Professor Langdon
Hammer: I have in the
chairman's office down the hall
two photographs.
One is of the Yale English
Department in 1924,
and there are a number of
distinguished gentlemen casually
posed in it;
distinguished scholars but all
gentlemen.
Come by and take a look at it
sometime.
I also have a photograph from
1967 in which there are more
distinguished gentlemen,
less casually posed;
in fact, arrayed in a sort of
phalanx, and seated in the
middle of these men is one
woman, Marie Borroff.
 
Marie is our guest lecturer
today and I'm delighted to have
her here.
She has been a member of this
English Department and a
distinguished member of this
English Department for a long
time.
She is a medievalist,
a scholar of modern poetry,
a translator of Middle English
poetry, a poet herself;
and she views poetry--or I
think of you,
Marie, as holding a sense of
poetry as a long tradition that
reaches back to the origins of
our language and is alive with
us today,
and that writing about it,
writing it, and translating it
are your activities,
and also teaching it.
 
And Marie is one of our best
and most revered teachers in the
history of this department.
 
So, it's a really wonderful
honor for me to get to give the
stage and the microphone to
Marie Borroff.
Would you please welcome her.
 
 
 
Professor Marie Borroff:
Thank you Lanny.
I'm getting over a virus,
so I hope my voice won't be too
scratchy.
I have some water to help.
 
 
I think of it as,
it's really all the same thing:
Beowulf, Galloway,
Chaucer, Milton,
Wallace Stevens – it's all
the same thing,
in a sense.
I want to begin this morning
with a little poem that you may
never have heard of,
or read, by Wallace Stevens
called "Gubbinal"
(g-u-b-b-i-n-a-l).
 
And if you have the poems of
Stevens here you can look at it,
if you want,
though it doesn't matter.
I'm going to tell you it.
 
That strange flower,
the sun,
Is just what you say,
Have it your way.
The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.
That tuft of jungle feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you say.
 
That savage of fire,
That seed,
Have it your way.
 
The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.
In this poem,
the voice of the imagination in
Stevens's concept of the
Imagination – with a capital
l – speaks,
and it addresses a "you" that
views the world without
imagination;
that is, you – the "you" of
the poem – you take the sun
for granted.
You aren't excited by seeing
it, by the thought of it,
by the fact that it has risen
on this particular day and you
hope it's going to rise again
tomorrow.
You don't feel,
as Stevens puts it in another
poem, "the sun comes up like
news from Africa."
 
And that's how one with the
imagination at work feels about
the sun.
Imagination,
as Stevens conceives of it,
is the incessant stream of
language emanating from the
human consciousness as we live,
expressing both the state of
the world at a given time and
its own state,
both of which states are
constantly changing.
 
Our inner state changes.
 
Our inner weather changes,
as the outer weather of the
world changes and as the seasons
change.
The work of the imagination,
as represented in "Gubbinal,"
is the generation of metaphors.
 
The sun is a "strange flower,"
a "tuft of jungle feathers," an
"animal eye," a "savage of
fire," and a "seed."
And one thing that's important
about this to notice is the
rapidity with which one metaphor
gives way to another metaphor.
You don't stick with one;
you don't have a definitive one
that is it.
You go on.
And if the poem were longer
there'd be more metaphors still.
The mind is in motion,
as the world also is in motion.
Implicit in this poem also is
Stevens's particular concept of
happiness.
Without the imagination,
the poem says,
"the world is ugly / and the
people are sad."
And we can turn this statement
on its head and say,
with equal validity,
from Steven's point of view,
with the imagination.
When the vital imagination is
in residence and at work,
the world is splendid,
exciting, and the people are
happy.
Note that happiness has nothing
to do with personal fortune,
with the fact that you've been
accepted by Harvard Medical
School or you performed
brilliantly on the basketball
court or the football field,
or got the date you were hoping
to get.
Happiness is internal,
independent,
self-starting,
but also shared,
communal, human.
The work of the imagination,
for Stevens,
is the same as the writing of
poetry: the generation of poetry
on a small scale,
as in "Gubbinal" and many other
such, or on a large mythical
scale, as in "The Auroras of
Autumn."
A lot of Stevens's early poems
are called, by him,
anecdotes.
Now, an anecdote,
if you go back to the etymology
of the word, is something
unpublished.
It's like a draft.
And what Stevens would do--He
lived in Hartford,
as you probably know.
 
