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Prologue
- University of Pittsburgh Press
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P RO LO G U E Metaphor and the English Studies Curriculum T by Wallace Stevens that begins: You like it under the trees in autumn, Because everything is half dead. The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves And repeats words without meaning. What strikes me about these lines—and brings me back to them again and again—is the irony, the near contradiction, of the addressee’s enjoyment (“You like it . . .”) and the objects of that enjoyment: things that are “half dead”; the wind “like a cripple”; the repetition of “words without meaning.” What is it that attracts this person—and perhaps the poet is addressing himself—to such symbols of loss? Why the preference for all that is on its way toward absence? The poem—entitled, interestingly enough, “The Motive for Metaphor ”—continues: In the same way, you were happy in spring, With the half colors of quarter-things, The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds, The single bird, the obscure moon— The season now changed to spring, the word “half” appears here again, along with a number of other qualifiers—“slightly brighter,” “melting,” “single,” “obscure”—that temper the presence of those images poetry has so often associated with replete, effulgent Nature: sky, clouds, bird, moon. As I imagine Harold Bloom might observe, these opening stanzas can be said to recall and revise those of Keats’s in “Ode to a Nightingale”: “Darkling I listen: and, for many a time / I have been half in love with easeful Death.”¹ But while Keats’s poem speaks from within, and thereby attempts to seize, the fleeting present, Stevens’s words look to the past, as if he were writing an elegy for a time not simply dying but now fully dead. Yet the title of Stevens’s poem indicates that he is after something else —not just a Modernist’s refiguring of Romantic metaphors for Nature, but the very “motive” that leads to metaphor in the first place. It is toward this motive that Stevens moves in the stanzas that bring the poem to a close: The obscure moon lighting an obscure world Of things that would never be quite expressed, Where you yourself were never quite yourself And did not want nor have to be, Desiring the exhilarations of changes: The motive for metaphor, shrinking from The weight of primary noon, The A B C of being, The rudder temper, the hammer Of red and blue, the hard sound— Steel against intimation—the sharp flash, The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X. In that final series of images—from the “weight of primary noon” to the “sharp flash”—each item would appear to reflect something fully defined, clear, unambiguous: the sun at its peak, the basic elements of life, the vigor of spirit, the contrast of colors, the solidity of sound, the stab of light. Moreover, the last line of the poem—“The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X”—brings to a climax this crescendo of metaphors presented as that which metaphor rejects: whatever can be definitively named (“X”) and, as a result, directly apprehended. Such naming is “vital” to human understanding, but it is also “arrogant, fatal, dominant ”: to ascribe names—to resort to literal language—is to participate in what might be called the fixing of knowledge. To apprehend is, after all, both to know and to arrest, to halt the elusive movement of the unknown . • [100.26.140.179] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:00 GMT) If metaphor represents an impulse that opposes sharp definitions, then the early stanzas of the poem take on new meaning. Perhaps the figure addressed “likes it” in autumn and spring because during these seasons nothing remains the same long enough to be named: all is fluid. What this person desires (and here it seems all the more likely that Stevens is referring to the poet) is not so much personal expression but “the exhilarations of changes”—the thrill of transforming everything that is otherwise frozen by its literal definition. Metaphor, from this perspective , serves not to clarify but to blur; its effect is that of an “obscure moon lighting an obscure world.” Hence the paradox of taking pleasure in the “half dead”: in a culture that demands you to be exhaustively articulated—to be fully present to self and others—there may be considerable solace in a realm where “you yourself were never quite yourself / And did not want nor...