Wallace Stevens in Connecticut

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1993 by William Doreski

The title of "The River of Rivers in Connecticut," as Ronald Sukenick aptly notes, indicates that its subject "flows through Connecticut, as well as everywhere else" (196). Yet it is a river that if mythic in one dimension is decidedly geographical in another, and occupies space as well as mind, though in a locale that is not entirely natural, with "trees that lack the intelligence of trees" (Collected 533). The trees, as Stevens suggested in a commentary, grow in an unnatural place, and therefore lack that bond with nature that allows them to share in its vast, somewhat undifferentiated, intelligence.(4) That is because here above the first black cataracts nature is beginning to yield to culture, and reality and the imagination begin to interact. The tone of the poem is that of the geography lesson, which suggests we accept a certain yielding to the pressure of reality; but the necessity of reminding the reader that this river is not the Styx (but rather is a river on the near side, reality's side, of Stygia) suggests how porous is the membrane between the mythic and the real, and how inexact is Stevens's aphorism that "Reality is a cliche / From which we escape by metaphor" (Opus 204).

Sukenick argues that the metaphorically vital river represents the flow of "existence," and that it "consists of the tangible reality of common objects, such as |The Steeple at Farmington,' and the town of Haddam" (196). However, in my readings of the poem the river does not represent existence (or, as Vendler puts it, "the total stream of life" [Words 74]) but rather is the force in landscape that mediates between geographical actuality and the desire for landscapes of the imagination. Metaphor is no longer about the relationship between tenor and vehicle, that neat but obfuscating binary complement. Another late poem dismisses that binary relationship by defining metaphor "Not [as] Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself," a "scrawny cry from outside" (Collected 534) that invites the imagination to claim it as its own.

The action of "The River of Rivers in Connecticut" (Collected 533) is nothing less than the rediscovery of much of Connecticut (a state both of desire and of reality) through the process of mediating between landscape and desire. Mock pedantry gives way to an argument about the way landscape and the imagination interact, which then concludes with a marriage of elements--light and air--and a moment of transcendence. Faced with particulars--the steeple at Farmington (which incidentally is not on the Connecticut River, but on a tributary) and the village of Haddam--the imagination interacts with the river, the emblem of vital natural and cultural (mythic) force, and of these two vitalities engenders a "third commonness with light and air, / A curriculum," a plan, a program, "a vigor, a local abstraction...." The State of Connecticut, a political and cultural abstraction represented by two actual place names, is regenerated by the river that flows everywhere and nowhere, that never exhausts itself but does change its shape.