Wrestling Wallace Stevens

Stevens's obscurities have kept me occupied, on and off, for over thirty years. In my early twenties, at night, at my desk in an insurance office (no less), I read and re-read The Collected Poems until my head ached and my sight blurred (I was supposed to be working on my accounts). If only I could cut my way through this forest of words! Stevens had set his traps for someone like me: young enough to believe that, by means of some magic--whether black or white did not matter--I could tame those poems, conquer them, and come, at the last, to know what they "truly meant." Fortunately, I never became so desperate in my desire to "master" the master as to consider returning to graduate school to study English literature. That would have been the end of reading. To this day, then, Stevens comes to me by night, at Jabbok's ford, and we wrestle until dawn. He has wounded me again and again and named me again and again. And when night falls, I continue to turn my eyes to the blackening sky and listen for his words:

A blue pigeon it is, that circles the blue sky,
On side-long wing, around and round and round.
A white pigeon it is, that flutters to the ground,
Grown tired of flight. Like a dark rabbi, I
Observed, when young, the nature of mankind,
In lordly study. Every day, I found
Man proved a gobbet in my mincing world.
Like a rose rabbi, later, I pursued,
And still pursue, the origin and course
Of love, but until now I never knew
That fluttering things have so difficult a shade.

(Section XII of "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle," from Harmonium).

Learning to see with both eyes (something I suspect Stevens was pointing us towards) is an important Akbarian trope. Stevens could not have known that, of course; it does not matter: he intuited it.