Wallace Stevens in Connecticut

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1993 by William Doreski

I do not agree with Harold Bloom that this poem "accepts the myth of Stygia, region of the river Styx, in order to transcend the role of Charon and the oblivion of Hades" (365). Rather, the poem reminds us of the myth only to refute it and assert that "There is no ferryman" and "No shadows walk on its banks"; the myth is unoccupied, therefore defunct, and the river-as-process is not bound to the past. Bloom aptly describes the river as a "trope of power," but it is particularly a figure of the combined power of geographical actuality and the imagination. The myth of Stygia was the product of that combination once, long ago, but the new myth is Connecticut, that "local abstraction" generated by light and air.

If, as Bloom contends, this Connecticut is a "transcendence," what is transcended are the relative limitations of geography and the imagination. The geography lesson concludes, then, with the irony that the curriculum linking reality and the imagination transforms the river into a sea--a wry comment, perhaps, on the "oceanic feeling" that Bloom quotes from Freud. Wry because this transformation negates the original metaphoric value of the river and redirects its power--or rather negates its power by forcing it to relinquish its form. Perhaps this is why myths like that of Stygia grow stale--it is the making of myth, the curriculum, the confrontation of imagination with the glistening of the steeple, the shining of the village, that engenders the naming that in turn stalls the river, broadens it into sea-like stasis. Transcendence balances reality and the imagination to generate an entity that is neither, but that abstract state is momentary, at best, and its price is the depletion of the vitality of its originating metaphor.

Connecticut, then, attains the status of myth, as Stygia long ago did, but this new visionary quality is a product of light and air, and is not a permanent state. As Stevens says in "Connecticut Composed," "We live in the tradition which is the true mythology of the region and we breathe in with every breath the joy of having ourselves been created by what has been endured and mastered in the past" (Opus 303). Myth, which is constantly being re-created by the pressure of desire, represents the past and links it to the present, but it is a living process, begat by and begetting living beings. Because it is culture, not nature, myth cannot sustain trees, and because the fatefulness of the river is that it flows from myth (culture) to reality (nature) and back again, trees cannot thrive on its banks. But the river's "propelling force" is the pressure of reality, not of myth, and only that moment of closure, when the pressure of poetry and the imagination is greatest (a recurring structural principle in Stevens's late lyrics), can stall it "like a sea."

The New Haven of "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" (Collected 465-89) is twofold: it is "The eye's plain version . . . the vulgate of experience" (1), the reality of a shabby industrial city between Hartford and New York; it is place where we might "Suppose these houses are composed of ourselves, / So that they become an impalpable town" (11), a place (or state) of imaginative redemption. The bulk of the poem mediates between these two New Havens. Because it is an ordinary evening, this mediation, we may assume, is part of ordinary experience; in fact, as the poem progresses, it seems to be the necessary state of existence. Vendler argues that the poem is concerned with aging and depletion, and that the poem sets itself the difficult task of "accounting, in terms of consciousness, for a depression which is overwhelmingly physical--the metabolic depletion in age of the body's responses" (271). Because the scenery itself is so depleted, because "These houses, these difficult objects, dilapidate / Appearances of what appearances" (1), they link themselves metaphorically to the poet, who is a house composed of the sun and yet a house like these other houses, collapsing under the pressure of reality.