He worked in a big insurance
company, it was very successful,
and he would walk every morning
– he was a great walker –
from his home in West Hartford
to his office in downtown
Hartford.
 
 
 
As he walked,
he would write poems,
poems would come to him.
 
He once said,
"I never like anything that
doesn't fly in at me through the
window."
He'd get to the office,
he'd call on his secretary,
and he'd dictate the poems he
had thought of on the way to the
office on separate sheets.
 
She would give him the poems,
he'd put them in a desk drawer,
and then in about a month he'd
go through what was in the
drawer and throw some of them
away and keep some.
And the ones he kept would go
into whatever book it was that
he was writing.
Oh to have his wastebaskets,
is what I say!
I dare to think that Stevens
would have liked,
or at least approved of the
idea of,
the first stanza of a poem I
wrote many years ago,
when I was getting up early
enough in March to see the sun
rise: "Black rim,
pale dawn, now as to rolling
drums, sun, your great signal
comes to bid me on."
 
But Stevens said it less
pretentiously and better.
He wrote:
The sun, that brave man,
Comes through boughs that lie
in wait,
That brave man.
… [I'm skipping a little.]
Fears of my bed,
Fears of life and fears of
death,
Run away.
That brave man comes up
From below and walks without
meditation,
That brave man.
And if you can think of the sun
as a brave man,
you're well into Stevens,
I think.
I'm sure Stevens would have
liked a story that I'm about to
tell you.
When I was teaching Stevens
years ago, among other poets in
my course in twentieth-century
poetry,
I was walking on campus one day
and I ran into one of my
students, and we were just
reading Stevens then.
 
And I said to him,
"Well, how are you?
How goes it, how are things?"
 
He said, "Oh, I'm fine."
 
He said, "All my friends are
depressed, but when I hear how
depressed they are,
I look at them and I think,
'Have it your way,
the world is ugly and the
people are sad.'"
And Stevens would have liked
that because Stevens said that,
strangely, that poetry should
make us happy,
should help to make us happy.
He also said – this is rather
hard to swallow perhaps for
someone who's been struggling
with "The Auroras of Autumn" or
"Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction"
or any of the other big ones –
people should enjoy poetry the
way a child enjoys snow.
And that is true.
 
In reading Stevens,
especially reading the little
poems, I always say you
shouldn't worry about a poem.
You should read on and find one
that tickles you,
that you like,
and make a mark there and
return to that poem later and
read it again;
though, it's also important,
I know, to study Stevens,
to study especially the large
poems, the big creations.
"The Auroras of Autumn" exists
in a sequence of seasonal poems,
large-scale seasonal poems that
Stevens wrote.
The earliest one,
in seasonal terms,
is "Notes Toward a Supreme
Fiction", and that is a poem of
the spring.
And if you read it you'll see a
lot of things that are
associated with spring in
Connecticut.
You'll see the forget-me-not in
bloom, though he calls it the
myosotis, not to be sentimental
about it.
You'll hear about forsythia;
you'll hear about yellow and
the blue sky.
It's a spring poem.
 
Then comes "Credences of
Summer," and then comes "The
Auroras of Autumn."
 
Now, these poems go
chronologically,
seasonally, but they also go
chronologically in Stevens's own
life.
He is older as he writes each
one of them.
When he wrote "The Auroras of
Autumn," he was in his
seventies.
And this is the first of the
poems in which the idea of death
comes in, dauntingly,
the idea of human death;
because one thing that autumn
is is the season that presages
winter, winter death,
the death of the landscape in
New England, and ultimately the
death of the individual human
being.
And that threat comes into the
poem and is faced in the poem.
 
Now, I want to go back to the
beginning of the poem – so if
you have a copy of it you could
look at the beginning – and go
very quickly through,
say, sections one through seven
maybe, because I'm going to end
by talking about sections nine
and ten and something about
section eight.
In the poem,
we see the imagination in its
work as the creator of myth.
 
This has always been true of
human culture.
There have always been great
myths of the world:
the myth that the world rests
on a turtle,
or the myth of creation,
how the world was created or
how the animals first came.
 
And Stevens toys with mythical
creation in the poem.
In particular,
in section one,
he writes three different
myths, one of which succeeds to
the other,
in true Stevensian fashion,
because an essence of the
world, as Stevens thinks about
it,
is change, as I intimated
earlier.
It's hard to imagine Stevens
living anywhere but in a
temperate climate where there
are seasons.
It's hard to think of him as
living in the tropics or in
Antarctica because he's a man of
the seasons, a man of the
weather.
He writes a lot about the
weather.
One of his poems begins,
"Lights out.
Shades up.
/ A look at the weather":
let's see what the weather is
tonight, on this particular
night.
In the first section of "The
Auroras of Autumn," there are
three different myths,
one of which succeeds to
another with equal validity.
They are three myths about
serpents.
First, we have the cosmic
serpent: "the bodiless.
/ His head is air."
 
I'm reading from the beginning
of the section.
"Beneath his tip at night /
Eyes open and fix on us in every
sky."
Clearly there he is talking
about the dawning of stars at
night, "eyes open and fixed on
us in every sky."
 
So, this is a huge cosmic
serpent that he is imagining.
He's imagining the heavens as
presided over by a great serpent
which may well have something to
do with a constellation named
Draco (d-r-a-c-o),
which is "dragon" or "snake."
Then we throw that one away,
and Stevens says "Or is this
another…?"
An "or" in Stevens always has
to be answered or responded to
by saying, yes:
this is another one,
let's have another one;
we've just had one,
let's throw that one out and
have another one.
 
The stale has to always be
thrown out.
So now, we get a terrestrial
serpent, on a huge scale.
"This is where the serpent
lives";
you could underline that.
 
At the beginning of the poem,
"This is where the serpent
lives."
Well, that's in line one.
Now we're in line seven:
"This is where the serpent
lives.
This is his nest,
/ these fields,
these hills,
these tinted distances,
/ and the pines above and along
and beside the sea."
 
So here, we have a serpent that
is a terrestrial myth,
a myth of the whole,
encompassing the whole
landscape.
And finally,
almost at the end,
"his meditations in the ferns,"
can you find that?
 
It's the next-to-last tercet of
that section – "his" is
clearly "the serpent's"
meditations: "His meditations in
the ferns,
/ when he moved so slightly to
make sure of sun / made us no
less as sure."
And here is a third serpent,
and this is a local serpent,
a particular serpent,
a serpent visualized in sensory
terms.
"We saw in his head / black
beaded on the rock,
the flecked animal / The moving
grass, the Indian in his glade."
 
The Indian in his glade,
the Indian's glade;
that is, the native of the soil.
 
In this section we find one of
the great opposites in Stevens,
the great oppositions between
pairs.
Imagination and reality is,
of course, one or
Imagination with a
capital I,
versus imagination with
a lowercase i;
an imagination that sort of
produces little fancies.
But here, we have a strange
opposition, which is rather
idiosyncratic with Stevens,
between abstraction and--not
between the abstract and the
concrete, but between the
abstract and the particular,
the local.
And with that,
very often characteristically
in Stevens, there comes a flash
of the sensory,
a detail of color:
"black beaded," the
black-beaded head of the snake;
a particular glade in New
England where Native Americans
once lived – "the Indian in
his glade" – the recognition
of that.
So, this opening section of the
poem demonstrates the
imagination at work as a
generator of myths.
And one myth succeeds to
another myth.
There's the cosmic serpent,
the terrestrial serpent,
and the local serpent,
the particular serpent,
the serpent that we see right
there, on a particular day.
Now, something happens that's
characteristically Stevensian,
and it occurs at the beginning
of section two.
And this is something that not
everyone agrees on but this is
how I interpret it.
 
What I'm giving you is my
interpretation of the poem,
which you have to take for
better or for worse for the
moment.
"Farewell to an idea…" I take
this to be the discarding of an
achieved idea and the moving on
to something else.
 
So, what Stevens is saying
farewell to is the whole serpent
mythology: cosmic,
terrestrial,
and all.
 
