Wallace Stevens in Connecticut

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1993 by William Doreski

Plain men in plain towns

Are not precise about the appeasement they need.

They only know a savage assuagement cries

With a savage voice; and in that cry they hear

Themselves transposed, muted and comforted

In a savage and subtle and simple harmony,

A matching and mating of surprised accords,

A responding to a diviner opposite. For Stevens "savage" means closer to the idea (not the fact) of origin, and it is apt that a savage voice should transpose, mute, and comfort, and give rise to a "savage and subtle and simple harmony," the very sort of harmony he seeks to generate in these late poems. Certainly the anaphora points to Stevens's central lifelong concern with finding a language adequate for expressing that which precedes and follows language: the recurrent idea of origin, the depletion of the imagination under the pressure of reality.

The people of New Haven, "plain men" in a plain town, confront the world without (for example, the projection of tropical luxuriance, which has to be imagined later in the poem), but they do have architecture and culture, Yale and everything it represents. Section VII offers the city's cultural institutions as sources of interpretation of the "Naked Alpha" with which the experience of reality begins, as well as the "hierophant Omega" (in VI), where it concludes:

In the presence of such chapels and such schools,

The impoverished architects appear to be

Much richer, more fecund, sportive and alive. But these cultural monuments are not the only forms after which we model our experience. In fact, they and other external manifestations of form reinforce a rather commonplace notion of reality:

The objects tingle and the spectator moves

With the objects. But the spectator also moves

With lesser things, with things exteriorized

Out of rigid realists. It is as if

Men turning into things, as comedy,

Stood, dressed in antic symbols, to display

The truth about themselves, having lost, as things,

That power to conceal they had as men,

Not merely as to depth but as to height

As well, not merely as to the commonplace

But, also, as to their miraculous,

Conceptions of new mornings of new worlds. New Haven tempts us to "fling ourselves, constantly longing, on this form" (VIII), on commonplace reality. The streets breathe it, and we breathe the breath of the streets, so "We keep coming back and coming back / To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns / That fall upon it out of the wind." Tempted by powerfully concrete manifestations, "We seek / the poem of pure reality, untouched / By trope or deviation" (IX) and attempt to link word and object in a simple but impossible bond. But like seekers of real toads in imaginary gardens we can enter the metaphysical streets of physical New Haven, and through the imagination see real things more fully, more as themselves. "Juda becomes New Haven, or else must" (XI) because the "profoundest forms" are the product of metaphysical seeing. Only a town that could remind one of Juda and yet still be made of the most commonplace reality could satisfy Professor Eucalyptus, who looks for god in a shabby room in New Haven, whose pantheism suggests the aesthetic that rejects trope and would embrace the word as if embracing the thing itself: