Stanzas In Meditation: The Corrected Edition (review)

Stanzas In Meditation is a long commonplace poem, filled with descriptions of the writer's literal experience. "In looking up I have managed to see four things" she says (Part I, Stanza X). Stein wrote this, her longest poem (164 stanzas in five parts), in 1932 just before The Autobiography Of Alice B. Toklas, the memoir that made her famous. She and Toklas were at their country home in Bilignin, in southeastern France. For almost a decade they had spent the summer and fall seasons in that area, out of Paris, and this was their fourth year in a leased home that gave them a sense of belonging. By 1932 they knew the people and the landscape well. When war came seven years later this emplacement helped protect them from Nazi removal. Writing Stanzas reinforced her claim to place there.

The poem's motto may be "Seen is often very well said" (IV.III): that is, the poem was not just an occasion for Stein to write what she was seeing, it fulfilled her idea that seeing was made possible through writing. She did not write what she had seen; instead, she wrote in order to see. Donald Sutherland said in his introduction to the first publication of Stanzas in 1956 (and usefully reprinted in the edition under review) that it "expresses the action of the mind willing and realizing its own presence, in the present, to its own thought" (43), and there is throughout "a recognition that what the mind is present to in its act of presence is simply the thisness of any object" (43). Foremost in the poet's mind is the thisness of the words themselves, and it may be that Stein was never more attuned to the sound and look of words than she was in this (as John Ashbery has called it in an essay also reprinted in this edition) "hymn to possibility" (52). Sutherland's simple description more than suffices: "there is a balancing or drawing taut of the line by repetition with differing emphases" (45).

I like a moth in love and monthsBut they will always say the same thing whenThey sing singingI wish I could repeat as new just what they do

(III.XXII)

The first line is made taut through the words "like" and "love", "moth" and "months", and their syntax, while verse two stresses sound: "they", "always", "say", "same", as well as "they" and "thing". The words transform (sing) along the line. Stein's interest in transformation was so powerful that her work can be unsettling or unacceptable to some readers. She looked for the difference that repetition makes, not similarity; how to "repeat as new" was her self-directive. Late in the poem we find this one-line stanza: "I feel that this stanza has been well-known" (V.XI). Did she start a stanza and then decide it was, in a sense, too well known? Another writer would use an often-heard thought or start stanza XI over again, but Stein offers what amounts to a gravestone inscription and goes on to stanza XII for a fresh start.

While many of the meditations have an abstract quality and read best when read aloud, there are clearly referential moments. Here are two passages that center on things literally seen and heard around their pastoral home. They deal with themes of proximity, intimacy and growth. Ulla Dydo has glossed the second passage: "In the Rhône Valley, dried marsh grass, blache, is used for strawberry beds as well as litter for animals and bedding" (2003, 518).

Hours of a tree growing. He said it injured walls.We said the owner and the one then here preferred it.Imagine what to say he changed his mind.He said it would not matter until ten years or five.

(I.VIII)

It will be often fortunately that strawberries need strawOr may they yes indeed...