The First Eight Poems of “The Rock”

Abstract. “The Rock” (Wallace Stevens’ last book of poems) was inspired by “Scepticism and Animal Faith” (George Santayana’s single volume summary of his late philosophy). Each of Stevens’ twenty-five poems arises, more or less, from Santayana’s Preface or one of the twenty-seven chapters of the philosopher’s book. As examples indicate, Stevens’ method was to use the philosophers’ universal concepts and convert them into “particulars,” creating poems that provide specifics and illustrative examples of Santayana’s more general ideas.

Here follows a discussion of the first eight poems of “Rock” (CP 501–507) and the first part of “Scepticism and Animal Faith” (pp. v-x, 1–48).

1) “An Old Man Asleep”

“Preface” (to “Scepticism and Animal Faith”)

In the Preface to Scepticism and Animal Faith, Santayana makes some general remarks about his system and says the aim of his book is “[to] distinguish the edge of truth from the might of imagination” (x). His wish, he explains, “is to clear my mind of cant” (vi).

Stevens’ “An Old Man Asleep,” the first poem in The Rock, likewise pictures this removing of mental obstructions:

The two worlds are asleep, are sleeping, now.
A dumb sense possesses them in a kind of solemnity.

The self and the earth — your thoughts, your feelings,
Your beliefs and disbeliefs, your whole peculiar plot;

The redness of your reddish chestnut trees,
The river motion, the drowsy motion of the river R.

Going farther in the description of his system, Santayana makes four italicized remarks. The first of these is that “my system is not mine, nor new” but based on universal truths and the common sense views of laymen everywhere (v). In his poem, Stevens make a similar exclusion of the personal by using “your” five times to describe what has been put to rest.

Santayana’s second italicized remark is that his is “no system of the universe” (vi). So, Stevens says to the old man that what also sleeps are “your beliefs and disbeliefs, your whole peculiar plot.”

The third italicized remark that the philosopher makes about his system is that it is “not metaphysical” because Santayana objects to metaphysicians “materializing ideal entities . . . and dissolving natural things into terms of discourse” (vii). Stevens make the same exclusion when he tells the old man that what has also been put to bed is “the redness of your reddish chestnut trees” because “redness,” used in this fashion, is an ideal entity that has been materialized while the chestnut trees have been dissolved into terms of discourse.

The final remark that Santayana makes about his system is that it is “no phase of any current movement.” Using an arboreal metaphor (that Stevens seems to borrow with his chestnut trees), the philosopher observes that all philosophies “give glimpses of the same wood” (ix). Truth is universal, he says, though some thinkers mistakenly offer what is only local (viii).

The way Stevens takes up this last exclusion amounts to a play on Santayana’s word “movement.” What is also asleep, the poet says, is “the river motion, the drowsy motion of the River R.” What also sleeps, in other words, are localized versions of the truth when drowsy old men see rivers as drowsy too.

In his Preface, Santayana spells out what his system is not and Stevens, in the first poem of The Rock, likewise puts to rest what is personal, systemic, metaphysical, and local. Stevens’ Old Man may happily slumber with his beliefs and disbeliefs, along with the redness of his trees and his drowsy river, but Santayana insists — in a comment that seems to have provoked Stevens’ somnolent imagery — these notions “must be discounted in our waking life, when we come to business” (viii).

2) “The Irish Cliffs of Moher”

“I. There is no First Principle of Criticism”

After his Preface, Santayana turns in the next three chapters of Scepticism and Animal Faith to methodological issues. In the first chapter, he investigates whether philosophical criticism might begin at the beginning, with the origin of things (with atoms or monads, for instance) and proceed from there. Santayana, himself, believes we must begin wherever we are in media res and that “there is no source of things at all, no simpler form from which they are evolved, but only an endless succession of different complexities” (1). Nonetheless, the existence of “episodes of evolution” warrants an investigation of whether criticism might possibly begin with the discovery of first principles. Santayana offers three examples of “episodes of evolution”: “parents with children, storms with shipwrecks, passions with tragedies” (1–2).

In “The Irish Cliffs of Moher,” the second poem in The Rock, Stevens employs the philosopher’s first example and pictures the search for the origin of things in terms of child seeking his parent, his ultimate father:

Who is my father in this world, in this house,
At the spirit’s base?

