How the Sun Came Shining: Stevens and Wilbur on Waking Up

Abstract

Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light. EPHESIANS 5:14, KING JAMES VERSION In poems written throughout their careers both Wallace Stevens and Richard Wilbur use venerable tradition associating the sun with spiritual or intellectual enlightenment (the pun is nearly inevitable), and both recognize autonomy--freedom of the self--as an aspect of enlightenment. Two important examples of these poems, Stevens's Latest Freed Man and Wilbur's Love Calls Us to the Things of This World, combine the image of sunrise with the image of man waking up in order to examine the relationship between human knowing and human responsibility in the world. The question addressed by each poem is how the sun [comes] shining. (1) Despite employing similar images, the two poets start from substantially different epistemological assumptions that lead them to correspondingly different anthropological conclusions. Below I develop detailed readings of both poems as means of understanding the importance of these differences. Before turning to Stevens and Wilbur, will be useful to sketch the tradition they inherit, first in pre-modern synthesis summarized by the Dutch Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck, and then in modern versions expressed by Immanuel Kant and Henry David Thoreau. Bavinck concisely reviews the pervasiveness of sunlight as an epistemological image: Plato clarified ... scientific process [that is, knowledge confirmation] by means of beautiful and striking image. Just as the sun objectively illuminates the object and subjectively the human eye, so God, or the idea of the good, is the light by which the truth or essence of things becomes visible and by which at the same time our mind is able to see and recognize the truth. Augustine adopted this image and said, God is the sun of minds. In the unchangeable light of truth, our mind sees and makes judgments about all things. ... Just as with the physical eye we cannot see anything unless the sun sheds its rays over it, so neither can we see any truth except in the light of God, which is the sun of our knowledge. (2) Bavinck goes on to paraphrase St. Thomas Aquinas, who employs the same idea: just as we look into the natural world, not by being in the sun ourselves, but by the light of the sun that shines on us, so neither do we see things in the divine being but by the light that, originating in God, shines on our intellect. Reason in us is that divine light; is not itself the divine logos, but participates in it (232) (3) (Stevens alludes to Aquinas as doctor of the church in Latest Freed Man.) Bavinck's dense summary tacitly endorses pre-modern Western cultural syntheses of classical and Christian notions, touching on several traditionally recognized tensions that remained under scrutiny during the early twentieth century: that between and object, that between the invisible (reality, the Kantian noumena) and the visible (appearance, the Kantian phenomena), that between spiritual and physical, and so on. Bavinck's summary ofWestern tradition comes near the end of chapter that questions the epistemological priority given to autonomous reason. The chapter closes by affirming creation as a beautiful and by insisting that human reason functions reliably because of correspondence or kinship between object and subject (233) (4) Significantly, he cites the Belgic Confession as the immediate source of his phrasing: world is an embodiment of the thoughts of God; is 'a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God' (art. 2, Belgic Confession) (233). His reliance on the authority of creedal document resists the modern (Enlightenment) preference for intellectual autonomy favored by Kant (among others). It will be useful to let Bavinck's comments direct our attention to Kant's best-known recommendation of autonomy in An Answer to the Question: 'What is Enlightenment? …