Proustian closure in Wallace Steven's "The Rock" and Elizabeth Bishop's "Geography III."

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1998 by C.K. Doreski

"The Rock" grew out of the acknowledgment of limitations imposed by age and failing health. As Stevens wrote to Alfred Knopf in April 1954:

I think that I should have difficulty in putting together another volume of poems, as much as I should prefer that to a collection. But I might as well face the fact. If, therefore, you are interested in a collected volume, it is all right with me. (Letters 829)

The "difficulty," though unarticulated in the body of the letter, is tacitly linked to its closing: "My seventy-fifth birthday falls on October 2, which is only about five months away." In The Whole of Harmonium (Stevens's original proposed title for his collected poems), Stevens collects himself "Out of all the indifferences, into one thing" (CP 524).

Stevens's orchestration of his career assumes a stark linearity in the closing triad of "The Rock": "The Planet on the Table," "The Rivers of Rivers in Connecticut," and "Not Ideas about the Thing But the Thing Itself." Bereft of the "pleasures of merely circulating," Stevens projects a speculative, posthumous identity as he posits the disengagement of his poems, "although makings of his self," from his failing being.(9) Uncertain as their survival might be ("It was not important that they survive"), the poems lay immediate and certain claim to the integrity of the poet's own existence.

In the colloquy of "The Planet on the Table," the contemplative figure of Ariel, Shakespeare's captive spirit, inventories familiar tropes in a tone that mixes satisfaction and resignation. The complex emotional appeal of this poem derives from the peculiar situation of the hierarchical poet-figure, a magician whose work is done and whose time has almost passed. His success is both personal and worldly, so his work cannot survive his death unchanged. Ariel finds pleasure in considering his poems despite "the poverty of their words," because in making them he brought together his imaginative self and reality, generating a quality, an "affluence," that distinguishes them from "Other makings of the sun." Because they are "makings of his self," the survival of these poems, which is not by any means assured, is not so important as their pedigree. That they bear something of the world that came of his interactions with the sun makes his poems - those, especially, of "The Rock" - matter more than the "poverty of their words" suggests. That they are of a "remembered time / Or of something seen that he liked," however, suggests why Ariel's passing will in some way undo them, why they cannot transcend the conditions of their making. To contemplate them is in some measure to relinquish them. In their canonical form, they have become a "planet on the table," a reality too immediate, modest, and palpable to transcend itself.

The dramatized surrender of "The Planet on the Table" and the poems of "The Rock" associated with it, which constitute this late ars poetica, demands the public offering of private works. No longer a world of (as Bishop might have it) "flowing" creation, Stevens's collected poems have "flown" into the static realm of a reading public, a fixed canon. As Stanley Kunitz explains the phenomenon in "Passing Through - on my seventy-ninth birthday": "The way I look / at it, I'm passing through a phase: / gradually I'm changing to a word" (18). Yet for Stevens, words alone are an impoverishment; they require the vitality of memory, the nuances of pleasure and sadness, and the living voice. Without those, poems even in their plenitude writhe like the "ripe shrub," ruined by the stark light of reality.