My father’s father, his father’s father, his —
Shadows like winds

Go back to a parent before thought, before speech,
At the head of the past.

The next part of the poem is a bit of a shock and non sequitur. This backwards search, this hunt for the fons et origo, surprisingly ends with a famous Irish geographical landmark:

They go to the cliffs of Moher rising out of the mist,
Above the real,

Rising out of present time and place, above
The wet, green grass.

This is not landscape, full of the somnambulations
Of poetry

And the sea. This is my father [. . .]

The surprising and completely arbitrary choice of the Cliffs of Moher as the origin of things recalls Santayana’s observation that an argument from first principle resembles the arbitrary choice of postulates to construct a system in pure mathematics: “[any] set of axioms and postulates . . . may be posited in the air . . . but such a pure logic is otiose . . . [because it has] no necessary application to anything” (2).

If anything might be arbitrarily chosen as a first principle, one can imagine how, looking for an example, Stevens’ eyes landed on a postcard sent by his friend Jack Sweeney picturing those Irish cliffs, or so the poet seems to suggest in a letter (L. 769–770). Indeed, like any first principle arbitrarily chosen, the cliffs are (to use Santayana’s words) “posited in the air.” They are “Above the real, // Rising out of present time and place.” In fact, Stevens twice refers to them as “out of” and “above.”

And Stevens also reiterates Santayana’s idea that arbitrarily chosen first principles have “no necessary application to anything.” Stevens adds, “This is not landscape, full of somnambulations / Of poetry // And the sea.” In other words, the cliffs in the poem do not even possess a half relationship with existence like an amalgamation of imagination and reality, of poetry and the sea — for an example, think of the myth of Neptune.

But here the poem changes, signaled by “maybe,” as the transitive verb gives way to intransitive verbs:

[. . . ] This is my father or, maybe,
It is as he was,

A likeness, one of the race of fathers: earth
And sea and air.

The search for the origin of things, Santayana had concluded, is “merely a parabolic excursion into the realm of essence” (3). He says that first principles cannot be discovered “until they have long been taken for granted in the very investigation that reveals them” (2). So, by way of example, we might say that tracing causality backwards, one arrives at the First Cause; tracing motion backwards, the First Mover; and so forth.

The backtracking in Stevens’ poem (“My father’s father, his father’s father, his–”) ends here with a recognition of a genus: “the race of fathers.” The search for the origin of things is not advanced, reaches no conclusions, but returns to the idea of fatherhood per se in what Santayana describes as a “parabolic excursion into the realm of essence.” These mystical cliffs participate in the essence of fatherhood like other chosen first principles–for example, the basic elements of the pre-Socratic philosophers, “earth / And sea and air.”

A parabolic excursion into the realm of essence is an exercise in self-evidency, and the search for the ultimate father is arrested in the recognition of the essence of fatherhood. In this way, “The Irish Cliffs of Moher” resembles another poem by Stevens where he chides a drowsy old man (not unlike the one in the previous poem, “An Old Man Asleep”) for asking circular and self-evident questions: “Mother, my mother, who are you?” Stevens aptly titled that poem “Questions Are Remarks” — a title equally applicable to the parabolic exercise in self-evidency in “The Irish Cliffs of Moher.”

The second poem of The Rock, then, articulates the conclusion of Santayana’s first chapter that we cannot hope to discover the origin of things and begin philosophical criticism from there. Instead, we must begin wherever we are and start in media res.

3) “The Plain Sense of Things”

“II. Dogma and Doubt”

The announced intention of Scepticism and Animal Faith, “[to] distinguish the edge of truth from the might of imagination” (x), is linked in the second chapter with the sceptic’s attempt to distinguish facts from the gratuitous and mental contributions of beliefs. Santayana is concerned in this chapter with discovering how far he can go in dispensing with belief. In his corresponding poem, Stevens likewise means to discover the extent to which he can abandon imagination to arrive (as his title indicates) at “The Plain Sense of Things”:

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

Stevens admits that it is difficult to describe this state where the imagination is absent. He offers a number of tentative images meant to convey this absence, and their very plurality signals the poet’s reluctance to hazard any imaginative assertion that would evade the plain sense of things:

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

In truth, Santayana concedes, the sceptic can only go so far. Consider that when the sceptic casts doubt on the statement “If any child knew his father he would be a wise child,”¹ doubt falls on some point other than the axiomatic belief in the existence of fathers and children (8). Scepticism retains, in other words, a residual belief in facts: “[Belief] cannot be abandoned; it can only be revised in view of some more elementary [belief] which it has yet occurred to the sceptic to doubt” [9].