 
 
And from that we turn to
something different.
We turn to seasonal change,
the change from summer to
autumn.
And another important
Stevensian opposition comes into
play in this section,
and that is the opposition
between whiteness and color or,
as Stevens often calls it,
"candor."
"Candor," as you may know,
is whiteness,
and if we were true to our
Latin etymologies,
all candidates would wear white
robes;
of course, it's a little hard
to imagine some of them in a
white robe.
At any rate,
"candor" is abstract,
white.
He also uses the word "blank"
in this section:
"the man who is walking turns
blankly on the sand."
In "Notes Toward a Supreme
Fiction," the poem begins with
whiteness and moves from
whiteness, from that ever-early
candor, to its late plural;
from the abstract to the
particular, multifarious plural.
 
Here summer is stale;
it's over, it has happened,
so now it's time to throw it
out and move on to something
else,
namely autumn,
and the whiteness is visualized
as a landscape:
"A cabin stands,
/ deserted on a beach."
And it's the sort of summer
cabin that we all,
most of us, probably know:
a white beach and a white
cabin,
probably a white fence and
maybe a white enclosure for a
shower that you can take after
you've swum.
It's summer.
…The flowers against
the wall
Are white…
Reminding… of a white
That was different,
something else,
last year
Or before.
…
[And now the wind is beginning
to blow.
Summer is over.] The wind is
blowing the sand across the
floor.
Here being visible is being
white,
Is being of the solid of white,
the accomplishment
Of an extremist in an
exercise...
The season changes.
 
A cold wind chills the beach.
 
The long lines of it grow
longer, emptier,
A darkness gathers though it
does not fall
And the whiteness grows less
vivid on the wall.
Again and again in "The Auroras
of Autumn," we have some sort of
reassuring or splendid or
restful vision,
and then comes some sort of
threat, "a cold wind."
In one of the sections the wind
knocks "like a rifle-butt
against the door."
 
And this poem was written
during the decade of World War
Two, so violence,
death,
and the coming of winter are
linked implicitly in the poem
with the idea of war,
the death of war.
And then, we go to a single man
who is always the vehicle of the
imagination.
In the end, the imagination has
to reside in the consciousness
of the individual,
of each one of us,
although from it we can project
a great cosmic imagination –
an unmoved mover,
a generator of images – as
Stevens does later in the poem.
So here, we have our hero,
the individual man,
the man imagining:
The man who is walking
turns blankly on the sand.
 
He observes how the north is
always enlarging the change,
With its frigid brilliances,
its blue-red sweeps
And gusts of great enkindlings,
its polar green,
The color of ice and fire and
solitude.
So here, what happens is very
much like what happens to white
light when it's put through a
prism and broken up into the
colors of the rainbow.
 
This is what happens in the
beginning of "Notes Toward a
Supreme Fiction" and it's what
happens here.
The whiteness of summer breaks
up into the prismatic colors of
the auroras of autumn.
 
Now, you probably have never
seen them.
I've never seen the auroras of
autumn, but I happen to know a
man who was at Yale,
living on the old campus in the
early 1940s, and he told me that
he remembered coming out of
where he lived at night onto the
old campus,
and looking up and seeing the
Aurora Borealis,
in color.
It could happen then.
I've seen it in Maine in the
summer sky, but as I've seen it,
it's been white and dark.
 
And what you see are white
pulsations in the sky.
They're very beautiful and
they're very wonderful.
But it's been many,
many years since I saw any
colors in the auroras.
 
Nonetheless,
this is what he's writing
about, the Aurora Borealis in
its colors.
Section three,
here again, "Farewell to an
idea..."
Away with the cabin,
away with the man walking on
the sand.
Now, we move to something else,
and what we move to in the next
few sections are myths,
large-scale myths:
first the myth of the mother,
the earth mother,
let's say,
or the sky mother;
the mother as nurturing,
as warm, as tender;
the mother who could perhaps be
symbolized by summer,
by a balmy, beneficent summer
day, or by the warmth of the sun
on a summer day.
Then we get the father,
the myth of the father,
and this is the kind of,
well,
let's say the Jove-like or
Zeus-like being:
the man who presides over the
heavens.
But first, we have the mother.
The mother "…gives
transparence to their present
peace.
/ She makes that gentler that
can gentle be."
But here again,
as over and over,
as I said earlier,
in this poem,
the concept of something warm,
gentle, and reassuring gives
way to some sort of threat –
the coming of cold,
the wind, the darkness,
and finally the wind "like a
rifle-butt" at the end of the
poem.
Boreal night [I'm toward
the end of section three here]
Will look like frost as it
approaches them,
And to the mother as she falls
asleep.
And as they say goodnight,
goodnight.
Upstairs
The windows will be lighted,
not the rooms.
What does that mean?
 
