Poetry: False and Circular

Wallace Stevens directly addresses the nature of poetry in his poem “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman.” “Poetry,” he begins, “is the supreme fiction.” He presents the scenario in which we take the “moral law,” presumably human morality, and “make a nave of it,” or build it into a structure like the nave of a church and make it like institutionalized religion. We then make the nave into a “haunted heaven,” so we make an artificial heaven, and even one that is “haunted”—sublime and feared by humans. A result of this would be that “the conscience is converted into palms,” possibly a play on “psalms,” so the conscience becomes the religious guidebook, in place of the traditional book of Psalms. This is corroborated by his next words, which likens this transformation to “windy citherns hankering for hymns”: a cithern is an instrument similar to a lute, and it yearns to play hymns, which are similar to psalms.

Yet, Stevens remarks that one can “take / The opposing law” and the same effect would occur. One can take this opposing law and make a “peristlyle,” which is a row of columns surrounding a court, and “project a masque / Beyond the planets,” or make it be a mask that extends far out into the heavens. Just like the first scenario in which an abstract concept was made into a nave, an impressive building structure, and built into a heaven, so too here, something is built into a peristyle, an impressive structure, and reaches into the distance of the universe. However, in both scenarios, there is a structure that lacks a central core; they both consist of boundaries, but the center is arbitrary. In this second scene, “our bawdiness,” of indecent humor, will be “indulged at last” and will be “equally converted into palms.” While our conscience turns into “windy citherns,” our bawdiness is found in a state of “[s]quiggling,” which is wilder than “hankering,” and “like saxophones,” which is louder than citherns. Nevertheless, our conscience and bawdiness, opposites, both are converted into palms, possibly representing our religious guide, as Stevens states: “And palm for palm… we are where we began.”

So what is poetry, Stevens asks, if not for an artificial construction that employs physical words, yet does not correspond with anything beyond it? We can play with words and arrive at the same conclusion. We can develop our moral or amoral tendencies and create religious language from it that can be used for worship, so is there actual truth? The fiction of poetry is that anything can be framed and packaged into words that do not represent the original thing in itself.

The next part of the poem juxtaposes the earthly with the sublime. The “flagellants,” individuals who flog themselves, are described as “well-stuffed” and “[s]macking their muzzy bellies in parade.” However, their grotesque description is framed within the lofty “planetary scene” and they are “[p]roud of such novelties of the sublime.” The tensioned relationship between these two models, described in made-up words as ‘tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,” causes “a jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.” Stevens concludes with the use of alliteration, repeating the words “widows,” “wince,” and “wink” in close proximity to each other. He says that the flagellants will cause themselves to be whipped, which will make widows wince. But “fictive things,” i.e. products of the imagination, such as poetry, “wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.” I am not exactly sure what these last lines mean, but it seems like Stevens attempts to show the circularity of poetry, expressed by his rehashing of similar sounding words, for poetry surrounds an idea but does not actually correspond to it or verily reflect it.

In “Imagination as Value,” Stevens quotes Pascal, who says that imagination is “the deceptive element in man, the mistress of error and duplicity…being most often false, it gives no sign of its quality and indicates in the same way both the true and the false” (133). Stevens seems to agree in this poem about the duplicity of imagination, for it can lead one in opposite directions. While Pascla criticizes imagination for having this ability, Stevens seems to be glorifying it for exactly that. He seems awe-inspired by the endlessness of poetry.