Stevens makes the same concession as his poem continues:

Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.

Though their vocabularies differ, the philosopher and the poet make the same point. In his effort to “distinguish the edge of truth from the might of imagination,” Santayana endorses the sceptic’s endeavor to separate beliefs from facts and dismiss those gratuitous mental additions; but that enterprise can only go so far because belief “cannot be abandoned,” only revised to some more elementary form. Likewise for Stevens, the effort to reach “the plain sense of things,” to dispense with the imagination, can only go so far because the imagination is always present in a residual way and even “the absence of the imagination had / Itself to be imagined.”

This inability to completely abandon beliefs does not mean the sceptic should throw up his hands in despair and abandon the enterprise. He must do the best he can. The mind is driven to seek the truth, the philosopher says, and “even if each of its efforts fails” [my emphasis], the mind must press forward while accepting the inevitable: “the brute necessity” [my emphasis]of some beliefs (10).

Stevens’ words echo Santayana’s. The desire in Stevens’ poem is to achieve “the plain sense of things,” but the inability to completely abandon the imagination makes it seem as if “a fantastic effort has failed” because “the absence of the imagination had / Itself to be imagined.” But some degree of imagination is always, to use Santayana’s words, a “brute necessity.” “All this / Had to be imagined,” Stevens concedes, “as an inevitable knowledge, / Required, as a necessity requires.”

Notes.

1. Santayana chooses an example that, we might note, recalls the father-hunting of Stevens’ previous poem, “The Irish Cliffs of Moher.”

4) “One of the Inhabitants of the West”

“III. Wayward Scepticism”

“One of the Inhabitants of the West” is, in my opinion, an unsuccessful poem. Its meaning remains obscure because the poem requires an extensive familiarity with Stevens’ lexicon, a knowledge of his stock-in-trade imagery that comes from reading a considerable number of his poems. In fact, “One of the Inhabitants of the West” provides a good example of the usefulness of Santayana’s book because without reference to Scepticism and Animal Faith, the poem would scarcely be intelligible. With that book in hand, however, we can gather what Stevens’ intentions were and recognize the poem’s shortcomings.

While in his previous chapter Santayana argues that scepticism can only go so far (in its effort to abandon belief and reach “The Plain Sense of Things”), in his third chapter he takes up when scepticism does not go far enough. The subject of this chapter is solipsism. In summary, Santayana admires the solipsist for his regimen of disbelief and for narrowing attention to the present moment. But he faults the solipsist for not being completely thorough in his disbelief, for reserving some favorite credence from sceptical scrutiny; Santayana has in mind, for example, the religious beliefs of Hinduism which are ready to dismiss everything as illusion but exempt a divinity, an all encompassing Brahma, from this critique. In the end, Santayana concludes that solipsism “is a violent pose, permitted only to the young philosopher, in his first intellectual despair” (17).

Santayana arrives at this conclusion by first explaining how ideas become beliefs when they are thought to impact the life of an individual. Ideas, in themselves, are innocent but when they evoke something like a self-interested response, those remote notions are taken as omens of something out there that may affect an individual’s wellbeing:

Ideas become beliefs only when by precipitating tendencies to action they persuade me that they are signs of things. . . . The belief is imposed on me surreptitiously by a latent mechanical reaction of my body on the object producing the idea; it is by no means implied in any qualities obvious in that idea. Such a latent reaction, being mechanical, can hardly be avoided, but it may be discounted in reflection, if a man has experience and the poise of a philosopher. (16)

The opening section of Stevens’ poem describes this situation Santayana speaks of, though it will take a bit of effort to tease out this recognition:

Our divinations,
Mechanisms of angelic thought,
The means of prophecy,

Alert us most
At evening’s one star
And its pastoral text,

When the establishments
Of wind and light and cloud
Await an arrival,

A reader of the text,
A reader without a body,
Who reads quietly:

Without reference to Santayana, it might not be clear that Stevens is presenting a situation where ideas are being converted into beliefs. With reference to the philosopher’s words, however, we can hear the echoes and gather what Stevens is about. Ideas are converted into beliefs, the philosopher says, when ideas are taken as “signs of things” because of a “mechanical reaction” of the body. This yields the introductory phrases of Stevens’ poem: “Our divinations, / Mechanisms of angelic thought, / The means of prophecy [. . .].”