That means that they've turned
off the lights and gone to bed.
Nonetheless,
there are lights appearing in
the windows, and what can they
be but the lights of the Aurora
Borealis that shine in the
windows of the house?
Even though the light doesn't
come from within the house,
it comes from the heavens.
 
A wind will spread its
windy grandeurs round
And knock like a rifle-butt
against the door.
The wind will command them with
invincible sound."
So, this is the temporary,
reassuring togetherness;
I hate that word but I can't
avoid it really in this section.
This is where we were all
together with the mother,
and all was well,
and it was summer.
But it can't last;
it never lasts;
something more,
something less welcome takes
its place.
Section four,
"Farewell to an idea…" Leave
the mother behind;
we've had her.
Now, we move to the father.
"The father sits / in space,
wherever he sits,
of bleak regard."
 
He is not a warm,
nurturing kind of presence.
His regard, his gaze is bleak.
 
And then we have this curious
image: "as one that is strong in
the bushes of his eyes."
 
I think that alludes to the
word "ambush."
He has a power that is held in
check, as when someone is
ambushed.
The strength is there and is
not yet let out.
"He says no to no":
that's an affirmation.
 
"He says yes to yes":
that's an affirmation.
"He says yes to no":
that is an affirmation.
He always affirms;
he never denies.
And he affirms something new
and then something new and then
something new,
as signified by "in saying yes
he says farewell";
that is, when you accept and
affirm the new idea,
the new imaginative
construction,
you have said farewell to the
one that preceded it,
as he has done earlier in the
poem – farewell to the idea of
the cabin,
farewell to the idea of the
mother.
"He leaps from heaven to
heaven, more rapidly / than bad
angels leap from heaven to hell
in flames."
This is clearly an allusion to
the Christian myth,
and I'm going to bring up the
Christian myth later,
toward the end of what I'm
saying about the poem.
You perhaps have read,
if you're English majors,
you may have read Paradise
Lost.
So, you've read about how the
bad angels leap from Heaven to
Hell.
They're driven out by the
powers of God and his Son.
 
So, the father leaps;
that is, his imagination,
the cosmic imagination,
the large scale imagination
that he personifies,
is hugely vital and capable of
leaping from one concept to
another, from one heaven to
another,
and from one myth to another.
 
 
Now, I meant to say a little
earlier and I will say now,
that I think,
though I couldn't substantiate
it from this place alone,
that toward the end of section
three – the mother as she
falls asleep,
"and as they say good-night,
good-night" – I consider that
one of a number of allusions in
the poem to the play
Hamlet.
There's a lot of theater.
Theater is one of the motifs of
the poem, and I haven't time to
go into that in detail,
but you see it again and again.
And one of the things that
happens in the poem is that a
company of actors comes,
as happens in Hamlet and
Hamlet welcomes them.
 
And "Good night,
good night, good night sweet
ladies, good night sweet ladies,
good night, good night," I
think it alludes to that.
 
Eliot quotes that;
I think it's in The Waste
Land that he does it.
 
So the masks--the actors come
in company.
Now, I'm at section four,
toward the end of that section.
"The actors approach in company
in their masks."
These are not human actors.
 
This is a superhuman drama that
is being played,
and the father is inviting
them.
And then there's a very
eloquent invocation of the
father as the master,
the master of the maze.
Master O master seated by
the fire
And yet in space and motionless
and yet
Of motion the ever-brightening
origin,
Profound, and yet the king and
yet the crown,
Look at this present throne.
 
