Wallace Stevens in Connecticut

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1993 by William Doreski

"Of Hartford in a Purple Light" vaguely hints at a response to Archibald MacLeish's "You, Andrew Marvell," and illustrates the great compression often found in Steven's shorter poems of the 1930s.2 It is a poem about learning to see landscape, and about seeing as an act of creation that occurs in the light of the revealed world. The speaker, who humbles himself by addressing the sun as "Master" (always an ironic title in Stevens's work), assumes the role of the poet who interprets the light in terms of his own perceptions, which mingle quotidian actuality (town, river, railroad) with operatic coloration and the frank artifice of personification:

A long time you have been making the trip

From Havre to Hartford, Master Soleil,

Bringing the lights of Norway and all that.

A long time the ocean has come with you,

Shaking the water off, like a poodle,

That splatters incessant thousands of drops,

Each drop a petty tricolor. For this,

The aunts in Pasadena, remembering,

Abhor the plaster of the western horses,

Souvenirs of museums. But, Master, there are

Lights masculine and lights feminine.

What is this purple, this parasol,

This stage-light of the Opera?

It is like a region full of intonings.

It is Hartford seen in a purple light.

A moment ago, light masculine,

Working, with big hands, on the town,

Arranged its heroic attitudes.

But now as an amour of women

Purple sets purple round. Look, Master,

See the river, the railroad, the cathedral ...

When male light fell on the naked back

Of the town, the river, the railroad were clear.

Now, every muscle slops away.

Hi! Whisk it, poodle, flick the spray

Of the ocean, ever-freshening,

On the irised hunks, the stone bouquet. (Collected 226-27) Understanding this poem requires accepting the preposterous manner with which it imitates a Dickensian servant's slyly humble address to his master. This address concludes with an imitation of the voice in which one might "Hi!" away an even lowlier servant to do the master's bidding, in this instance the poet "Hi"-ing away the ocean. The difficulty of taking seriously this kind of rhetorical play may be why this poem has rarely been discussed by Stevens critics. But almost alone among Stevens's poems of this period it manifests an aspect of the poet's relationship with reality that will become more apparent in "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction."

The poet, Stevens emphasizes, is the servant of reality. The earlier romantics elevated imagination to a noble and central role in poetics; but for Stevens it is the means by which the poet maintains composure in the face of the bright light, the enormous pressure, of the real. The imagination functions as a sense of humor might function to keep a servant from despair. By mediating between reality and desire, the imagination makes poetry possible, but it also prevents the light of the sun from simplifying or occluding reality. The servant, not the master, understands the dichotomy of "Lights masculine and lights feminine," and understands that the purple that envelops Hartford is the light of the sun translated (as through a prism) by his imagination to represent his desire for the feminine, while the "heroic attitudes" embody his vision of the masculine. The relationship between masculine power and feminine complexities of coloration are problematic, but probably not as insistently Freudian as some critics have claimed.3 The masculine-feminine dichotomy is a produce of culture, not of nature, and is a fiction, unlike the sun. Could his imagination have illuminated New York in similar shades of purple? Perhaps only a "town," not a city, readily accepts being arranged into "heroic attitudes." It is not difficult to believe that the pressure of reality exerted by New York, because already shaped into attitudes larger than the merely heroic, would resist such embellishmet. Hartford, in this instance, is a suitable site of contention between the will of the sun, which resists the differentiations of culture, and the desire of the poet, which imaginatively distinguishes things, colors, and forms of rhetoric. That he also seems to fear the feminine as a diminution of the masculine underscores the courage necessary to acknowledge this distinction, which the harsh light of the sun would otherwise obliterate. Generating the supreme fiction requires that desire and reality negotiate on roughly equal terms.