(This essay was published in Poetry Wales 27.3 (December 1990) pp. 16-26.)
1 A scratching post
In his W. D. Thomas memorial Lecture on the poet, given at U. C. Swansea in December 1982, John Ormond says that it was "Up the hill from here, in Tycoch," that he first heard the name of Wallace Stevens. The occasion was a radio broadcast. Ormond was "so bowled over" by a reading of "The Idea of Order at Key West" that he "ran out next day and ordered everything in W. H. Smiths… anything in print by Stevens". He remarks that Stevens's "belated Selected Poems" had just come out in England, which, since the Selected appeared in 1953, ties down his discovery to the mid-50s. Ormond was thirty in 1953; two years later he joined the B. B. C. Television News Service, and in 1957 entered upon his film-making career with B. B. C. Wales. His earliest verse had long since appeared (along with that of two other young poets) in Indications (1943). But, so much had he taken to heart Vernon Watkins's suggestion that he shouldn't publish any further collection until he was thirty, he did not publish another until 1969, by which time he was in his mid-forties.
That collection, Requiem and Celebration, is notable for its two styles. These, to make use of a distinction formulated by F. W. Bateson and restated approvingly by Wallace Stevens in his essay "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words", might be described as connotative and denotative. Stevens wrote:
A variation between the sound of words in one age and the sound of words in another age is an instance of the pressure of reality. Take the statement by Bateson that a language, considered semantically, evolves through a series of conflicts between the denotative and the connotative forces in words: between an asceticism tending to kill language by stripping words of all association and a hedonism tending to kill language by dissipating their sense in a multiplicity of associations. These conflicts are nothing more than changes in the relation between the imagination and reality.1
This is well said, but that it errs on the side of historical optimism the contents of Requiem and Celebration plainly demonstrate. So intense, in the second half of the twentieth century, has Bateson's conflict become, so intense "the pressure of reality", that a succession of ages isn't required for such a conflict to manifest itself. It can do so within the working life of a single poet. One of Ormond's formative poetic loves was Dylan Thomas, and Ormond's earliest style is a late-romantic symboliste style influenced by Thomas and by Ormond's study of Welsh poetic prosody. Only two poems in this manner survive in the Selected Poems of 1987. "Expectation" (soberly re-titled for this book, for it was called "Between Times of Silence" in Requiem) I take to be a poem about the infrequent comings of the Muse. She, a "naked figure winged with fire", has the power to transform winter into spring; once upon a time the poet encountered her in the woods only to lose her:
Yet where she disappeared
The snowskirl faltered, the ravelling
White waste of air warmed at her wing
And at her touch a bough
Of a tree burst into green spray,
The incalculable bird began to sing.
Ormond's practice here is illuminated in his contribution to Artists in Wales 2, where he writes of his attempt, in 1940 or 1941, to incorporate some of the rules of cynghanedd into English:
I tried to write second and third lines based upon similar consonantal systems and these constructions were meant to be read with the eye: three lines, say, being read simultaneously, rather like a musical score.2
In pursuing such experiments, in being so influenced, Ormond was very much of his time. The Anglo-Welsh poetic tradition in what has been called its "first flowering" is predominantly a connotative tradition. The influence from the Welsh language, the example of Gerard Manley Hopkins (himself a student of cynghanedd) and the tremendous success of Dylan Thomas, guru to a generation, all favour connotation: linguistic brilliance, rhetorical artifice, word-music, the proliferation of metaphor and symbol. It can be observed in the work of such various poets as Vernon Watkins, Glyn Jones, Roland Mathias, Raymond Garlick, to go no further; and the young John Ormond too went down this path. But, as Stevens remarks in "The Noble Rider", "A tendency towards the connotative, whether in language or elsewhere, cannot continue against the pressure of reality". Or at least, as he later says, that pressure can only be resisted, or evaded, by "individuals of extraordinary imagination". Now what Stevens means by "imagination" here isn't what all poets would mean by it. But if we abide by Stevens's words, we must take Stevens himself to be one such individual of "extraordinary imagination". His style is remarkably consistent; he seems, as many critics have remarked, to have begun to write with his poetical philosophy already in place, and to have gone on elaborating the same ideas for the rest of his life. In Ormond's case, however, the "pressure of reality" seems to have precipitated him into a wholly new style around 1950. Reality for him didn't need to be that incessant flood of news – "news of a new world" – about which Stevens is so eloquent: rather, it began at home with the deaths of family and friends. In a series of conversations I had with him in 1989,3 Ormond denied that at this time he was consciously reaching out for a new style: his new style seems instead to have been the only way in which he could express the perceptions he had to express: these events demanded these words. Of "My Dusty Kinsfolk" – "written possibly even as early as 1950" – he said:
It's got a firm grip, and it describes the hillside behind Ebenezer Chapel in my home village of Dunvant. It describes exactly what we did. There was this feeling that you put the best blanket around a dead person's body because the shroud was too cold a garment to wear to the grave.