What company
In masks can choir it with the
naked wind?
How can we celebrate?
How can there be a theatrical
celebration of the world when
the wind is blowing and autumn
is coming and darkness is
coming?
To call the master the origin
of motion – motionless and yet
the origin of motion – is to
go back to concepts of God:
the divine as the unmoved
mover,
a term applied to the Christian
God and sometimes to other
divinities.
So, once again,
we have an allusion to
religion, which is nonetheless
not part of a religious
presentation.
In section five,
the mother and the father give
a party.
I don't happen to like this
section very much.
I don't think Stevens really
succeeds in jazzing it up the
way he tries to.
The children laugh.
I don't like the negresses who
dance:
…like curious ripenesses
of pattern…
…[T]he musicians make
insidious tones,
Clawing the sing-song of their
instruments.
The children laugh and jangle a
tinny time.
Well, he's trying very hard to
jazz it up but for me it doesn't
quite work.
Nonetheless, this is what it is.
This is the party that the
world stages for us,
as we look out;
the party of spring or the
party of the colors of autumn
leaves, and it's a kind of
symbolic representation of that.
 
"…he musicians strike the
instinctive poem" and so on.
This then is Chatillon.
 
You find that's three stanzas,
three tercets from the end of
that section.
I believe that Chatillon is
used here as the name of a great
chateau in France.
There is such a chateau.
 
So, it is a palace,
a castle, where there could be
a splendid party with dancers
and with music.
"This then is Chatillon or as
you please.
/ We stand in the tumult of the
festival."
The world is a kind of
tumultuous festival at times
that goes on around us,
let's say,
on an autumn day when the trees
are very bright in color and the
wind is blowing and the sky is
blue and the leaves are drifting
from the trees.
It's the tumult of a festival.
But all of a sudden:
What festival?
This loud, disordered, mooch?
 
These brute-like guests?
 
These musicians dubbing at a
tragedy,
A-dub, a-dub,
which is made up of this:
That there are no lines to
speak?
There is no play.
 
Or, the persons act one merely
by being here.
So, once again,
we have affirmation and then
comes threat,
then comes denial.
There really is no play,
there is no theater.
It's only something that we
imagine.
But then immediately,
as if to prove its validity and
its vitality,
the great imagination speaks in
section six and utters at the
beginning of that section one of
the most eloquent tributes to
the beauty of the cosmos that I
know in poetry,
in which an amazing telescoping
of time takes place.
 
What do they call it?
 
Fast-forward photography?
 
Perhaps you've seen one where
the flower grows up and is seen
blooming.
Here, we see geology in fast
forward, we see mountains rising
and falling like water,
like waves.
It is a theatre floating
through the clouds,
Itself a cloud,
although of misted rock
And mountains running like
water, wave on wave
Through waves of light.
It is of cloud,
transformed again [a 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 fires delight,
Splashed wide-wise because it
likes magnificence
And the solemn pleasures of
magnificent space.
And then human history is seen
fast forwarding,
as the section goes on:
A capitol,
It may be, is emerging or has
just
Collapsed.
[A civilization has come as a
mountain has come and has
collapsed.]
The denouement has to be
postponed…
But now, once again,
the all-importance of the hero,
the human hero,
that is, the imagining mind,
is affirmed.
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.
[That's the aurora,
in other words,
the Aurora Borealis.]
The
scholar of one candle sees
An Arctic effulgence flaring on
the frame
Of everything he is.
And he feels afraid.
In section seven,
Stevens visualizes autumn as,
let's say, a mythical
hypothesis.
Suppose that there is a cosmic
imagination that imagines the
whole show, an imagination that
imagines the passing of the
seasons,
that imagines the earth,
the solar system,
the whole cosmos.
 
Suppose that maybe there is.
 
Let's imagine that there is.
 
So, the answer to the questions
are always "yes."
Is there an imagination
that sits enthroned
As grim as it is benevolent,
the just
And the unjust,
which in the midst of summer
stops
To imagine winter?
[Yes there is,
why not?]
When the leaves are dead,
Does it take its place in the
north and unfold itself,
Goat-leaper,
crystalled and luminous,
sitting
In highest night?
Here – and I have no time to
go into this aspect of the poem,
which is another one like the
theater and then the
Hamlet allusions that I
think are there – this is part
of the astronomical motifs in
the poem.
There's a great deal about the
stars.
I mentioned Draco in the first
section as possibly underlying
the celestial serpents,
a great big constellation that
is across the sky for us,
for us in New England.
 
