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

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

There is a great fiver this side of Stygia, Before one comes to the first black cataracts And trees that lack the intelligence of trees.

In that river, far this side of Stygia, The mere flowing of the water is a gayety, Flashing and flashing in the sun. On its banks,

No shadow walks. The river is fateful, Like the last one. But there is no ferryman. He could not bend against its propelling force.

It is not to be seen beneath the appearances That tell of it. The steeple at Farmington Stands glistening and Haddam shines and sways.

It is the third commonness with light and air, A curriculum, a vigor, a local abstraction. . . . Call it, once more, a river, an unnamed flowing,

Space-filled, reflecting the seasons, the folk-lore Of each of the senses; call it, again and again, The river that flows nowhere, like a sea. (CP 533)

The vigorous and insistent syntax and present-tense urgency of these triplets enact the bestowal of private emotion on the public sphere.(12) The poet renders palpable the problematic relationship between mortality and immortality as he arrests his progression towards death, lingering "this side of Stygia, / Before one comes to the first black cataracts / And trees that lack the intelligence of trees."

For "Men Made Out of Words," it is difficult to imagine a world without "the sexual myth, / The human revery or poem of death" (CP 355). Confronting the "stale grandeur of annihilation" (CP 505), Stevens required an austere yet familiar closure to his Proustian "infinite efforts," where "everyone can find it in his own existence." The posthumous existence, the canonical entity anticipated in "Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself," resembles what Walter Benjamin called "reality in the form of the ruin" (Tragic Drama 177) in which "the greater the significance, the greater the subjection to death, because death digs most deeply the jagged line of demarcation between physical nature and significance" (166):

At the earliest ending of winter, In March, a scrawny cry from outside Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it, A bird's cry, at daylight or before, In the early March wind.

Most alert, hovering at that "jagged line," Stevens listens to the excursion of his voice from the mortality of winter to the "scrawny" unpredictable spring of his reputation. Simultaneously a poem of death and birth, "Not Ideas" recalls Benjamin's dialectical assertions regarding Proust, the inside-outside world of the artist.

The poet of "The Whole of Harmonium" no longer seeks Harmonium's syllables "in the distances of sleep" (Stevens, CP 113); he anticipates the world of his reputation where the patterned injunction turns from "Speak it" (113) to read it. Unlike the collective transferal of "The Hermitage at the Center" ("birds called up by more than the sun, / Birds of more wit, that substitute - / . . . Their intelligible twittering / For unintelligible thought" [CP 505]) thematizing the reality that "this end and this beginning are one," this past-tense representation demands an aubade that is at once invasively personal (thwarting the inevitable reductiveness of death itself) and generously public (extending the collected works outside to the world beyond authorial intent, the ordinary world of the quotidian).