Poems from Parts of a World: “Parochial Theme” and “Country Words”
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Poems from Parts of a World: “Parochial Theme” and “Country Words”
PREFATORY NOTE: The transcript of this third seminar, which took place on June 20, 2017, in Bogliasco, Italy, uses the following abbreviations: GH (Gül Bilge Han, Stockholm University), GM (Glen MacLeod, University of Connecticut), CA (Charles Altieri, University of California, Berkeley), MB (Massimo Bacigalupo, University of Genoa), BE (Bart Eeckhout, University of Antwerp & Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study), LG (Lisa Goldfarb, Gallatin School, New York University), RM (Rachel Malkin, University of Oxford), MM (Maureen N. McLane, New York University), ER (Edward Ragg, Beijing), TS (Tony Sharpe, Lancaster University), JU (Juliette Utard, Sorbonne University & CNRS). The transcript was heavily edited for readability and circulated among participants for fine-tuning; it thus reproduces the dynamic of exchange without in any way striving to be literal. Readers who come upon this material outside the special issue to which it belongs are advised to read the editorial introduction for an account of the rationale behind the following discussion.
Exhaling Postromantic Health
We’ll start this session with “Parochial Theme,” the first poem in Parts of a World. I’ll read it out first, then Gül will make some introductory comments and I will follow through:
Long-tailed ponies go nosing the pine-lands,Ponies of Parisians shooting on the hill.
The wind blows. In the wind, the voicesHave shapes that are not yet fully themselves, [End Page 51]
Are sounds blown by a blower into shapes,The blower squeezed to the thinnest mi of falsetto.
The hunters run to and fro. The heavy trees,The grunting, shuffling branches, the robust,
The nocturnal, the antique, the blue-green pinesDeepen the feelings to inhuman depths.
These are the forest. This health is holy,This halloo, halloo, halloo heard over the cries
Of those for whom a square room is a fire,Of those whom the statues torture and keep down.
This health is holy, this descant of a self,This barbarous chanting of what is strong, this blare.
But salvation here? What about the rattle of sticksOn tins and boxes? What about horses eaten by wind?
When spring comes and the skeletons of the huntersStretch themselves to rest in their first summer’s sun,
The spring will have a health of its own, with noneOf autumn’s halloo in its hair. So that closely, then,
Health follows after health. Salvation there:There’s no such thing as life; or if there is,
It’s faster than the weather, faster thanAny character. It is more than any scene:
Of the guillotine or of any glamorous hanging.Piece the world together, boys, but not with your hands.
Let me start off with the publication history of this poem. It appeared in 1938 in the Southern Review as part of the “Canonica” series, which is the title Stevens gave to twelve poems that would end up as one cluster at the beginning of Parts of a World. It’s the first poem in the series, hence in the volume, which is important to understand because it seems to anticipate other poems from the same series. In the image of the sticks rattling on tins and boxes, for instance, we recognize “The Man on the Dump.” We may find echoes of Ideas of Order as well: the “voices crying without knowing [End Page 52] for what,” the “shapes,” and the “Blar[ing]” music from “Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz” (CPP 100–01) return here as “the voices” that “Have shapes that are not yet fully themselves” and the “blare” of a hunting music. Yet if we look at the reference to parishes in the title, then there appear to be religious connotations as well, and I’m curious to hear what you make of the religious language in the poem. In the preparatory notes Glen sent me, he pointed out that the “parts” in the volume’s title can also refer to a world that is...
