6) “The Hermitage at the Center”
“V. Doubts about Change”
“The Hermitage at the Center”¹ provides a representative occasion for noting how a poem by Stevens that has puzzled critics becomes clear once the connection between The Rock and Scepticism and Animal Faith is recognized. Most critics acknowledge that “The Hermitage at the Center” is two poems, one consisting of the first lines of the tercets and the other composed of the last two lines of the tercets ( I have added the bold emphases):
The leaves on the macadam make a noise —
How soft the grass on which the desired
Reclines in the temperature of heaven —Like tales that were told the day before yesterday —
Sleek in a natural nakedness,
She attends the tintinnabula —And the wind sways like a great thing tottering —
Of birds called up by more than the sun,
Birds of more wit, that substitute —Which suddenly is all dissolved and gone —
Their intelligible twittering
For unintelligible thought.And yet this end and this beginning are one,
And one last look at the ducks is a look
At lucent children round her in a ring.
But after agreeing about the structure of the poem, critics go on to vary widely in their interpretations of the poem: saying that it concerns Stevens’ recurring female figure, for example, or positing a clash between varying seasons or moods or views of art.² Whatever the case, once the connection between Scepticism and Animal Faith and The Rock is recognized, speculation can be set aside. “The Hermitage at the Center” concerns belief in change.
As its title suggests, Santayana’s fifth chapter treats “Doubts about Change.” It is one thing, he says, to have a feeling of change but quite another to extrapolate from that a belief in change. Santayana finds two ways to challenge belief in change. These two ways correspond to the two poems within “The Hermitage at the Center.”
The first challenge to belief in change follows from the fact that all a sceptic might ever be concerned with is a single, discrete, present moment. Unfortunately, over-eager minds are unwilling to accept the sui generis quality of the present moment and add arbitrary and subjective contexts, so that the present itself is converted into the present-which-is-no-longer-the past or the present-which-is-about-to-become-the-future. Strictly speaking, according to Santayana, these illusory contexts are not to be found in the present moment in the discreteness of which “there is no avenue to past or future” (29).
The poem of the first lines refers to this:
The leaves on the macadam make a noise —
Like tales that were told the day before yesterday —
And the wind sways like a great thing tottering —
Which suddenly is all dissolved and gone —
And yet this end and this beginning are one
The first two lines convey the idea of seeing the present moment in terms of an avenue from the past (an “end”), and the next two lines as an avenue to the future (a “beginning”). But these are the extrapolations of an over-eager mind. Remove these illusory and subjective contexts and we return to the present as a single, discrete moment.
The second way Santayana exorcizes belief in change follows from this. Once the sceptic realizes that “the past” and “the future” are illusory notions imported by an over-eager mind unwilling to accept the present moment as it is, then all he need do is remove those eager conditions within himself that give rise to these subjective additions. Feelings of regret breed the notion of the past. Feelings of anxiety spawn the illusion of the future. To become immune to belief in change, Santayana says, all a sceptic need do is extirpate any vestige of regret or anxiety that leads to these subjective projections. In a word, the sceptic needs to become detached. He must become a poised spectator who can simply watch what unfolds. In that way, Santayana adds, what the spectator observes takes on a particular, aesthetic quality:
They become pictures of motions and ideas of events: I no longer seem to live in a changing world, but an illusion of change seems to play idly before me, and to be contained in my changelessness. This pictured change is a particular quality of being, as is pain or a sustained note. (30)
Stevens provides an example of this dreamy prospect in the poem composed of the last lines of the tercets:
How soft the grass on which the desired
Reclines in the temperature of heaven —Sleek in a natural nakedness,
She attends the tintinnabula —Of birds called up by more than the sun,
Birds of more wit, that substitute —Their intelligible twittering
For unintelligible thought.And one last look at the ducks is a look
At lucent children round her in a ring.
