The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens by Rosu Anca

Author:Rosu, Anca [Rosu, Anca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780817390914
Publisher: University of Alabama Press

Death is absolute and without memorial,

As in a season of autumn,

When the wind stops,

When the wind stops and, over the heavens,

The clouds go, nevertheless,

In their direction.

[CP 97]

The poem’s central metaphor, “as in a season of autumn,” works as a reminder of an archetypal analogy between the end of human life and the death of nature in the “season of autumn.” It constitutes, in the first place, the speaker’s way of giving in to the common or collective perspective, since the trope of the seasons of life is, to use a phrase of Robert Frost’s, one of the “metaphors we live by.”7 It is not only very old but also central to mythical thought—the race’s way of understanding the mystery of life and death. Most of the ancient myths of the world are based upon patterns of recurrence analogous to the succession of the seasons. As Mircea Eliade8 shows, the “myth of eternal return,” which is almost universal, can take a variety of forms, but one of its main models, especially relevant to Western culture, is the pattern of nature’s regeneration. Thus the analogy between human life and the life of nature in the seasons is, in a way, an act of acceptance of the natural way of life that leads to death, but on the other hand, it offers the means to resist its inevitability by also suggesting regeneration. When he uses the traditional metaphor, the speaker subscribes to the collective view of death as a natural occurrence but discovers, at the same time, the collective way of canceling misfortune.

The statement of the poem can thus be reduced to the reiteration of an old adage, which may even be missed. For instance, James Longenbach—an otherwise attentive reader—dismisses the metaphor as weak precisely because he thinks it was meant to be original. In addition, he also devalues repetition: “Even the one rather weak metaphor offered for the death (‘As in a season of autumn’) is protracted into meaninglessness when it is repeated in the third tercet, not to enlarge the single death by locating it in a natural cycle, but to reveal that this seasonal decline is indifferent to human sorrow.”9 There are reasons for Longenbach’s misreading here. He does not notice the old adage because Stevens does not reproduce it but rather echoes it. The significance of the adage could remain limited if it were not for the almost imperceptible imperfections of this repetition of a commonplace.

As is customary for Stevens, the poem’s speaker wrestles with his own language, this time in order to compose an original representation of death beyond the old adage, although the traditional image is difficult to avoid, since it bears the authority of that tradition. The speaker’s initiative resides in minor grammatical alterations that should eventually change the meaning of the metaphor. Such changes are subtle, and for a while, they seem to do nothing but reinforce the traditional representation of death. For instance, in “as in a season of autumn” the use of the

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