And here the goat-leaper is the
constellation Capricorn.
Capricorn means "goat horn," as
you know.
And you may also know that
Capricorn begins in the zodiac
on the twenty-second of
December, which is to say
immediately after the winter
solstice.
So, the constellation Capricorn
takes over, comes in,
at what Stevens at the end of
the poem calls "in winter's
nick,"
in the nick of winter just as
the solstice comes and the
constellation Capricorn becomes
the dominant constellation of
the zodiac.
 
 
But now we can't stay solemn,
the mood has to change.
And so we get,
at the end of this section,
a change from destiny to slight
caprice with,
I think, an allusion to the
word Capricorn.
And you may know that the
capri element has to do
with leaping,
so the leaping from Heaven to
Hell is associated with that.
 
It must change from
destiny to slight caprice.
And thus its jetted tragedy,
its stele
And shape and mournful making
move to find
What must unmake it and,
at last, what can
Say, a flippant communication
under the moon.
So, all this is thrown away and
what we have is "a flippant
communication," something
flippant.
But that is the way Stevens's
imagination works on a large
scale.
"The Auroras of Autumn" is not
architectonically structured as,
say, something like the odes of
Keats and Shelley are,
like "Adonais" or "The Ode on
Melancholy" or "The Ode on a
Grecian Urn."
That is to say,
it does not move by logical
stages to a climax at the end
that incorporates and is founded
on what has gone before.
 
Rather, it is structured,
if structure is the word,
as I've been telling you.
 
You go from one thing to
another.
You go from one thing to its
opposite.
You go from something solemn to
something flippant.
You go from summer to autumn.
 
You go from day to night,
from the warmth of the mother
to the threat of death and
darkness.
Nonetheless,
it does move--the poem does
move, toward what I would call a
culmination;
not an architectonic or
structural climax,
but a kind of emotional climax.
 
And this happens in the next to
last section,
section nine,
and it's predicated on the
assertion of innocence at the
beginning of section eight.
And I should say,
in case I don't have time to do
justice to it at the end,
that in section ten the whole
thing falls apart.
 
We discard the whole thing,
and it all becomes fragmentary,
and the mythical creations
become trivial and we get an
ending that is completely
unsatisfactory to those of us
who love resonant,
rhetorical endings.
It's just not like that and we
can't look in Stevens for that
kind of ending.
The term "innocence" is another
term, like "imagination," that
has to be thought of in its
Stevensian sense.
 
 
 
The opposite of innocence,
for Stevens,
is either guilt or malice.
 
Now, you probably know,
you may know,
that the origin of the word
"innocence,"
the root, Latin root of the
word "innocence" is a Latin verb
meaning to harm:
noceo.
So, "innocence," literally is
"unharmingness."
The affirmation of innocence
that comes to the speaker in
section eight arises,
in a sense, from all that has
gone before;
that is, from the myth-making
of the early sections because,
as we think back on them,
it's obvious that Stevens's
overarching myths,
his great cosmic myths – the
mother,
the father, the celestial
imagination that imagines the
whole world and the passage of
the zodiac – none of that has
anything to do with revealed
religion or particularly with
the Christianity that we,
most of us, know so much about.
As we think back,
it's obvious that there's
nothing in them about a
benevolent God,
a God who watches over us,
a God who comforts us and who
will reward us if we are
virtuous.
There's nothing about that.
 
The Imagination,
with a capital I,
the cosmic Imagination is as
grim as it is benevolent.
The world is as grim as it is
benevolent.
We have the benevolence of
summer but, always after it,
the darkening of autumn and the
grimness and cold of winter.
And humanly,
we have the change from youth
to the midst of life to finally
the coming of death.
And that possibility,
that inevitability,
is faced, at the end of the
poem.
So, what is innocent here is
the world.
The world is innocent.
 