Santayana commends the solipsist, it will be remembered, for dismissing those corporeal reactions that take ideas as omens and convert them into beliefs. The ideal solipsist, he says, is an “incredulous spectator” who merely watches but does not participate in the scene he observes (15). Turning to the poem, we can see a person whose “arrival” is awaited: “A reader of the text, / A reader without a body.”

He is “a reader of the text” because Santayana offer as one example of a solipsist:

a secondary mind fed on books [and no longer in touch with] objects of sense, . . . his denial of material facts [accompanied by assertions about] the absolute reality of his knowledge of them. This reality, however, will extend no farther than his information . . . . And his personal idea of the world, so composed and so limited, will seem to him the sole existence. His universe will be the afterimage of his learning. (19)

Stevens’ “reader of the text” is Santayana’s “secondary mind fed on books,” and he is also “a reader without a body” because such a person would thereby be immune to those mechanical reactions of the body that precipitate belief.

At this point, we encounter the second part of the poem which Stevens presents in quotation marks as the text that this bodiless reader, this model solipsist, reads:

“Horrid figures of Medusa,
These accents explicate
The sparkling fall of night
On Europe, to the last Alp,
And the sheeted Atlantic.

These are not banlieus
Lacking men of stone,
In a well-rosed two-light
Of their own.
I am the archangel of evening and praise
This one star’s blaze.
Suppose it was a drop of blood…
So much guilt lies buried
Beneath the innocence
Of autumn days.”

Again, it will require some effort to tease out Stevens’ meaning in this section, but Scepticism and Animal Faith provides a Rosetta Stone.

While Santayana commends the solipsist as an incredulous spectator who fixes his attention on the present moment, he faults the solipsist for cheating in his disbelief. A solipsist, he explains, dismisses all beliefs as illusions only to exempt his favorite credence from scrutiny. The solipsist thinks himself better than the hoi polloi with their vulgar beliefs, but it is only “by lopping everything else off” that he raises his own special dogma (Brahma, Pure Being, et al.) to a specious eminence.

Stevens takes up these ideas in an impossibly difficult way by referring to the constellation Perseus in the second part of the poem. The stars that form this constellation are like an outback (“banlieus”) populated by the men who were changed into stone by Medusa.¹ In the midst of this stellar abundance, the persona of the poem singles out the evening star for special praise. Here, in all its metaphoric obfuscation, is Santayana’s solipsist who belittles the beliefs of the vulgar (the minor lights of the outback) in order to praise all the more his chosen dogma (the evening star).

All this may seem somewhat clear with reference to Santayana, but there remains a great deal more which requires a familiarity with Stevens’ lexicon to puzzle out. For instance, the mention of “angelic thought” early in the poem refers in the poet’s lexicon to the imagination (the “necessary angel”); and when the poem’s persona styles himself an “archangel,” Stevens seems to mean that the solipsist has not denied all imaginings but singled out one special fancy of his own. And when the poem mentions the evening star, this may be Stevens’ way a referring to the solipsist’s concern with the present moment since that how Stevens uses the evening star in, for example, his poem “Martial Credenza”: “Itself / Is time apart, from any past, apart / From any future [. . .] The present close, the present realized” (CP 238).

The poem’s use of the constellation Perseus also seems curious. Such a choice may have been prompted by words and phrases Santayana employs when presenting his ideas in the chapter: “legends” (11), “the ring of Saturn” (13), “Athens” (13), “denizens of the twilight” (14), “nether gods” (14), “Erebus” (14) and those that recall the myth of Perseus and Medusa–”terrible apparition” (16) and ”lopping off” (18). Then, once we grasp that the intent of Santayana’s chapter is to identify the ways beliefs are superimposed upon reality, how perceptions are regarded “omens” when self-interest is implicated, we come to realize Stevens’ choice of the constellation Perseus concerns astrology more than astronomy.