This "firm grip", this need to describe "exactly what we did" – because the harsh and tender truth of death demanded clear perception and clean language – issues in an eloquent yet essentially denotative English:
My dusty kinsfolk in the hill
Screwed up in elm, when you were dead
We tucked you though your hands were still
In the best blanket from your bed
As though you dozed and might in stirring
Push off some light shroud you were wearing.
This might at first sight seem not only a barer language than that used in "Expectation", but also a diminished language, but the gains seem to me to outweigh the losses. It's a language of greater flexibility, of greater precision and tonal variation, and a language – essential to the full maturation of this a particular poet – that allows the play of wit and humour. The word "dusty", for example, combines the ruefully playful sense which the word possesses in the phrase "not so dusty" with a pun on the immemorial phrases of the burial service and the inevitable fate of interred bodies. "Screwed up" goes far beyond the simple carpentry of coffins to suggest the tightly closed eyes of the dead, even bodies hunched up (as they aren’t, except in the coffins of Caradoc Evans) like enwombed foetuses against death's depredations. This is the Ormond who, when later he found it in Stevens's Adagia, would quote approvingly and often the dictum: "Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking".4
By the time, then, that Ormond discovered Stevens, he had already moved away from a poetry of symbolist connotation to one of realist denotation. He had thrown off the retrograde influence of Dylan Thomas and found a language fully equal to the pressure of reality. In consequence, whatever influence Stevens would exert upon him would never be – except peripherally – a matter of style, and I must therefore state that what this essay is not is a study in stylistic influence. What is it, then? Many modern poets have meant a great deal to Ormond: as well as Dylan Thomas and Vernon Watkins one could mention Robert Frost, Wilfred Owen and R. S. Thomas. But in the sense in which one poet, more than any other, fulfils to a second poet the function of scratching post, a necessary fixture against which, it seems, he must rub himself for a lifetime, or (to put it a little more philosophically) stands to him as a figure with whom he must carry on an unavoidable dialogue, someone with whom he can compare and contrast his own ideas and perceptions, with whom he can establish fruitful grounds for agreement and no less fruitful grounds for argument, Wallace Stevens seems to have fulfilled this function for John Ormond: to have become, indeed, more important to him the longer he went on writing. The business of this essay, then, is to explore this relationship in so far as it's revealed, iceberg-like, in Ormond's poetic thought and poetic practice: and, by way of defining points of common belief and points of dissension between the two writers, to say (I hope) something of interest and significance about each of them.
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2 Versions of Venus
Harmonium, Stevens's first collection of poems, came out in 1923, the year of Ormond's birth. Printed fourth in it is a piece entitled "The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage". Here are the first two stanzas of five.
But not on a shell she starts,
Archaic, for the sea,
But on the first-found weed
She scuds the glitters,
Noiselessly, like one more wave.
She too is discontent
And would have purple stuff upon her arms,
Tired of the salty harbors,
Eager for the brine and bellowing
Of the high interiors of the sea.
This poem obviously works off Botticelli's well-known Birth of Venus in which the golden-haired goddess is portrayed scudding on a half-shell across the surface of the sea. Stevens's nude is "paltry" in comparison with the Venus of myth; she stands not upon a shell but on seaweed, something far less picturesque; and her "discontent" seems to be with the limitations of diurnal human existence. Harold Bloom has no hesitation in identifying her as "The American Venus… an Emersonian [who] attains the American Sublime". Yet Bloom is forced to admit that even in her sublimity her play remains, as Stevens states, "meagre":
So there will be in some visionary and introjected future a greater American Venus… [she] will manifest 'an intenser calm' because she will have emulated Emerson's program of joining yourself to Fate after discovering that you can't beat Fate, and as an American she will demand Victory, 'the centre of sea-green pomp'.5
Well, perhaps. The trouble is that Stevens's poem contains not one specifically American reference. Many of Stevens's poems refer themselves to American locations, but many refer to non-American places, so it seems questionable to assume that his "Paltry Nude" must be home-grown. Immediately, then, we come up against one of the fundamental characteristics of Stevens's connotative language: its ambiguity. Of this quality R. P. Blackmur has written that it
is that of a substance so dense with being, that it resists paraphrase and can be truly perceived only in the form of words in which it was given.6
As soon, that is, as you begin to paraphrase a Stevens poem, you change it. This, no doubt, is true in varying degrees of most poetry; but symbolist poetry is language at its least tractable. Here's an alternative reading of my own: Stevens's nude is paltry because she's the stuff of mundane actuality. Only when, at a later date, she has been transformed by the sun-like operation of imagination will she will she transcend the physical present and attain her true destiny as a piece of tranquil art. This reading has, I hope, not only the virtue of being in keeping with Stevens's view of imagination (so important to his poetry), but the virtue of being ahistorical: the creative power which transforms woman into goddess could be that of Botticelli, that of Stevens himself, that of any artist within human time. But other interpretations are of course possible. Since we're faced with a poem by a symbolist, why not read Stevens's nude symbolically rather than literally? Frank Doggett sees her as nature herself: "the naked, nameless personification of earth traversing the flux" of time and change.
