Wallace Stevens: The Fierceness of Desire
The Poems of Our Climate
Wallace Stevens
The Poems of Our Climate
I
Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations – one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there.II
Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one’s torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.III
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.
Poems speak to other poems as well as to us, their readers. And as readers we contain within our imaginations all the various poems we ourselves have read.
My last letter was about a poem, “A Stool” by Zbigniew Herbert, which counseled looking at objects as a way to get to an incontrovertible truth. The poem has much, much, to recommend it.
But near the end of the letter I referred to a poem by Wallace Stevens, “The Poems of Our Climate,” [1942] that seems to argue with the position taken by Herbert. I would like to consider that poem, now.
Stevens is an odd poet for me to write about. A corporate executive – I dislike major corporations, and I dislike those who lead them – and in politics a conservative Republican – not my cup of tea – and a very cerebral poet (or seemingly so) – another direction that repels me: Wallace Stevens seems exactly the kind of voice I do not want to listen to. I know that if I were at a dinner, I would avoid talking to him, and to be truthful he would avoid talking to me, a leftist Jewish social critic.
And yet. And yet. He speaks important truths about important things. In my mind, always, is the opening and close of one of his best poems, “The Well-Dressed Man with a Beard:”
After the final no there comes a yes,
And on that yes the future world depends….
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
The mind keeps inquiring. Even as Zbigniew Herbert (and Thoreau and Husserl before him) insists on the primacy of objects and how we can root our search for ‘truth’ in the awareness of the ‘facts’ of the world, Stevens tells us, ‘Not so fast.’ We depend on the continuing search of the mind because the world is neither as simple nor as stable as we believe it to be.
Consider the poem before us, “The Poems of Our Climate.” No rhymes, a constantly shifting meter (predominantly iambic, there is no regularity to the feet in each line), it has three parts. Parts Two and Three build on the part previous to them: There is a growing argument, but it is also to a modest degree a dialogue. Here is Part One, which seems to say that we encounter the object world, and yet we want more:
Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations – one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there.
The water is clear. The carnations in the bowl are pink and white. It is winter, the stripped down season: None of that tropical lushness to confront us, of the sort that Stevens referred to in “Arrival at the Waldorf:” “Alien, point-blank, green and actual Guatemala.” No, this is a chill and “snowy air, reflecting snow.”
I suppose if I were an even closer and more attentive reader than I am, I would be forewarned by the imminence of spring, as alluded to in the line about “the end of winter when afternoons return.” But I see that only later; what I see when I read the stanza, is that “the day itself/ Is simplified…Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,/ With nothing more than the carnations there.” Yet amidst this perfection what stands out is the stark “one desires/ So much more than that.” The word ‘desire’ is stunning, totally alien to the cool ‘perfect’ world of the carnations and the bowl.
There is the object world, and there is desire. The object world is cool, clear, sufficient unto itself.
Desire is hot, disorderly, full of want. (It will come as no surprise, then, that ‘hot,’ ‘want’ and a strange disorder will emerge as the poem continues.) The word jars the reader in that brilliant first stanza, and will be enlarged upon as the poem progresses. Maybe stools (Herbert) and crisp flowers are not enough for us? Maybe we “desire” more?
II
Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one’s torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.
We arrive at the second stanza. It begins by acknowledging that the pink and white flowers in clear water in a porcelain bowl on a cool day are, in the search for what is real, or at least what will suffice, enough: “complete simplicity.” And with such simplicity we are stripped of our torments: We know what is real and really there. Maybe the self – Stevens goes the whole distance, calling it the “evilly compounded, vital I”—can be, well, not excluded but “concealed.” Maybe our “torments” can be left behind, “stripped” away: “still” something would remain.
Here we are at the key word in this poem, “vital.” For what is alive is our desire, our wants and needs. Our vitality is this want and need for more, “More than a world of white and snowy scents.” (I should note that “more” appears three times – three times – in the final two lines of the stanza!) ‘More,’ ‘desire,’ ‘want,’ ‘need:’ All are related to the self. Yes, the poem acknowledges, the self is “evilly compounded,” made out of parts that by themselves might be alright but which in combination make something which is not alright, which is in fact ‘evil.’ We want to be “fresh” in a “clear” and “brilliant” world. But we “want more,” we “need more,/ More than this world of white and snowy scents.” (Can we accommodate the pun, between ‘cents’ and ‘sense’? I think we can. The clear and brilliant world does not make ‘sense’ to us. Why not?)
The word I have been avoiding is “vital.” For the self is full of life, so dominated by life that is alive in a world that, however “brilliant-edged,” is somehow (in its perfection) not alive – hey, those carnations are cut and dead. The cut carnations compose an image, a simulacrum, of perfection. Vitality, life in the world, is not perfection. It is full of desires and wants and needs. It keeps crying, “More.”
The “I” is “vital” and so is connected to something other than the white porcelain bowl of red and white carnations. That is probably a bad thing, always wanting more, always desiring, very far from a world of self-sufficiency: But it is who and what we are. Vital. Full of life, even if “evilly compounded.”
[Let me stop, because this analysis is dense and about to become even more dense. To guide us along, remember that the poem contrasts two things. One is a ‘perfect’ bowl of red and white carnations floating in a porcelain bowl of water. Dead, lovely, a composition that provides a resting place for the mind, a perfect scene. The other thing in the poem is the poet and his mind, who wants more than that resting place, that perfect scene.]
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.
The mind is never-resting, always moving forward, ever wanting – and yet is what the “vital I” is composed of. (Ah, a paradox: The “never-resting” is what “remains!”) So, Stevens insists, we want to escape from paradise (again, note that the “want” in the second line of the final stanza is the same word as occurs in the penultimate line of the preceding stanza!). We are fueled, driven, by the wants that comprise desire.
We come back to the world, this world, our world. Not the ‘composed’ world of the florist’s creation, pink and white carnations in a water-filled porcelain bowl, but the world we live in, hot with want and desire and need. That world, too has been “composed,” for we create the world around ourselves as we move through the ‘reality’ we are born into. Desire shapes our world, and has shaped it: In this sense, the daily world around us is “composed,” and composed for “so long.” We know this world, because we have been living in it for a long time. Perhaps from our first breaths, wanting the comfort and sustenance of our mother’s breast.
That is why “the imperfect is our paradise.” Because we have lived for so long in desire we long for – desire – more of that world of always wanting. We are comfortable in it, and this is what we want: More of the vitality that comes from never being satisfied, always wanting and needing more. We are not happy in the perfect dependability of objects.
Ah, “the never-resting mind.” It remains. And so we want to go back to a world that is ongoing, full of desire, full of things among which the mind can move in its never-ending-ness. We exist in the imperfect – “The imperfect is our paradise” – because imperfection allows us to long for more, for perfection I suppose. Desire fuels us, and this desire is what marks us out as “vital,” not perfect like those (dead) flowers floating in clear water in a white bowl.
There is no sentimentality in this poem by Stevens. The imperfect is, when all is said and done, bitter: “this bitterness.” Joy, or what he here calls “delight,” lies in accepting and working with imperfection. That “hot” of the penultimate line recalls the “desire” of Part One, the “want” and “need” of Part Two. It is the hot red blood of the “vital I” which exists, full of wanting and needing, alive in a world which it has become accustomed to.
Stevens is a poet and so is concerned with poetry: Why is it that we write poems, struggle with language, strive to make meaning in a world that is without sense (or filled with “white and snowy scents”)? We struggle with “flawed words and stubborn sounds” because we live in an imperfect world, one full of flaws, one that stubbornly resists intelligibility. Poetry reveals, in this poem, for Stevens, the form of human existence: Seeking delight in a world that is imperfect, and liable to remain so. We struggle with language as we struggle with the imperfect, desire-warped world itself.
For Stevens, unlike for Herbert, the object world is not sufficient. We want more. Here is the remarkable ending of one his long poems, “The Man with the Blue Guitar.” We acknowledge the stone and the bread of the object world in which we know we have to live our lives, but there is something else, and we long for it:
The bread
Will be our bread, the stone will beOur bed and we shall sleep by night.
We shall forget by day, exceptThe moments when we choose to play
The imagined pine, the imagined jay.
In my view, Stevens tells us – in the lovely words in “Poems of Our Climate,” – that life is tough, that objects are not a sufficient ground for living, that we struggle to find meaning, that looking for a ‘ground’ to anchor upon is not a usable strategy. All is struggle. I know Stevens would reject the phrase, leftist as it is (its origin was in the radical movement for independence from Portugal in Mozambique), but “La Luta Continua.” The struggle continues.
There is no conclusion for me. I want to ground my search for truth in something, often in facts and the objective world, as Herbert proposes. (Although, to be completely straightforward, the stool in Herbert’s poem is not merely a brute object, but part of his human world: He encounters it daily, and he describes it in metaphorical and not factual terms.) But I also recognize, with Stevens, that “It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.”
It is worth remembering that only in listening to other voices do we discover, more fully, who and what we are. Poems, as both Herbert and Stevens would agree, matter very deeply. The struggle with language, with “flawed words and stubborn sounds,” limns the struggle we have in our own experiences. The world we encounter is shaped by, flooded with, desire. And it is in this world what we must live, a world of “wants’ and not of clear and cold facts.
Objects, even perfect objects, are not enough. Having always wanted, having always been shaped by need and desire, we want more than objects.
Stevens says something rather different from Zbigniew Herbert.
Poems, I feel, may tell us the truth. But different poems tell us different truths. In our lives, we sometimes want an answer, a truth that will clarify everything.
I will end with something I found myself saying to a new friend, a poet and critic. We need literature – and I need poems – because, unlike Donald Trump, we need to hear voices that are not our own. No matter what we may think about the world, there are other views, powerful views, of what this world is and what it might be. Only through encountering the voices of people other than ourselves can we get some sense of not only the lives we are living, but the lives we could live.
One can embrace both Herbert and Stevens, even though they seem to say disparate things. Objects are, perhaps, where we must begin. And perhaps they are not enough.
This complexity and this ongoingness – “It can never be satisfied, the mind, never” as Stevens said – require that we keep reading, keep listening to voices other than our own, so that the (glorious) complexity of our lives can be acknowledged and can fully become ours.
La luta continua.