The Course Of The Particular by Wallace Stevens

The Course of a Particular

Today the leaves cry, hanging on branches swept by wind,

Yet the nothingness of winter becomes a little less.

It is still full of icy shades and shapen snow.

The leaves cry . . . One holds off and merely hears the cry.

It is a busy cry, concerning someone else.

And though one says that one is part of everything,

There is a conflict, there is a resistance involved;

And being part is an exertion that declines:

One feels the life of that which gives life as it is.

The leaves cry. It is not a cry of divine attention,

Nor the smoke-drift of puffed-out heroes, nor human cry.

It is the cry of leaves that do not transcend themselves,

In the absence of fantasia, without meaning more

Than they are in the final finding of the ear, in the thing

Itself, until, at last, the cry concerns no one at all.

– Wallace Stevens

***

Steven Wallace said...

“The poem means what the poem says, but what the poem says depends on the poem's affirmations of nobility, than which nothing is more difficult or more necessary. There is no element more conspicuously absent from contemporary poetry than nobility.”

Affirmations of nobility, affirmations of what is worthwhile, and by implication, the avoidance or excision of what is not.

For Homer, the worthiness and excellence of a life consisted in strength, bravery and wit.

For Aristotle it was Arete – his ethics of what it means to live the Good Life – it is a mean, not an in-between, that sits between two extremes, of too much and too little.

It is the practicality of choice which determines the wisdom of a person.

Was it an aristocratic stance by Stevens or a search for meaning, trying to hear that primordial voice (‘cry’) before the extinguishment, again, into the undifferentiated where ‘no one (cares) at all’?

***

Joseph Carroll in Wallace Stevens’ Supreme Fiction (1987):

‘The course of the poem is a meditation in which Stevens inverts the visionary process through which he comes to a realization of essential unity.’

From vision and ‘fantasia’ to alienation and back to ‘the thing Itself’.

***

If God is dead, then it is Man who is the measure of Value.

And it is his Imagination that weaves new possibilities.

To relive us of that dreadful sense of our finitude, of our particular, individual and unknown date with Death.

Post Nietzsche, the poet is, indeed, the arbiter of the world.

“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 in his style”

***

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