It means us no harm;
it is not malicious.
If there's no God who
benevolently watches over us,
there's also no God who judges
us or who consigns us to
damnation.
So, we can live in the world in
this state of innocence without
what Stevens eloquently calls
– and I hope you'll check it
out again after this – "the
enigma of the guilty dream":
Christianity.
We don't understand it.
 
It's a riddle;
it's the guilty dream,
but it's a dream like all other
dreams.
The world operates
impersonally,
it means us no harm.
 
 
 
Now, I'm going to read toward
the end of section eight:
So, then,
these lights [these lights are
the Aurora Borealis,
which he's
referred to by the phrase
"these lights" several times in
the poem]
are not
a spell of light,
A saying out of a cloud,
but innocence.
An innocence of the earth and
no false sign
Or symbol of malice.
That we partake thereof,
Lie down like children in this
holiness,
As if, awake,
we lay in the quiet of
sleep…
I haven't time to go on,
but in section nine,
Stevens picks up on this and
says: "We were as Danes in
Denmark all day long /
…hale-hearted landsmen";
we were brothers.
 
And here, we have the play
Hamlet again.
As you remember in
Hamlet,
there's something rotten in the
state of Denmark.
And here the world is Denmark
and there's something wholesome
in the state of Denmark.
 
And what is wholesome is us and
the world and the beauty of the
world, even though that beauty
eventually gives way to darkness
and cold.
"Shall we be found hanging in
the trees next spring?"
 
This is toward the end of
section nine.
People interpret this
differently, and I think the
word "hanging" is misleading,
but I read it as meaning:
are we going to come back in
the spring as the leaves come
back in the spring?
 
And we're not.
Human life is a single
trajectory and has a single
spring, summer,
and winter, and loss in such a
world is permanent.
But in this world we have the
splendor of the world,
if we can simply see it,
if we can allow ourselves to
see it without preconceptions.
 
We can see "the stars…
putting on their glittering
belts."
This reminds me of the
constellation Orion which has a
glittering belt and a dagger
hanging from it.
"They throw around their
shoulders cloaks that flash /
like a great shadow's last
embellishment."
But now suddenly there's a
change;
there's a drop in the rhetoric
to the utmost simplicity of
language.
The last tercet,
three-line stanza,
of section nine:
"It may come tomorrow in the
simplest word,
/ almost as part of innocence,
almost, / almost as the
tenderest and the truest part."
"It," I am quite certain,
is death.
And Hamlet speaks memorable and
extremely simple words when he
is about to die.
He's about to fight a duel in
which he's going to be poisoned,
and Horatio,
his friend, is concerned and
fears his death.
And Hamlet says,
"Tush, it's nothing.
If it be not today,
it will be tomorrow,
and if it be not tomorrow it
will be today,
and if it be not now,
it will come."
And that, I think,
is what is being echoed,
in a sense, here:
"It may come tomorrow in the
simplest word."
Death is almost as a part of
innocence, almost as the
tenderest and truest part.
Well, I can say only a few
words about section ten.
As I say, everything goes to
hell in section ten.
All the great concepts are
discarded.
But in section ten,
we do return to the concept of
happiness in Stevens.
 
We are, humanity is,
an unhappy people in a happy
world;
that is to say,
we live in a world in which
there is splendor and vitality
and the sun is like a jungle
tuft of feathers and like an
animal eye,
but we're unhappy because we
lack the faculty of imagination,
as the "you" does in the short
poem.
The cosmic imagination
meditates the whole thing,
the history of humanity,
and all of our fates.
 
At the very end of the poem the
mother reappears in degraded
form as a "harridan,"
which means kind of an ugly,
untidy old crone,
and "a haggling of wind and
weather."
The splendors of the aurora
have come to that,
"by theses lights,
/ like a blaze of summer straw,
in winter's nick."
That's the last metaphor for
the Aurora Borealis.
"Winter's nick" is the solstice;
the coming of Capricorn,
the constellation,
and the auroras are like "a
blaze of… straw" in the midst
of all that.
Not a very grand image,
but for Stevens this is what we
have, and this is enough.
 
And I think in a poem like "The
Auroras of Autumn," he manages
to convince us,
at least temporarily,
that it is enough.
 
Thank you.
 