It may only be with reference to Scepticism and Animal Faith that we can come to some understanding of the poem’s conclusion. Near the end of his chapter, the old philosopher offers his sage observation that solipsism is “a violent pose, permitted only to a young philosopher, in his first intellectual despair” (17). This may explain the concluding sigh of Stevens’ solipsist. His archangel praises the evening star and then adds in decrescendo: “Suppose it was a drop of blood… / So much guilt lies buried / Beneath the innocence / Of autumn days.”²

In truth, “One of the Inhabitants of the West” is a poem that stands only feebly on its own. The necessity for lexical parsing indicates that Stevens’ images are more idiosyncratic than obvious. And without reference to Scepticism and Animal Faith it might be impossible to detect that Stevens intended his third poem to dismiss solipsism as an admirable method that finally falls short.

Notes.

1. Medusa, the terrible apparition, anticipates “Madame La Fleurie” in the poem by that name which appears a few pages later in The Rock.

2. I am suggesting that the “archangel of evening” is praising the Evening Star, traditionally associated with Venus. But Venus is a pale-colored planet, so if the line “suppose it was a drop of blood” refers to it, then Saturn (aka “the red planet”) might seem a better choice; and Santayana does make passing mention in his chapter to the discovery of “the ring of Saturn” (13). A third possibility, well known to stargazers, is Hind’s Crimson Star which is a smoky red color and was memorably described by its discoverer (British astronomer J. R. Hind in 1845) as “like a drop of blood on a black field.”

5) ‘Lebensweisheitspielerei”

“IV. Doubts about Self-Consciousness”

Having made his methodological observations, Santayana turns in the next four chapter to exercises in scepticism; he is headed to his own ground zero from which he will then build up his system. In the fourth chapter of Scepticism and Animal Faith, he lays the groundwork for his dismissal of a belief in “self-consciousness,” which he defines as the ability to survey the movement of experience over time. Self-consciousness, Santayana demonstrates, rests on a belief in change. When he debunks faith in change in his next chapter, belief in self-consciousness will be shown to be groundless.

If the philosopher is to begin anywhere, Santayana argues as this chapter opens, he must start with what he first finds and what he finds first is experience. Later he may reason that experience is the spark caused by the interaction of self and environment, but scepticism requires that the spark itself must be his initial point of departure. It is wondrous that we find experience at all, Santayana observes, but equally wondrous is that experience seems to fade and lapse:

The fact of experience, then, is single and, from its own point of view, absolutely unconditioned and groundless, impossible to explain and impossible to exorcise. Yet just as it comes unbidden, so it may fade and lapse of its own accord. It constantly seems to do so; and my hold on existence is not so firm that non-existence does not seem always at hand and, as it were, always something deeper, vaster, and more natural than existence. (24)

This fading and lapsing of experience is pictured in the opening stanzas of Stevens’ corresponding poem, “Lebensweisheitspielerei,”¹ in terms of the setting sun:

Weaker and weaker, the sunlight falls
In the afternoon. The proud and the strong
Have departed.

Those that are left are the unaccomplished,
The finally human,
Natives of a dwindled sphere.

Stevens’ thesaurus-like exercise–weaker, falls, departed, left, finally, dwindled–seems to paint Santayana’s observation that just as experience seems to come, so, too, it may fade and lapse.

The assertion of self-consciousness arises from this observation of change, the philosopher argues. And the notion that change is taking place implies an assertion that we can rise above, as it were, and observe a series of moments that we believe to be taking place either in the world or in ourselves.

In the first case, we believe change is taking place in the world at large. We see a report of this kind in Stevens’ third stanza in his account of the natives’ feelings as the sun sinks:

Their indigence is an indigence
That is an indigence of the light,
A stellar pallor that hangs on the threads.

The natives’ feelings are seen as something independent of them (“Their indigence is an indigence”) and occurring at large (“a stellar pallor that hangs on threads”). In contemporary terms, we would say this free-standing and mythic indigence is the result of projection and hypostasis.

In the second case, change is believed to occur within ourselves. We may believe change has occurred, Santayana says by way of example, when we notice one sentiment give way to another or when feelings “[grow] more articulate or more complex” (26). This occurs in Stevens’ next stanza:

Little by little, the poverty
Of autumnal space becomes
A look, a few words spoken.

