennially under the influence of waves, of light. This revelation, however, for Stevens is a historical and personal phenomenon. He embodies in his personal
history the transition from being a “scholar of one candle,” which was the light of the
world, to a mere element in an “Arctic effulgence,” which is not only the real, whole light
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of the world, the universe, and everything, but also the harbinger of everything’s destruction.
On its own, this apocalyptic – Gnostic in a favorite Bloom construction – vision
of the universe doesn’t matter all that much: “This is nothing.” It is almost comedy, “a
flippant communication under the moon” (418), uttered in the face of the astronomical
fate of the earth fulfilled, its “leaves … dead,” taking its place in the constellation of Capricorn, “goat-leaper,” as an airless rock, “crystalled and luminous, sitting / in the highest
night.” It is of the highest order of mirth, “outlandish” but still merely “queerer than Sunday” (419) because, turning again to the fuller exposition of the theme in “Ordinary
Evening,” the “anonymous color of the universe” (470) “is almost the color of comedy”
(477). That is, until it is “in a single man contained,” “until this named thing nameless is”
(416). Which is to say, until it becomes human history. For Stevens lived through a historical moment in which these same universal realities were made manifest and revealed
in a specific human invention, the “nameless” (a noun here, by the way), the atomic
bomb. Forgive us for turning to “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” again, but it is
once again there that we find the echo of this “nameless” that helps us more fully understand the rhetoric of the passage we are discussing.
XXIV
The consolations of space are nameless things.
It was after the neurosis of winter. It was
In the genius of summer that they blew up
The statue of Jove among the boomy clouds.
It took all day to quieten the sky
And then to refill its emptiness again,
(482.)
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Without going into more abstract analysis, this is clearly an invocation of “The Bomb.”
Dropped in August, it was a “genius of summer,” that reduced the “neurosis” of ‘total
war’ into the mere dust of Jove rendered upon “the boomy clouds.” The unavoidable interpenetration of the personal and the universal are made manifest: it was “a happening /
In space and the self, that touched them both at once / And alike” (483), offering the
proposition that life without Jove could be made new, could avoid fatal historical “repetition” if not avoid death itself, ultimately, ironically, by the same or similar means. But
what interests us most for our reading of “Auroras” is the opening line of the canto, “The
consolations of space are nameless…” Historically manifest in the bomb, the power of
the universe, formerly nameless and at such a far remove, has become something containable in “a single man,” and as such, something much to be feared. And the poet, “he
feels afraid.”
Just within the bounds of Canto VI, then, we arrive at the poet, Stevens, a frightened man, enveloped in a universe that, of its own will – if it could be said to have one
(tending to the agreeably abstract and aesthetic) –independent of the interferences of
man, and despite being made of light and fire, is largely comic. No wonder then, that the
poet begins the poem’s valedictory canto with the construction “An unhappy people in a
happy world” (420), and after testing the algebraic “phases” of this epitaph, settles on it.
The poem itself seems to make this a foregone conclusion. In the most primitive reading,
the narrative of “Auroras of Autumn” concerns simply an older man looking upon a
splendor of the universe and contemplating his place in it, becoming wondrous in his
sense of immersion, but simultaneously anxious about what that reveals to him about his
own fate. But Stevens in this concluding canto has also dressed himself in his reflexive,
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theological garb, as the “rabbi,” and by doing so, invites us to consider whether he has
any theological or religious statement that he means to add to or conclude the poem with.
In a fascinating recent essay in the Journal of Religion, “Even Stevens: A Poet for
Liberal Theologians,” William Dean argues that “even Stevens” – as opposed that is, to
more predictable candidates like Auden, Eliot, or R.S. Thomas – by in essence being a
great modern poet, by modeling after the important liberal theologian Paul Tillich the
stance of the “reverent agnostic” (Dean, 186) and opening readers’ minds to “celestial
possibility” (185), “provides evidence of the divine – not explicit evidence of the divine
in religious contexts, but implicit evidence of the divine in secular, or nonreligious contexts, and in ways especially appropriate to liberal theologians” (177-78). Dean notes a
critical turn in the history of liberal theology, from what he calls the “classical liberal”
theologians of the mid-twentieth century – like Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich – and
what he calls the “renaissance liberal theologians” of today (180). This is an important
distinction, when considering the question of Stevens’ religiosity, or lack thereof, because
while the classical liberal theologians celebrated mystery, and the ultimate unknowability
of the moral and divine – a position one imagines would at least be palatable to the poet –
today’s “renaissance liberal” theologians begin in a spirit of liberation-theology-like moral righteousness and work backwards, deploying academic philosophy and language that
in their pseudo-scientific methodologies make positive but dubious claims about the divine.
Renaissance liberals focused on methods – neopragmatist,
deconstructionist, historicist, relativist, pluralist, and socialchange methods. These methods operated like a wringer,
squeezing the strangeness out of theology, until it was fit to be
hung in the backyards of the academy. (181.)
