15) “Song of Fixed Accord”
“XVI. Belief in the Self”
On first glance, “Song of Fixed Accord” might seem a simple lyric about a cooing dove and the kind of light, impressionistic verse at home in Stevens’ early work in Harmonium. Seen in the context of Scepticism and Animal Faith, however, it becomes clear Stevens intends the poem to do something more. That may seem a stretch for some readers. Of those hesitant or recalcitrant folks, I make only one request: Consider the following (the last sentence of Chapter XVI) before reading the poem:
The self is a fountain of joy, folly, and sorrow, a waxing and waning, stupid and dreaming creature, in the midst of a vast natural world, of which it catches but a few transient and odd perspectives. (SAF 149)
In the five paragraphs of Chapter XVI, Santayana introduces belief in the “self” — by which he means something more physical than the transcendental ego present in intuition and more instinctual than the thinking mind evident in extended argument. The self is more primordial: “a natural psyche” continually worried about its existence in a sometimes uncertain world, “a living psyche” that welcomes or rejects events, a voluble creature that carries on a running dialogue (“full of trepidation, haste, terror, potentiality, and sweetness”) about the world (146–147).
Almost predictably, Santayana’s mention of a “psyche” seems to have sent Stevens off in the direction of Keats and his “Ode to Psyche” where–in a figure largely unprecedented in mythological history–the goddess is referred to as a “happy, happy dove.” In any event, this is where Stevens lands when he needs a figure for Santayana’s “self,” a passionate nature that accepts or rejects events, a dove greeting and bobbing as she welcomes the day:¹
Rou-cou spoke the dove,
Like the sooth lord of sorrow,
Of sooth love and sorrow,
And a hail-bow, hail-bow,
To this morrow.
The psyche is concerned to react to the world, Santayana explains, because she is an anxious creature who feels the “precarious conditions of [her own] existence” (147). Varying states of internal stress prompt the continuous chatter that bubbles up from the self, “a running mental discourse . . . employed in remembering, loving, and hating” (147). So anxious a being is, of course, a natural conservative; she seeks a fixed accord with the world, abhors novelty or surprise as a threat to her existence, and aims for the perfect adaptation or equilibrium between herself and her precarious circumstances.² As Stevens suggests about his similarly gendered dove, events are “heavenly” to her when they are “fixed,” “not subject to change,” and “ordinary”:
She lay upon the roof,
A little wet of wing and woe,
And she rou-ed there,
Softly she piped among the suns
And their ordinary glare,
The sun of five, the sun of six,
Their ordinariness,
And the ordinariness of seven,
Which she accepted,
Like a fixed heaven,Not subject to change…
Day’s invisible beginner,
The lord of love and of sooth sorrow,
Lay on the roof
And made much within her.
It is worth noting that, according to Santayana, the self can only be described “from without, scientifically, by behaviourist psychology.” “The critical approach from within” can only go so far before descending into the pathetic fallacies of “literary psychology” (148) — like, we might say, those human sentiments Romantic poets heaped upon the poor nightingale. Instead, a description of the self must stop short with just the notion that it is “a principle of steady life, welcoming or rejecting events” (149).³ And that is, of course, the way Stevens describes the dove in his poem, from the point of view of a behaviourist, from the outside, while acknowledging “the much within”⁵ but only in so far as it reveals a passionate nature (of sooth love and sorrow) that accepts or rejects events.
Santayana might easily have been describing Stevens’ dove when he wrote:
The self is a fountain of joy, folly, and sorrow, a waxing and waning, stupid and dreaming creature, in the midst of a vast natural world, of which it catches but a few transient and odd perspectives. (SAF 149)
Notes.
- One of the ways Stevens brings the coherence of a “book of poems” to The Rock is by his repeating motifs. Here we have the cooing dove. But consider his aviary: the “birds of more wit” in “The Hermitage at the Centre”; the accusatory blue-jay in “Madame La Fleurie”; a city’s “bird-nest arches” in “To an Old Philosopher in Rome”; the swallow that swoops unknowingly through our celestial figurations in the poem that precedes this one, “Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly”; and the important final poem of this book — a poem that is anticipated in “Prologues to What is Possible” with its mention of “some first thing coming into Northern trees” — “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself” where the first bird in the morning is a harbinger, just as it is in this poem where the dove is “day’s invisible beginner.” In this regard, others have pointed out to me, the Mourning Dove (the most common species in North America) becomes a “morning” dove.
- Santayana says the sole role of the self is to accept or reject what comes to it. In Chapter XVI, Santayana emphasizes existential rejection: he identifies shock as providing the most dramatic evidence of a self separate from objects (145–147); in a familiar example, he mentions a roof tile falling upon someone’s head. Stevens, however, emphasizes existential acceptance: here the self is busy like the poem’s dove in a “running mental discourse,” engaged in “a successive survey,” and adding “an adventitious order” (147) with its reports from five, six, and seven o’clock. In other words, the presence of the self becomes evident in its continued effort to normalize and make “ordinary” what it encounters.
- The “ordinary.” In Stevens’ second longest poem, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” the “eye’s plain version” of things (“the vulgate of experience”) is elaborated this way and that by a “never ending meditation” (CP 465) for some twenty-four pages (CP 465–489); while Stevens could only come up with “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” in his early career, here he rings changes on “an ordinary evening” in thirty-one substantial sections. In this extraordinary abundance, there is proof of the “self . . . snarling in him for discovery” (referenced in “Prologues to What is Possible”) which is given “privilege over the ordinary” (CP 516–517). This duality of “self” and the “ordinary” might be viewed as synonyms for Stevens’ more customary terms of the “imagination” and “reality.” Needless to say, The Rock vacillates along these axes, between “The Plain Sense of Things” (where the imagination is triumphant since even “the absence of the imagination had / Itself to be imagined”) and “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Things Itself” (a poem whose title suggest the polar opposite). The key word in “Song of Fixed Accord,” however, is “accepts”: the dove “accepts” ordinariness. Here, the self is far more limited and more along the lines of Santayana’s description of it as a physical and animal creature whose simple reactions are confined (from the point of view of the behaviorist) to acceptance and rejection, though she may invisibly make “much within her.”
- “Made much within.” My reading of the poem arises from Stevens’ apparent consideration of Santayana’s assertion that the self is observed from “without” by the behaviorist and that the approach from “within” can only go a limited way before it falls into the “much”-ness of pathetic fallacy (148). Others see the poem differently if — instead of a linking by means of a simile — there are two separate personas in the poem: the female dove and “the lord.” In that case, Phillip Beard has suggested that the lord may be the sun (an object rich with meaning in Stevens’ lexicon) and perhaps a figure for Reality that the dove bows to and chooses to accept. David Dilworth, however, argues that the lord is another, male dove: he bases his arguments on Eleanor Cook’s reading of the poem in Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens (Princeton, 1988), 310; and in that case, the poem describes a courtship that terminates with the observation that the lord “made much within her.” Finally, as the title of and observations within Cook’s book suggest, it’s possible that each these interpretations is correct and the Joycean genius of Stevens is to make them coterminous.
