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  • Heraclitean Ideas in Stevens’ “This Solitude of Cataracts”
  • J. H. Lesher

In his Discussion of the philosophical aspects of Wallace Stevens’ poetry, Bart Eeckhout observes that

Stevens’ poetry does not parade philosophers’ names, nor does it include direct quotations from them. Unlike his contemporaries Ezra Pound and Eliot, Stevens is not the kind of writer who will tell us where he got his ideas or will start dropping names.

(107)

Nevertheless, Eeckhout acknowledges that Stevens

would have been quite aware of the affinity between much of his own worldview and the ideas of somebody such as Heraclitus (who held that the world is in constant flux) or who was likely to ponder his conflicting personal affinities with philosophical movements from antiquity such as Skepticism, Stoicism, and Epicureanism.

(107)1

The challenge, then, is to identify those aspects of Stevens’ poetry that relate in some significant way to the teachings of philosophers, ancient or modern. In what follows, I take up one small part of this project, exploring affinities between Stevens’ late poem “This Solitude of Cataracts” (1948) and ideas associated with the ancient Greek thinker Heraclitus of Ephesus. But our first task is to fashion a plausible reading of Stevens’ challenging poem.

In “This Solitude of Cataracts,” the experience of a flowing river evokes the desire for a more permanent reality:

He never felt twice the same about the flecked river,Which kept flowing and never the same way twice, flowing

Through many places, as if it stood still in one,Fixed like a lake on which the wild ducks fluttered, [End Page 27]

Ruffling its common reflections, thought-like Monadnocks.There seemed to be an apostrophe that was not spoken.

There was so much that was real that was not real at all.He wanted to feel the same way over and over.

He wanted the river to go on flowing the same way,To keep on flowing.

       (CPP 366)

The “he” on this occasion, as often in Stevens’ poems, is the poet himself.2 The “solitude” mentioned in the title is the isolated location Stevens imagines (or perhaps remembers) himself occupying during a period of reflection.3 “Cataracts” in Stevens’ poems are falling waters—here a river flowing near a mountain.4 The “apostrophe that was not spoken” would appear to be “an address that was not made,” perhaps an unspoken affirmation of nature’s beauty.5 And the river that is “never the same way twice” can only be the flowing river Plato claimed Heraclitus used as a simile for “existing things”:

Heraclitus says somewhere that everything gives way and nothing remains, and likening existing things to the flow of a river, he says that you cannot step twice into the same river.

(Cratylus 402a)6

Three contrasts pervade and structure the poem. The first lies between two rivers, one experienced as ever changing, the other hidden and unchanging (“as if it stood still in one, / Fixed like a lake”), yet still the object of desire (the one he wanted “to go on flowing the same way”). A second, related contrast lies between two worlds, one that shares in the inconstancy of the perceptible river—the reflections of the mountain that ruffle the lake’s surface, fluttering wild ducks, and “so much that was real that was not real at all”—and a second world, stable and permanent (“Under the buttonwoods, beneath a moon nailed fast”). The third and most important contrast lies between that stable and permanent reality and the poet who desires for his “mind to rest / In a permanent realization” and to become, in some sense, a thing of bronze:

          He wanted to walk beside it,

Under the buttonwoods, beneath a moon nailed fast.He wanted his heart to stop beating and his mind to rest [End Page 28]

In a permanent realization, without any wild ducksOr mountains that were not mountains, just to know how it would be,

Just to know how it would feel, released from destruction,To be a bronze man breathing under archaic lapis,

Without the oscillations of planetary pass-pass,7Breathing his bronzen breath at the azury center of time.        (CPP 366)

The poet desires to know...

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