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Dean further claims this shift coincided, critically, with the beginning of the continuing
decline in influence of mainstream liberal denominations, both Christian and Jewish.
“Today, a reading of the history of liberal theology could be appropriately accompanied
by the playing of a requiem.”
The critical distinction between the traditional liberal and renaissance liberal
theologians is similar to the distinction between the tendency to silence on the one hand,
and the tendency to insensibility on the other, that we began this essay with. Dean refers
to the first tendency as apophatic – where “speech is a failure of speech” – and the latter
as cataphatic – where speech is “a kind of verbal riot, an anarchy of discourse” (192).
Dean summarizes the distinction thus: “While the [apophatic] would say, for example,
that God is neither male nor female, the [cataphatic] would say that God is both male and
female” (192). Dean associates traditional liberal theologians with the cataphatic – the
mysterious, insensible, unknowable – and argues that today’s apophatic theology needs
desperately to be saved from itself by an infusion of this broad, universalizing spirit. And
that is where, Dean asserts, Wallace Stevens comes in.
Dean offers a reading of a relatively obscure Stevens poem from Stevens’ middle
period, originally published in 1942 in Parts of a World, “Landscape with Boat.”
He never supposed
That he might be truth, himself, or part of it,
That the things that he rejected might be part
..........
He never supposed divine
Things might not look divine, nor that if nothing
Was divine then all things were, the world itself,
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And that if nothing was the truth, then all
Things were the truth, the world itself was the truth.
(CP, 242.)
Dean calls this Stevens’ recognition of “a truth of a higher order” (Dean, 192). Citing a
passage from Necessary Angels where Stevens describes the possibility that “his
imagination is not wholly his own but that it may be part of a much larger, much more
potent imagination, which it is his affair to try to get at” (191, quoting NA, 115), Dean
concludes that this “feeling amounts to intimations of the divine” (192), and that Stevens’
constant questing after a “sense of totality” and “the whole,” even in the most mundane
or secular – perhaps especially in the most mundane and secular – was not just a search
for a new aesthetic experience but for the “religious feeling that accompanies esthetic
perception” as it exists in the “world beyond this world” (197, quoting John Dewey, Art
as Experience (1958), at 191-95).
It shouldn’t really surprise us to discover something of a traditional, to us today
perhaps rather old-fashioned, religiosity embedded in Stevens’ poetry. His biography
practically begs us to discover it. But having lost sight now in our own era of the
acceptability of the stance of “reverent agnosticism” so characteristic of “reform”
churches and synagogues of Stevens’ generation, we are perhaps too likely to mistake
denunciations of theological particulars for an outright denunciation of all religious
impulses. Is the sitter of “Sunday Morning” unreligious, irreligious, or anti-religious;
certainly more likely one of the first two than the last. Yet we’ve been raised in an era in
which the religious typically habituates itself ‘fundamentally’ in the absolute, rather than
in its more typical mid-century habit of the anti-absolute. We have become too well-
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equipped to recognize the religious impulse in our political or ethical modernity, and thus
dismiss it as ideological poppy-cock, especially where it manifests as an expression of an
“other.” We have become proportionately desensitized to the religious impulse embedded
everywhere in the mysteries of our quotidian mundanity, of our ultimately unknowable
universe, and the implication that follows, that if we cannot know the universe, we can no
more know the world, nor ourselves.
“Turn back,” then, “to where we were when we began: / An unhappy people in a
happy world” (CP, 420). What kind of a sermon is this for Stevens to conclude his
masterpiece with? We’ll try to let the poet have the last word. For one, Stevens tells us,
“solemnize the secretive,” meditate upon “a whole,” take in “The full of fortune and the
full of fate.” These cadences certainly reflect the cataphatic theology Dean describes. “By
these lights,” the auroras, “This contrivance of the spectre of the spheres,” in the autumn
of a life, the autumn of a planet – for all we know the autumn of all known worlds – take
comfort in the human, in the sufficiency of the harridan; ponder not too long upon the
impossible paradise; most of all, look with humor upon the wonder of the auroras come
and gone “Like a blaze of summer straw in winter’s nick.”
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Works Cited
Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens: The Poetry of Our Climate. Ithaca, N.Y. and London: Cornell
University Press, 1977.
Dean, William D. “Even Stevens: A Poet for Liberal Theologians.” The Journal of Religion 92:2
(April 2012), 177-198. Web: JSTOR, April 22, 2012.
Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1978 [1954].
Vendler, Helen. “Wallace Stevens: Hypotheses and Contradictions.” Representations 81:1
(Winter 2003), 99–117. Web: JSTOR, April 22, 2012.
___________. Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire. Knoxville, Tenn.: University of
Tennessee Press, 1984.
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