Tonight I sat thinking for a bit and realized I had been reading ‘This Solitude of Cataracts’ all wrong, and searched my shelf for a copy of the poem I hadn’t read in years. Sure enough, I had it all wrong. There is the tendency to view it as a ‘disease of the week’ poem, to perceive it as depicting someone who suffered from a disease of clouding of the eye and wanted to maintain a sensory relationship to the natural world, seeing. It struck my memory that I had been denying the metaphor its full force.
What I never saw was the disease of cataracts being a metaphor for the protagonist's longing for a clouded vision. That Stevens chose this metaphor indicates his perception of the desire for blindness to be a common disease that comes naturally and not through persuasion and socialization. The imagery used near the end of the poem elaborates on the capricious, frivolous, and vain nature of this natural folly, "To be a bronze man breathing under archaic lapis." How much we seek out blindness like our lives depended on it! And stepping back Stevens is making a commentary on poetry itself, that it must be a prologue rather than a tableau, that to fix it in the time-image is to submit to the machinery of blindness.
4 comments:
fascinating poem and comments, Ian; I'd not read this till now.
About the bronze and lapis, by way of comparison, there's a passage in W.S. Merwin's long, early poem "East of the Sun, West of the Moon," where -- as one may construe it -- the mental realm is represented by a bejeweled palace where all natural phenomena, the evanscent world, is dissembled, represented by artful symbols, but not really palpably present. The world of art is, in its way, a world lifted out of reeing things that fade . . .
at any rate, many lovely lines and phrases in the poem.
oops -- that was d.i. (accidentally anon)
Haven’t read the Merwin poem, but Googling it (resulting in your ref being no. 7) it is based on a Norse love story for children and seems to critique art as myth-making. Merwin was of course much influenced by Stevens at the time. But just as Merwin’s poem supposedly critiquing art IS art, so the myth does not exist in fixed relation to truth or the absolute: myth lives and is transformed just like the world.
More on same: it's a very fine, and very mythological poem -- among my fave narrative poems in the old manner. There's surely influence of Robert Graves, and a very slightly archaic style handled well. That the poem could be interpreted as critique of art, is one layer of interpretation only, I'd say. It is also a thinking through / investigation / etc. The myth is a form of the Cupid and Psyche myth -- evolved in Christian/Euro folktale manner. The Eros (Cupid) figure in this version is a white bear. In another version I've seen (Irish folktale), he's a white fox.
I hadn't thought about Stevens' influence on Merwin, but that seems perhaps evident, I think you're right, in some early work. A kindred pleasing slight-elusiveness of reference, etc. Both were taking in French models . . .
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