The feelings of transience brought on by the setting sun are set aside, as it were, and we turn to modulations wholly within. Gradual changes of an intramental kind give the world a certain “look” and issue as “a few words spoken,” as feelings of indigence “[grow] more articulate or more complex” (to use Santayana’s words).

Self-consciousness, then, rests on the assertion that we can survey the movement of experience: that we can monitor what we feel when change is believed to occur at large, and that we can monitor our feelings as we change from one mental state to another. That is what Stevens says in his last stanza:

Each person completely touches us
With what he is and as he is,
In the stale grandeur of annihilation.

And Stevens’ poem ends with this final turning down, a sublime nadir, “the stale grandeur of annihilation” because, as Santayana observed, this a feature of human experience:

Yet just as [experience] comes unbidden, so it may fade and lapse of its own accord. It constantly seems to do so; and my hold on existence is not so firm that non-existence does not seem always at hand and, as it were, always something deeper, vaster, and more natural than existence. (24)

Notes.

1. Jeff Garrett, my expert German-speaking friend, advises that “Lebensweisheitspielerei” is Stevens’ own neologism made from combining the German words for life + wisdom + joking. It might then be understood to mean: wisdom drawn from life, but in a joking way.

6) “The Hermitage at the Center”

“V. Doubts about Change”

Though any poem in The Rock might serve as an example, “The Hermitage at the Center”¹ provides a representative occasion for noting how close or how far literary critics have come in guessing the meanings of Stevens’ poems. To be sure, this may seem a bit unfair or ungracious; once the connection between The Rock and Scepticism and Animal Faith is recognized, Stevens’ intentions become clear and many prior efforts at explication seem moot.

Most critics recognize 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:

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.

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.’”² 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.’”³

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.⁴ Blessing, I should add, finds different seasons: “We have Stevens’ winter mood and his summer mood juxtaposed.”⁵ And Henry W. Wells, abandoning seasons altogether, posits a harmonizing of two views of art (one sensuous, the other rational).⁶

I offer here only a selection of critical understandings of the poem, but perhaps enough to suggest that scholarly opining is all over the place. Even so, among the welter of opinions, there is one that comes close to understanding “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.⁷ Doggett comes close to understanding Stevens’ actual intentions, I suggest, because of his wide familiarity with Santayana’s writings.⁸

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 a substratum where moments are linked, while to insist on a unific substratum prevents any individuation necessary for change from one 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 conclusion, Santayana observes that while the sceptic frames his disbelief in change in terms of the duality of dialectic, the mystic proceeds more simply and denies change in his single assertion that “all is One” (32). Santayana’s mystic may, in fact, be the inhabitant of Stevens’ “Hermitage at the Center” — a composition where dual arguments are presented, to all appearances, as a single poem.

Notes.

1. The index to The Collected Poems provides an alternate spelling to the last word: “The Hermitage at the Centre.”
2. Richard Allen Blessing, Wallace Stevens’ “Whole Harmonium” (Syracuse, 1970), 152.
3. William Burney, Wallace Stevens (New York, 1968), 165.
4. Marjorie Perloff, “Irony in The Rock,” American Literature, XXVI (Nov. 1964), 338.
5. Blessing, 152.
6. Henry W. Wells, Introduction to Wallace Stevens (Bloomington, 1964), 48.
7. Frank Doggett, Stevens’ Poetry of Thought (Baltimore, 1966), 52–54.
8. 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).

7) “The Green Plant”

“VI. Ultimate Scepticism”

In his previous chapters, Santayana has made clear the many beliefs and illusions that are imported into the given of the present moment. All a sceptic might ever be concerned with is the “pure image” of the present, but an over-eager mind supplies “the rashest presumptions” that place the discrete instant in contexts of time and change not indicated by the moment itself (35). Another of these presumptive contexts is “existence,” and in the sixth chapter of Scepticism and Animal Faith Santayana means to show how this belief also places the pure image of the present moment in external relations not suggested by itself.