Stevens achieves here “the temperature of heaven,” the sustained equanimity that Santayana said exorcizes belief in change. The poem’s narrator allows “an illusion to play idly before him.” The quality of this picture, Santayana has said, is like “a sustained note”; and it may have been this phrase which lead Stevens to recall that he already articulated ideas similar to these in the musical metaphors of his poem “Peter Quince at the Clavier.”
Like Susanna in that earlier poem, the female here is in a heavenly indolence. And like Susanna, she listens not to the birds of this world, but to their more lyric substitutes that make much music within her; she attends to the galvanic and interior tintinnabula they evoke. This is the posture of the detached spectator who “no longer seems to live in a changing world” but in a world where he idly watches the play of illusions before him, so that “a look at the ducks” becomes a dreamy vision of a heavenly female surrounded by lucent children.
In his chapter, then, Santayana challenges belief in change from two directions. In one case, life consists of single, discrete moments once we remove the superfluous contexts of past and future. In another way, belief in change is exorcized when life is regarded as one, continuous dream. Stevens takes up these two positions in the two poems within “The Hermitage at the Center.”
As his chapter comes to an end, Santayana notes that these two challenges to belief in change constitute a “dialectic”: to insist on the present moment is to deny there is a substratum where moments are linked, while to insist on a unific substratum prevents any individuation necessary for change from one moment to another. Here may be the explanation for Stevens’ unusual structure. The two poems alternate as if engaged in a conversation with each other (the classical meaning of “dialectic”), presenting the twin ways the sceptic dismisses belief in change.
In his conclusion, Santayana adds one final observation. While the sceptic frames his disbelief in change in terms of the dialectic described above, the mystic goes him one better by simply denying change in a single assertion that “all is One” (32). Santayana’s mystic may, in fact, be the inhabitant of Stevens’ “Hermitage at the Center” — a poem where dual arguments are presented, to all appearances, as one.
Notes.
- The index to The Collected Poems provides an alternate spelling to the last word: “The Hermitage at the Centre.”
- Some critics have approached the poem in terms of its female figure, linking her to other females in Stevens’ poetry: “She would seem another of Stevens’ figures for the imagination,” writes Richard Allen Blessing, “a midsummer, naked, fictive queen whose power transforms the ducks into ‘lucent children’ in an ordered and perfect ‘ring’” [Wallace Stevens’ “Whole Harmonium” (Syracuse, 1970), 152]. William Burney, however, sees her less as a faerie queen than as a doddering human: “The mother is reduced from her summer fullness to ‘a great thing tottering’: but step by step with her realistic reduction, the imagination focuses on her human eminence until she is seen with ‘lucent children round in her in a ring’” [Wallace Stevens (New York, 1968), 165].
Other critics have seized on a contrast they perceive between the two poems within “the Hermitage at the Center.” Marjorie Perloff, for example, discovers an alternating vision of “death and life” in the “winter vision” of the first poem and “a spring vision” in the second [ “Irony in The Rock,” American Literature, XXVI (Nov. 1964), 338]. Blessing, I should add, finds different seasons: “We have Stevens’ winter mood and his summer mood juxtaposed” (152). And Henry W. Wells, abandoning seasons altogether, posits a harmonizing of two views of art, one sensuous and the other rational [Introduction to Wallace Stevens (Bloomington, 1964), 48].
I offer here only a selection of critical understandings of the poem. Even so, among the welter of opinions, there is one that comes close to understanding Stevens’ intentions in “The Hermitage at the Center”: Frank Doggett argues the poem of the first lines deals with flux, and the poem of the tercet’s second and third lines is an expression of permanence [Stevens’ Poetry of Thought (Baltimore, 1966), 52–54]. Doggett comes close to understanding Stevens’ actual intentions, I suggest, because of his wide familiarity with Santayana’s writings. For example, Doggett offers an interesting footnote (53, n. 23) linking the twittering birds in the poem (“Birds of more wit, that substitute [. . .] Their intelligible twittering / For unintelligible thought”) with Santayana’s description of “bird-witted empiricism” in Scepticism and Animal Faith (52).