Nature unified has the appearance of a season of the year, and although early in the year she embodies vernal meagreness…, in due time and at a later day, she is the goldener nude of summer.7
For Doggett, "the first found weed" isn’t even seaweed, it's the first vegetable sign of spring: a difficult notion to swallow, given that the nude is "Eager for the brine and bellowing / Of the high interiors of the sea."
"Poetry", writes Stevens in Adagia, "must resist the intelligence almost successfully."8 "The Paltry Nude" has the look of a simple poem, and in Stevensian terms it is a simple poem, but it teases the analytical mind. Tonally too it's elusive, so much so that I would say that it inhabits the atonal realm of the verbal artefact, sealed off from the world even as it seems to have dealings with it. (Bloom describes the poem as "fierce", which, seeming to ally it, for instance, with the sharp end of Blake's Songs of Experience, strikes me as an extraordinary finding.)
The Ormond poem I want to set against "The Paltry Nude" is "The Birth of Venus at Aberystwyth", which was first collected in Definition of a Waterfall (1973). It begins:
Beyond the pier varicose waves crocheted
A complex permanent nothing on the stones.
The Corporation deckchairs flapped
Haphazard unison.
Even if one sets aside the poem's title, there can be no question where we are. This is the mundane world with a vengeance – a seaside town out of season, deserted, almost abandoned, its human inconsequentiality echoed in the pointless and repetitious forms and processes of nature. Stylistically, however, the writing isn't all of a piece, as the Stevens poem was. It's denotative and unambiguous, it's notable for its precision, it hangs together; but Ormond keeps shifting gear, moving between a banal diction suitable to the presentation of the human seaside scene ("Corporation deckchairs flapped") and a more elaborate one which, rooted in physical particulars, nevertheless presses towards abstract and even philosophical statement ("Crocheted / A complex permanent nothing on the stones"). The first two lines are highly complex and metaphorical and, taking the ideas of varicose veins and permanent waves from the human realm, punningly insinuate a relationship between ageing humanity and senescent nature. Here is a yoking of heterogeneous things: "varicose" and "crocheted" are tied together by their common sounds, but pull in opposite directions – one towards ugliness, the other towards the beautiful. The opening line promises a positive act of creation, the second ironically dissolves that creation into "nothing". The whole strategy of the poem is in fact projected in this sentence. It's itself an act of crochet-work, the making of "A complex permanent nothing", a teasing paradox, out of transient materials. "Nothing", of course, is very much something, as writers from Shakespeare to E. M. Forster have shown. The very fact that "nothing" has a name gives it notional substance.
Nothing in the sky sought a response.
The occasional pebble moved, gave itself back
To the perpetual, casual disorder
Of all perfectly-shaped, meaningless forms,
Like pebbles.
" Nothing in the sky sought a response" may be read as either a positive or a negative statement, as may Forster's "Nothing, nothing attaches to them…Nothing is inside them…" of the Marabar Caves in A Passage to India. The business of the poet is precisely to give form to "nothing". Those pebbles, "perfectly-shaped" but "meaningless" in their raw, natural state might be seen as standing for all objects/words which remain in "perpetual, casual disorder" until brought into relationship. Ormond would, I think, agree with Stevens when he writes in Adagia: "Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right".9 For both poets, the making of poetry is the making of an order – although (a point I must expand on in due course) I don't think they would agree on the potency of that order.
But Ormond's "Birth of Venus" is a comic poem, and it would be wrong to lose sight of this. When Venus comes up through the water, "squadrons" of dolphins form up to welcome her, weeds "fandango" and currents change their course. All too soon, however, she is revealed as a hobbling, vulnerable, flesh-and-blood woman, and the bubble of fantasy blown in the middle of the poem is pricked. The poet implies that she would have been ignored even if she had been a goddess, so banal is the reality in which she's compelled to live. Yet for all the bathos of the poem, she is never, like Stevens's goddess, a "paltry nude" that some future "goldener" Venus will outshine.
Do not ask questions about where she came from
Or what she was, or what colour was her hair;
Though there are reasons for supposing
That, when it dried, its light took over
Where the summer left off.
This may be finely indirect writing, but Ormond values his Venus. His strategy has been to tease us with the promise of the surreal or supernatural and then, in saying that the real or the natural is all we can hope for or expect, to reaffirm the worth of the latter. "Poetry", says Stevens in Adagia, "is a renovation of experience",10 and I can't think that Ormond would reject the maxim, though he and Stevens might differ over the interpretation of "renovation". If, like the latter's minister, we ignore the lady in the safe beige hat, the loss is ours. She has more to offer him than he has to offer her. As for us, could we truly appreciate his Aberystwyth Venus, we should see that she is sufficient.
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3 Musical sceptics
Ormond entitled his Stevens lecture "In Place of Empty Heaven". This phrase comes form the fifth section of "The Man with the Blue Guitar":
The earth, for us, is flat and bare.
There are no shadows. Poetry
Exceeding music must take the place
Of empty heaven and its hymns...
Ormond says in his lecture that Stevens at the beginning of the century
saw more clearly and consistently than any of his contemporaries… one particular aspect of the world immediately ahead; and that was the crisis of faith, and the new questioning of physical, aesthetic and political values that was going to mark the world and its doings in that crucial decade from 1910 on.11
He quotes at length from the essay "Two or Three Ideas" in which Stevens speaks of "the origin and end of gods". Stevens may appear to be talking of the classical or pagan gods, but for him "The death of one god is the death of all"(Adagia12), and what he's really intimating is the end of the Christian era:
To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences. It is not as if they had gone over the horizon to disappear for a time; nor as if they had been overcome by other gods of greater power and profounder knowledge. It is simply that they came to nothing. Since we have always shared all things with them and have always had a part of their strength and, certainly, all of their knowledge, we shared likewise this experience of annihilation. It was their annihilation, not ours, and yet it left us feeling that in a measure we, too, had been annihilated. It left us feeling dispossessed and alone in a solitude, like children without parents, in a home that seemed deserted, in which the amical rooms and halls had taken on a look of hardness and emptiness.13
This passage is as good a gloss as any on the extract from "Blue Guitar". Without gods, both heaven and earth are empty places. Stevens sees it as the poet's task to repopulate the bare world, to replace celestial songs with earthly songs, to create the "supreme fiction" capable of filling the gap left by the discredited fiction of the gods. It's at this point in the argument that a certain ambivalence creeps into Ormond's attitude to Stevens. When Stevens declares that
The figures of the philosopher, the artist, the teacher, the moralist and other figures, including the poet, find themselves in such a time to be figures of an importance greatly enhanced by the requirements both of the individual and of society.14
Ormond worriedly asks "Is this the vain boasting, the high-minded wind of a braggadocio?" Stevens, in fact, is merely reaffirming the high Romantic conception of the poet. If his vision were to come about, Shelley's "unacknowledged legislators of mankind" might at last get acknowledged. But Ormond seems to doubt the poet's capacity to fulfil so elevated and public a role. He finds Stevens more palatable when he suggest smaller-scale aims for poetry: when, for example, he advises a young poet to aim "to become reconciled with what he cannot explain".15 Yet in the same breath he seems happy to go along with Stevens's picture of the poet as
the fictor, the modeller as artist justifying man's belief in himself not only as the inventor and destroyer of gods but, in a finally unaccountable universe, the arbiter of what he is.16
But if, one might ask, the poet can be "the arbiter" – the judge – "of what is", then what higher calling can there be? The problem would seem to lie in the contradictory complexities of Stevens's own theoretical pronouncements. As long, for example, as one is satisfied to extract individual statements from Adagia and to consider them in isolation, one can stay on reasonably firm ground. But to read the whole thing through is to feel submerged under an avalanche of discrete and often (and deliberately?) conflicting particulars. Stevens speaks much of "reality" and of poetry's privileged access to it – "Poetry increases the feeling for reality"17 – but at the same time insists that (poetic) fictions are all we can know. That is: reality is fictive; our fictions are the only realities we can know. But at one point at least he seems to get to what looks very much like the bottom line when he says – in a manner that must surely recommend itself to post-Einsteinian sensibilities – "Definitions are relative. The notion of absolutes is relative".18 Now if everything is relative, then poetry cannot escape relativity, and any claims made on its behalf cannot be other than relative too. This, I think, is what Ormond sees, and it prevents him from going the whole way with this seductive master. At one point in Adagia Stevens says:
The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.19
Arguably, Stevens's supreme fiction was his belief in the power of poetry, a commodity for which the busy world has little time and less use. I suspect that Ormond, no less committed a poet, nevertheless couldn't affirm such a belief; that his response to this last-quoted extract would have been to say that if the final belief must be in a fiction, then why believe at all? That it's better to live without belief than to live in a false belief, even when that belief is near one's heart. If, in short, one cannot believe in a god or gods, one ought not to elevate poetry to the position of the god in whom one cannot believe. Towards the end of his lecture, he quotes the closing lines of "Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz":
The epic of disbelief Blares oftener and soon, will soon be constant.
Some harmonious sceptic soon in a sceptical music
Will unite these figures of men and their shapes
Will glisten again with motion, the music
Will be motion and full of shadows.
From Ideas of Order (1935), this is a poem that confronts that perpetual "pressure of reality". A world without belief in some form of transcendence is one without order and one whose need for order will drive it to extravagant lengths. Any order will do, including a corrupt one; and totalitarianism and war both seem implied by the "mobs of men" and "clouds of faces and arms" that appear in the poem. Ormond comments:
In a sense that ending… sums up what Stevens tried to be, the musical sceptic. Whether he finally found his rest of mind there I doubt. I think of that fragment of Heraclitus that says that the waking share a common cosmos, that in death and sleep we recede into our private selves and that therefore the only morality lies in a relationship of the living, in the common logos.20
I agree with Ormond's interpretation here: the poem's "harmonious sceptic" certainly sounds self-referential: the adjective probably puns on the title of Harmonium. But Stevens is too musical a sceptic entirely to satisfy Ormond. In the latter's insistence on "the common logos" one may read a preference for a denotative over a connotative language, a language public rather than private. The proper subject – or one of the proper subjects – of such a language will be the poet's kin and friends, the community of the living: or, if they are no longer living, it will produce elegy. But, when one has allowed for the differences between Stevens's language and Ormond's, it remains true to say that they are both musical sceptics. Ormond is rarely as gaudy as Stevens, and is probably not best described as harmonious, but he cannot be denied his music, which may vary from the harshly physical to the tranquilly beautiful. And the longer he goes on writing, the more his poetry seeks to trade with the realm of ideas. Such trade, of course, was the whole of Stevens's endeavour, and this activity brings Ormond back towards Stevens – though he remains distinctly himself even when exploring country already trodden by the American. The remaining variations of this essay deal with aspects of that scepticism common to my two subjects.
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4 Empty heavens; descending angels
As my opening quotation in section 2 might have suggested, "The Man with the Blue Guitar" more than any other poem of Stevens relates the ideas of music and religious scepticism. To recap: the poet's time is for him one in which "The thinking of god is smoky dew": when, that is (or so I take it), both the gods' own thoughts and humanity's thoughts about the gods are evaporating away, like dew on a warm morning. The unidentified people who address the Guitarist – who of course is the poet – ask him to play for them
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.
His tune must be "A substitute for all the gods".
Music and scepticism come together in Ormond's poetry in "Tune for a Celestial Musician", where he's in perfect accord with Stevens on the implications of a vacant heaven.
Too long in deference to the dark
We have supposed alert and dulcet
Devices, acquired by private miracle,
Were his, making his music oracle;
That passing his open door of his studio
In the sky we should see him swinging in space,
That disguising our tears we should cry
"Play it again, Sam, play it again".
Why? Were his five-fingers exercises on breath
Better than ours? Are the more distant stars
His sounding-board? Must we assume a form
Always beyond us rankles to music in him?
No, he is ours; and ours his repertoire
Of stances. We dreamed his execution
Out of our fear of silence. Morning after morning
Sees him die as midnight after midnight
Re-invents him. Bring down his instrument
From the clouds; lute, lyre, whatever it is
He holds, with each impossible string.
His tune is of our own imagining.
As a piece of demystification, this ironic apostrophe on the music of the spheres could hardly be clearer. So confident is the poet of the rightness of his position that he takes upon himself the role of spokesman. His questions are rhetorical, Aunt Sallies to which a single negative is the only possible response. A firm, almost peremptory, series of short but eloquent statements leads to the commanding imperative of "bring down his instrument / From the clouds…" Rhyme – internal as well as end-rhyme – is employed irregularly but tellingly to point necessary connections and, at the very end, to clinch the argument. Half-humorous, mildly debunking, his tone implies that any contending viewpoint must be absurd.
The last word of all – "imagining" – is of course very much Stevens's. "The imagination is the romantic" – Adagia again,21 and one might add that as well as being Coleridge's principle it is Blake's. Ormond's sentiments would go down well with Blake's Devil in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, for whom "All Deities reside in the Human breast". For all that, however, Ormond's is a post-romantic sensibility. One cannot, for example, imagine him producing anything as rhetorical as Stevens's
Proposita:
1. God and the imagination are one.
2. The thing imagined is the imaginer.
The second equals the thing imagined and the imaginer are one.
Hence, I suppose, the imaginer is God.22
Blake, for whom Imagination was the divine in man, would have had no trouble with this. To a post-romantic sensibility, however, the Imagination must, in the real absence, or dissolution of God, be a fallen divinity. Although Stevens believes heaven to be empty, he cannot help but continue to attach a residual value to God, its erstwhile inhabitant – or, at least, to the idea of God. When, for his part, Ormond writes "… he is ours; and ours his repertoire of stances", he merely brings God down to the level of humanity: there is no compensatory elevation of humanity to the level of God. In "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words", Stevens writes: "It is one of the peculiarities of the imagination that it is always at the end of an era";23 and in his own case this is true. For all his heterodoxy, his mind is still the colour of his era. Ormond, however, belongs to a different generation, and in his scepticism can attach no transcendence to the very power – imagination – which traditionally has been held to separate and privilege the poet above the remainder of humanity. He is, then, like a sailor whose boat has sprung a leak, but who resolutely refuses to man the pumps, believing them a waste of effort. Nevertheless, as the water steadily rises towards his neck, he stays cheerful, celebrating the way the sunlight plays on its surface and the intriguing shapes of the flotsam, animate and inanimate, that drift past him. Isn't there plenty here to occupy a lively, good-humoured intelligence?
In "Tune for a Celestial Musician" Ormond fancies God's – or Sam Angel's – instrument to be a lute or a lyre; perhaps he was remembering Stevens's "Evening without Angels", which begins:
Why seraphim like lutanists arranged
Above the trees? And why the poet as
Eternal chef d'orchestre?
An harmonious beginning, certainly. But Stevens straightaway punctures his own metaphor:
Air is air,
Its vacancy glitters round us everywhere.
Its sounds are not angelic syllables
But our unfashioned spirits realized
More sharply in more furious selves.
Nature is simply itself. It's we who have created the angels: their music is our music. And Stevens goes on to assert that
Bare night is best. Bare earth is best. Bare, bare,
Except for our own houses, huddled low
Beneath the arches and their spangled air
But he's not always able to embrace such bareness so readily, and other evenings are not without angels. Most memorable of all is the single angel of the third part – It Must Give Pleasure – of "Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction" who
Leaps downward through evening's revelations, and
On his spredden wings, needs nothing but deep space,
Forgets the golden centre, the golden destiny,
Grows warm in the motionless motion of his flight.
Admittedly Stevens has no sooner imagined this heaven-forgetting angel than he's driven to recognise his own act of imagining: "Is it he or I that experience this?" It is, of course, himself. And he goes on to recognise that he experiences times of bliss when he's happy and "satisfied without solacing majesty": when, that is, simple being is enough. What after all are angels "Except reflections, the escapades of death…?" where "escapades" is preferred to "escapes" perhaps because of its connotations of childish adventuring.
Ormond's "Illuminations of the Letter O" – surely his most Stevensian title – plays on the oxymoronic associations of that letter: as exclamation of wonder and as zero. He celebrates the dance of language "under unfathomable, regretless heaven": "Nothing and dancing make the balance even." The shepherd of the first illumination, "A guest under grey heaven", awaits "the coming of others to witness the poised / Mirage of angels over blank fields" – a description which, cunningly hung out across the line-break, denies us a vision of angels even as it seems to proffer it.
But the angels actually arrive in "Waiting in the Garden", a variation of sorts on the two Stevens pieces to which I've alluded. It is (of course) evening, and the poet imagines suddenly cascading into "the green glaze" of his garden "No less than angels". Stevens's angels were splendid and inhuman; Ormond's are much less exotic beings. All once were human: some, "good boys killed on their motorbikes", comically crash-land "in the rhubarb, snapping the stems off short, / Breaking their legs yet again". If these youngsters are unimpressive representatives of an eternal realm, their elders aren't much more so, and when they approach, offering to take the poet "To where the secret is", he responds sceptically, asking them for their credentials. The truth is that they can offer him nothing he wants. Were he to ask them questions, they couldn't, he feels, offer him any "answer not yet given by the evening light" or by the human occupants of the garden. Whatever heaven holds (and he must propose, for the sake of this jeu d'esprit, that there is one), it can't be of the least interest to the poet. Nevertheless, the angels are "most welcome visitors", and he hopes that, returning from "their failed mission", they won't be punished by their commander. He concludes:
Poor lucky souls, knowing the mystery,
I'd signal them "Good luck,
Good flying" as the garden darkened.
"Poor lucky" is a nice oxymoron, and the fist epithet seems to go further than just to refer to their unsuccess with the poet: carrying the sense that to be in heaven is to be impoverished, since the only true and full existence is an earthly one. To reject the overtures of heaven means, of course, to reject the possibility of resurrection, to die into nothingness, and the darkening of the garden is both metonymic and metaphoric. Earth is the only Eden that the poet can believe in.
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5 Intermezzo on a mantelpiece
In "Waiting in the Garden" Ormond plainly is engaged upon the task of "becom[ing] reconciled with what he cannot explain". Indeed, this task dominates the last phrase of his writing life, and can be felt in a majority of the poems produced after Definition of a Waterfall. Characteristic of these poems is the marrying of a good humour that can expand into full comedy, with qualities that are dry, bleak, regretful, ironic. This leads to some pretty abrupt alterations of tone (in the case of the last line of "Waiting in the Garden", to the sudden undercutting of the playful by something altogether less comfortable), and to these a reader must be alert.
A different strategy manifests itself in "Note Found on a Mantelpiece". Its chatty, idiomatic style is disarming, for a snake lurks in the garden of this poem, where "Nothing's forbidden". The whole piece is metonymic, a point that the reader only comes to appreciate as the Note unwinds. The poem we finish isn't the poem we started. The "house" that welcomes us "for as long as [we're] able to stay" is, we come to see, the body, or physical existence, rather than (as it first seems) a harmless holiday villa. The note-writer sardonically telescopes our stay in the house of life: no sooner have we "settled in" than our time is up and we're off. I can't myself think of this poem without being reminded of a passage from Stevens's "Three Academic Pieces". He's talking about resemblance, about how certain objects inevitably recall to us certain people:
Apparently objects of sentiment most easily prove the existence of this kind of resemblance: something in a locket, one's grandfather's high beaver hat, one's grandmother's hand-woven blankets. One may find intimations of immortality in an object on the mantelpiece; and these intimations are as real in the mind in which they occur as the mantelpiece itself.24
One could usefully relate what Stevens is saying here to the objects that dominate Ormond's "After a Death" and "The Key" – many in the first poem, just one in the second. The conclusion of "After a Death" in particular confirms that notion of "intimations of immortality" when Ormond says of the absences he feels in the family home: "If I wait here they'll speak when time is older". "Note Found on a Mantelpiece" is a different kettle of fish. It turns Stevens's formulation inside out. The object found on the mantelpiece brings with it not intimations of immortality but of mortality, and those intimations are available from day one. "Note" is in fact one of the more abstract of Ormond's poems, since all its apparent particulars signal away from their simple meanings as objects (drawers, shelves, beds) in the direction of the realm of ideas.
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6 Pigeon fanciers
"There must", declares Stevens in Adagia, "be some wing on which to fly".25 His poetry of angels is at once literally and metaphorically winged: it enables him to soar in the imagination's empyrean. But his poetry is also rich in earthly images of flight: it's packed with birds. These may be exotic or commonplace. No species, however, seems dearer to Stevens's imagination that the pigeon. There are the blue and white pigeons of section XII of "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle", the first circling the blue sky, the second fluttering to the ground, symbols respectively (perhaps) of the imagination in motion and the imagination at rest. But, most memorably of all, there is the haunting closure of "Sunday Morning":
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
These lines have something of the tone of the closure of Keats's "Ode to Autumn", with its gathering swallows twittering in the skies. They may be read with satisfaction as purely literal verse. But if a poem is a wing, then Stevens's pigeons become symbols for the poet and his art: moving towards death, he nevertheless keeps his wings – or his imagination – "extended", receptive to experience: the "Ambiguous undulations" that the birds make, inscriptions incised upon the air, are his poems. A. Alvarez has written that Stevens's poems are "again and again about themselves"26 and the ending of "Sunday Morning" describes a poetic process no less precisely than the ending of another Keats ode, "To a Nightingale".
The flight of birds is a phenomenon that seems to have stimulated John Ormond too, for it issued in some of his most piquantly precise writing. There are, in "Evening in the Square" (yet another evening poem), his swifts -
invisibly mending the sky
Where last night's wind tore it to pieces,
Stitching, delirious with light labour,
High on it, with dizzy double-darning
Done in twos.
The poet imagines the birds working to recreate an order which nature itself has destroyed. Good-humouredly, but a little regretfully, he sees that "They'll never finish". The poet himself remains grounded, watching with ironic admiration. Yet the poem surely invites us to see swifts and poet as like-minded: what the birds perform in their frantic flight, the poet performs in language, eliciting meaning where none exists. He too will "never finish", will never produce the definitive account of reality. But "Evening in the Square" is something to be going on with.
Pigeons appear briefly in the poem, lining "The high eaves, baffled". They aren't the frenziedly acrobatic performers that the swifts are. Elsewhere, however, they have their own poem, "Homing Pigeons", and their own particular mode of flight:
Out of a parsimony of space unclenched,
Into the not known and yet familiar,
They ascend out of their hunger, venture
A few tentative arcs, donate new
Circumflexions to the order of strange sky;
Then blend to a common tangent and so render
Themselves to the essence of what they are.
This is beautifully evocative writing. The first line clearly refers to the unhasping of the cramped carrying-boxes by means of which the birds are conveyed to their launching-point. Their relation to the sky, their element, is the opposite of the swifts'; whilst the swifts strive to create an order, the pigeons immediately find one: an "order of strange sky" that requires them to orientate themselves before they can fulfil their innermost natures and strike for home. The metaphors of sewing which dominate "Evening in the Square" give way to a vocabulary culled from geometry – "arcs… circumflexions… tangent" – a vocabulary that casts the birds in the role of mathematicians of nature, elaborating a pre-existent spatial language. The poem continues:
What beguilement shepherds the heart home?
Not what we know but some late lode-stone
Which, far, was always there, drawing us
To a meaning irreducible, to a fixed star.
Why then the falling, all the fumbling
As tumbler pigeons, fools flying, with the most
Inept of masteries? But flying still
And, despite awkwardnesses, being, as best we can,
Committed, in the chance weather we approach,
To what and where, without a sense of reward,
We may reach and trust to be fed.
There are two crucial shifts in the poem, and they're interconnected. The first is pronominal, as the speaker moves from the impersonal "they" of the first stanza to the more personal "we" of the third. The pigeons are themselves in the opening verse, and are seen objectively; but in the third, which in line-length (seven) balances the first, they have become metaphors for humanity. The intermediate, four-line stanza acts as a kind of bridge linking the two. The second shift is from homing pigeons, a type bred especially for racing, to tumbler pigeons, a type bred for show. Unlike the homing pigeons, the tumblers, "fools flying", are clumsy in the air, more than a little absurd. Not masters of their element, they remind me of those children (in Stevens's essay "Two or Three Ideas", quoted more fully above) who are left "feeling dispossessed and alone in a solitude… in a home that seemed deserted…" Perhaps only children, in the human realm, "trust to be fed" with the guileless vulnerability the poem's ending seems to express. In an unpublished portion of the conversation I had with Ormond, he said:
Some people have found, notably a lecturer in the Society of Jesus, that my poem "Homing Pigeons" is a religious poem. That isn’t meant as a religious poem, but the best poems, or those that reverberate most anyway, are those which are saying many things, have layers of meaning that sometimes one wasn't aware of but nevertheless are there for the finding, have laminations of meaning.
Readers find the meanings in poems that their individual temperaments and inclinations lead them to find. Ormond is obviously right, despite his own and different sense of the poem's meaning, not to reject a religious interpretation of it. Certainly, the intensity of the shift from the plane of the impersonal to that of the personal suggests the intensity of the need that manifests itself in the poem. It's a need for love, and it’s a need for order. But the poet cannot take such love, such an order, for granted, and the unspecified "What and where" may or may not be reached, just as the "trust" he speaks of may or may not turn out to be justified. If one were to read the poem in the light of "Sunday Morning", the tumbler pigeons would be poets, the act of flying the act of imagining, the "What and where" that unknown discovered in the process of composition, the grain that's the "reward" the finished poem. In this reading, the order that the poet may discover is the fictive order of poetry itself – in this case, tautologously, the order inscribed in the poem "Homing Pigeons". But when I asked Ormond if he felt that his poems were "gestures of permanence" (a phrase from his poem "Finding a Fossil") in an impermanent world, he replied: "It would be vanity to suggest that my poems have permanence. They may be gestures of permanence, but they could be empty gestures too."27 "Homing Pigeons" is an expression of doubt rather than an expression of faith, and to the extent that it can be read as a poem about poetry, it must be seen as doubting its own validity. We're back with our sceptic in his poetical boat: the land is in sight, but he makes no move to row towards it. See the flying fish and the arcs they cut in the shining air! See the rainbow the sun makes in the translucent water! So what if the water is rising towards his neck?
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Notes
1 The Necessary Angel (Faber 1984) p. 13.
2 Ed. Meic Stephens (Gomer 1973) p. 159.
3 See New Welsh Review No. 5 (Summer 1989) pp. 38-46.
4 Opus Posthumous (Faber 1990) p. 185.
5 Wallace Stevens: the Poems of our Climate (Cornell 1980) p. 26.
6 "Examples of Wallace Stevens" in Wallace Stevens ed. Irvin Ehrenpreis (Penguin 1972) p. 60.
7 "Variations on a Nude": Stevens' Poetry of Thought in Ehrenpreis op. cit. p. 270.
8 Op. cit. p. 197.
9 Ibid. p. 201.
10 Ibid. p. 202.
11 "In Place of Empty Heaven: The Poetry of Wallace Stevens": W. D. Thomas Memorial Lecture 1982 (UC Swansea 1983) p. 15.
12 Op. cit. p. 191.
13 "Two or Three Ideas", Opus Posthumous p. 260.
14 Ibid. pp. 259-260.
15 Op. cit. p. 18.
16 Ibid. p. 19.
17 Op. cit. p. 188.
18 Ibid. p. 185.
19 Ibid. p. 189.
20 Op. cit. p. 22.
21 Op. cit. p. 189.
22 Ibid. p. 202.
23 Op. cit. p. 22.
24 The Necessary Angel p. 75.
25 Op. cit. p. 201. He also says: "There is no wing like meaning" (p. 189).
26 The Shaping Spirit (Chatto & Windus 1972) p. 131.
27 New Welsh Review No. 5 (Summer 1989) p. 45.
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