Belief in existence is insinuated, the philosopher says, when the image of the present moment is reframed by gratuitous contexts prompted either by expectation or memory. In the first case, when we say something exists, what may be implied is our expectation that it will continue into the next moment. But, as Santayana explains, experience teaches us that this kind of expectation is hazardous: How many times have we expected such-and-such to occur and been disappointed? Santayana makes this point by employing a striking arboreal metaphor: “[What] if the imminent events for which animal sense is watching failed altogether, failed at the very roots, so to speak, of the tree of intuition, and left nothing but its branches flowering in vacuo? “ (36).

What is true of expectation is equally true of memory, after all, the philosopher observes, “The backward perspective of time is perhaps really an inverted expectation” (36).

Here is where Stevens’ “The Green Plant” enters. Stevens picks up Santayana’s arboreal metaphor and inverts it: instead of talking about trees about to bloom, he talks about trees that have already bloomed. And instead of talking about misguided expectation, he talks about the distortions of memory.

Silence is a shape that has passed.
Otu-bre’s lion-roses have turned to paper
And the shadows of the trees
Are like wrecked umbrellas.

The effete vocabulary of summer
No longer says anything.
The brown at the bottom of red,
The orange far down in yellow

What can be observed in these lines are the insinuations of memory; the elements of the absolute present are not seen in themselves but in terms of history. “Silence” becomes in the poem not simply a condition of the present but “a shape that has passed.” The roses and the trees are not just what they are but ghostly records of what has been. The time of year is not simply autumn but a time when “the effete vocabulary of summer / No longer says anything.” And the dyadic colors, we shall see, are likewise symptoms of a present distorted by the insinuations of memory.

Memory contaminates the given with subjectivity: “This fugitive existence I attach to something,” Santayana says, involves that thing with the fate of the observer “when this is no part of its true being” (38). Steven says as much in his third stanza when he admits that the autumnal images he has offered

Are falsifications from a sun
In a mirror, without heat,
In a constant secondariness,
A turning down toward finality

The ruined flowers and wrecked trees are “falsifications” because they are not true pictures of the present but distortions of it in terms of memory. They are not images of autumn in itself but of an autumn-that-is-no-longer-summer, a season refashioned in a subjective way as “a turning down toward finality.” They are reflections, as “in a mirror,” of the perspective of the observer. They are not pictures of the ding an sich but of a world filtered through self-interest “in a constant secondariness.”

But, Santayana insists, “This fugitive existence I attach to something . . . is no part of its true being.” And it should be possible, he indicates, to exclude these gratuitous additions and see the present moment as it is in itself:

Remove this frame, strip off all suggestion of a time when this image was not yet present, or a time when it shall be past, and the very notion of existence is removed. . . . [The present] lies simply in its own category. If a colour, it is just this colour; if a pain, just this pain. . . . The sceptic has here withdrawn into the intuition of a surface form without roots, without origin or environment, without a seat or a locus; a little universe, an immaterial absolute theme, rejoicing merely in its own quality. This theme, being out of all adventitious relations and not in the least threatened with not being the theme it is, has not the contingency nor the fortunes proper to an existence; it is simply that which it inherently, logically, and unchangeably is. (39)

Stevens follows these instructions and strips away adventitious contexts, and in the last stanza of the poem encounters the absolute present, “a little universe,” an “absolute theme,” in his vision of a green plant:

Except that a green plant glares, as you look
At the legend of the maroon and olive forest,
Glares, outside of the legend, with the barbarous green
Of the harsh reality of which it is part.

The vision of the forest has become a “legend” because the trees have been seen in terms of memory of what they once were, in terms of their history. Remove those superfluous addition, however, the philosopher says, and we see the thing simply as it is: “If a colour, just this colour . . . .” Once Stevens strips away these insinuations, the forest can be seen in the colors it is (“the maroon and olive forest”). This is different from the same forest when seen by a narrator whose sorrow about summer’s loss and anxiety about winter’s approach yields a vision of dyadic colors which smacks of nostalgia and premonitions of decay: “The brown at the bottom of the red, / The orange far down in the yellow.”

Then there is the green plant. The ding an sich. The present moment all by itself which glares outside of the “legend” of the forest when the trees were reshaped by self-interest and projection. Strip away these adventitious additions, Santayana had said, and we have an image that “lies simply in its own category. If a colour, it is just this colour. . . . A little universe, an immaterial absolute theme, rejoicing merely in its own quality.” We have, in other words, Stevens’ green plant that “glares, outside the legend, with the barbarous green / Of the harsh reality of which it is part.”

