Wallace Stevens in Connecticut

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1993 by William Doreski

The flux of metaphor, then, mingles the dominant tropes--those of the dark, the body as dilapidated house, and light, the house made of sun. New Haven, though a "physical town," boasts "metaphysical houses." But neither the physical nor the metaphysical vision alone suffices to account for the depletion, the "barrenness" that "is an exposing ... / a coming on and a coming forth." Depletion, a human entropy, would hardly return as "a clearness" that "stands restored" (XXX). Imagination is a state of grace, not a fixed dimension, but it is the expression of the human half of the world, a place of elemental desire. We keep "coming back to the real" because its clarity corrects the blinding sunlit narcissism of desire, but reality does not monopolize the world - it is not simply a matter of the mind versus the planet. While the poem does not quite commit itself, it raises the possibility that "reality exists / in the mind" (XXVIII), and that "Real and unreal are two in one." Yet even if reality exists in the mind it does not wholly constitute it, nor does the mind entirely constitute the world. The poem notes that "The sun is half the world" (XXIII), and "New Haven is half sun," though the other half, the dark half, is slightly more real because "lighted by space" rather than by the sun, which is complicit with the imagination. The mind describes, even inscribes a place (as on a postcard), but does not embody it.

As the poem progresses, the imagery of light and dark, dilapidation and sun, finds embodiments distant from physical New Haven, as the "land of the lemon trees" (sun imagery), for example, or the "squirrels, in tree-caves" that "Huddle together in the knowledge of squirrels" (i.e. who brood in dark dilapidated houses) (XXX). Eventually the poem (in section XXXI) concludes by arguing that subtleties of perception and art approach the final form of reality by reconceiving and revising it, finding form without fixation, perhaps as a tone or coloring. The resolution to the state of depression, languor, and self-depletion is to demonstrate that the two New Havens complement and inhere in each other--to deconstruct the metaphor of the self as a dilapidated house, deconstruct as well the self as house composed of sun, and demonstrate how these are in fact the same house. The labyrinthine argument is too extended and complex to summarize here, but for purposes of this essay it is useful to consider the forms in which the qualities of New Haven and its setting (especially its night sky), both the New Haven of dilapidated houses and the one that like the poet's imagination is made of sun, recur.

Sections I and Il present the two New Havens and summarize the difficulties of telling them apart:

Obscure, in colors whether of the sun

Or mind, uncertain in the clearest bells,

The spirit's speeches, the indefinite,

Confused illuminations and sonorities,

So much ourselves, we cannot tell apart

The idea and the bearer-being of the idea. New Haven is half light, half dark, both idea and the bearer of the idea. As such, it would seem to be the perfect embodiment of the balance between reality and imagination that ignites the moment of transcendence in "The River of Rivers in Connecticut," but it is also a city of particular qualities that in some ways obfuscate, in some ways promote the desire that leads to effective confrontation with the real. Section IV argues, roughly, that people living in places like New Haven have trouble shaping their desire, although the very voice of desire is satisfying because it calls attention to otherness: