Late Poems: “One of the Inhabitants of the West” and “Nuns Painting Water-Lilies”
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PREFATORY NOTE: The transcript of this sixth and final seminar, which took place on June 21, 2017, in Bogliasco, Italy, uses the following abbreviations: BE (Bart Eeckhout, University of Antwerp & Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study), JU (Juliette Utard, Sorbonne University & CNRS), CA (Charles Altieri, University of California, Berkeley), MB (Massimo Bacigalupo, University of Genoa), LG (Lisa Goldfarb, Gallatin School, New York University), GH (Gül Bilge Han, Stockholm University), GM (Glen MacLeod, University of Connecticut), RM (Rachel Malkin, University of Oxford), MM (Maureen N. McLane, New York University), ER (Edward Ragg, Beijing), TS (Tony Sharpe, Lancaster University). 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.
A Negative Epiphany about Buried Guilt
For this final seminar, Juliette has accepted to kick off the discussions before I append a few comments of my own. But let me start by reading out the first poem, “One of the Inhabitants of the West”:
Our divinations,Mechanisms of angelic thought,The means of prophecy, [End Page 112]
Alert us mostAt evening’s one starAnd its pastoral text,
When the establishmentsOf wind and light and cloudAwait an arrival,
A reader of the text,A reader without a body,Who reads quietly:
“Horrid figures of Medusa,These accents explicateThe sparkling fall of nightOn Europe, to the last Alp,And the sheeted Atlantic.
These are not banlieusLacking men of stone,In a well-rosed two-lightOf their own.I am the archangel of evening and praise
This one star’s blaze.Suppose it was a drop of blood . . .So much guilt lies buriedBeneath the innocenceOf autumn days.”
This poem was first published in December 1952 in The Nation. Eleanor Cook calls it “Another angel poem, another reader poem, another poem meditating on day’s end, here as if on the edge of Western Europe. If it is touched by any sense of ‘Westward the course of empire’ . . . there is no sense of triumph” (280). I’m interested in the poem’s apparent sense of tedium, its rehearsal of various old themes, at a moment when Stevens was attempting to develop a distinct late style in The Rock. Tedium is a recurrent motif in that final section of The Collected Poems, from “An Old Man Asleep” to “Song of Fixed Accord” and “Long and Sluggish Lines.” The question to which Stevens seems to return is, “What difference can one ultimately make?” As he says in “Long and Sluggish Lines,” “at so much more / Than seventy, where one looks, one has been there before” (CPP 442). There is an unresolved tension in the poem between an effort toward singularity (“One of the,” “This one star’s blaze”) and an acknowledgment [End Page 113] of commonality (the poem, after all, begins in the first-person plural). So, like Cook, I treat the titular West not as troping conquest and the frontier but rather the setting sun and evening star—what Stevens in his previous volume called “The Westwardness of Everything” (CPP 389). Hence perhaps the figure of the Medusa as threatening petrification—which makes perfect sense in a collection entitled The Rock. To this cluster of images may be added the “fall of night / On Europe,” that strangely “last Alp” (as if the Alps were countable and we had reached the end of a series), the corpse-like “sheeted Atlantic,” shrouded in rigor mortis, the “drop of blood,” and then the final confession of “guilt.” “One of the Inhabitants of the West” seems to address finitude, but in a minor key. It is rather uncharacteristic of Stevens’s late...