8) “Madame La Fleurie”

“VII. Nothing Given exists” (draft jg)

In the previous chapter, Santayana dispenses with the empiricist’s dubious assertion of material existence; instead, an object must be taken as given, as pure image. In Chapter VII, he goes a step further and questions whether the image, itself, may be said to exist. But Santayana rejects that assertion because presence of an idea in the mind is no warrant of its existence.

Santayana finds the idealist’s position illogical because it posits that existence is limited to what we can conceive. Such a contention, he points out, reverses the natural supremacy of the world to our ideas about it. As an example of how the world has precedence over our ideas, Santayana notes how “the event of my death” overrules “my present expectation of some day dying” (47). That is the way of the world, he concludes, to “enact itself ignorantly and successively, and carry down all ideas of it in its own current” (48).

Here is where the funereal “Madame La Fleurie” begins:

Weight him down, O side-stars, with the great weightings of the end.
Seal him there. He looked in a glass of the earth and thought he lived in it.
Now, he brings all that he saw into the earth, to the waiting parent.
His crisp knowledge is devoured by her, beneath a dew.

The character in the poem commits the errors of the idealist, and Stevens suggests that in various ways. He “looked in a glass of earth” because he was attentive not to the earth itself but to the reflections of it in his mind; and he mistakenly “thought he lived in [this reflection]” because, Santayana had said by way of example, the idealist is like a novelist who believes the characters in his book are real and that he lives in their world (45–46). He has not properly acknowledged that the earth is “parent” to his ideas about it; so, the parent devours his “crisp knowledge” about her. The world is superior to our ideas of it, carrying “down all ideas of it in its own current” (Santayana) in “the great weightings of the end” (Stevens).

Stevens’ dirge continues:

Weight him, weight, weight him with the sleepiness of the moon.
It was only a glass because he looked in it. It was nothing he could be told.
It was a language he spoke, because he must, yet did not know.
It was a page he had found in the handbook of heartbreak.

It is “the sleepiness of the moon” because, in Stevens’ lexicon, the moon is associated with the false notion (see “The Note of Moonlight”) that “being is to be observed” (CP 531). There “was nothing he could be told” because he believed his ideas defined the world, and the extent of his imagination were taken as the limits of existence. And as for the “language he spoke . . . yet did not know,” since he made facts and events subordinate to his words for them, he did not comprehend that facts and events far exceeded his vocabulary. Finally, like the novelist living inside his novel, Stevens’ persona was more involved in a page of “the handbook of heartbreak” than in heartbreak itself.

One of the strongest pieces of evidence of the world’s transcendent relation to our ideas of it is, Santayana had said, was how the event of death supersedes any ideas about it. So, in the concluding stanza, in funereal circumstances, the world (the lovely named “Madame La Fleurie”) reveals herself to be a “bearded queen” and devouring monster.¹ With the approach of death, the correct relationship of the earth to the persona’s ideas about it will be reestablished:

The black fugatos are strumming the blacknesses of black…
The thick strings stutter the finial gutturals.
He does not lie there remembering the blue-jay, say the jay.
His grief is that his mother should feed on him, himself and what he saw,
In that distant chamber, a bearded queen, wicked in her dead light.

With the dirge playing in the background, the character in the poem discovers that the world need not beg leave of him and his ideas to exist; Nature exercises her power over him, bringing death. To idealists, Santayana says, nature “seems a truly monstrous excrescence, . . . ravishing them first and betraying them afterwards,” because it first evokes ideas about it, then indifferently crushes them and their author.

In his illustration of Santayana’s recognition that the earth overrules ideas about it, taking a clue from Santayana’s observation that the event of his own death takes precedence over any ideas he might have about it, Stevens presents a phaedo that anticipates another phaedo in the poem that follows. In “To an Old Philosopher in Rome,” Stevens’ subject is the dying Santayana.

Notes.

1. “Madame La Fleurie” is often compared to Keats’ “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” Both poems feature a male narrator who encounters a supernatural female who, to rephrase Santayana, ravishes them first and betrays them afterwards.

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