My Stevens: Believing As If

Abstract

My Stevens:Believing As If Tracy K. Smith I'd like to look at four of Stevens' poems and explain in a few words how they appeal to me. The first is "Metaphors of a Magnifico." As I descend into this poem, Stevens' gorgeous metaphor of "Twenty men crossing a bridge, / Into a village" is refracted as a way of illustrating the different directions our imaginings might lead, simultaneously (CPP 15). And it resists "declar[ing] itself" as a way of saying that the metaphor itself is alive, willful, rife with motives that belong only to itself. These men that were merely an idea, an illustration, have somehow managed to become real men, with sweat under their collars and holes worn through the bottoms of their boots. Ultimately, the poem teaches me that what matters is where the image insists upon going. We get two reminders that this metaphor of men crossing the bridge "will not declare itself," and then we get a pretty explicit admission that the metaphor has taken on a life of its own: "Of what was it I was thinking? / So the meaning escapes" (CPP 16). It reminds me of words attributed to Robert Browning that go something like this: "When that poem was written, two people knew what it meant—God and Robert Browning. And now God only knows what it means."1 The "meaning," if that is still what interests us by this point in the poem, has taken things into its own hands. But what ultimately becomes real in the poem are the men and their boots, and the fruit trees peeking over the tops of the village wall. The metaphor that was set into play becomes the only thing. It becomes actual. A move like this in a poem reminds me, when I write, that the most important thing for me to do is not to know where or why things are going, but to believe in them as if they are real, to cross the bridges and enter into the cities and listen to the boots and handle the fruits incredulously before trying with my mind to taste them. My second poem is "Six Significant Landscapes," in particular the first section about the "old man" who "sits / In the shadow of a pine tree / In China" (CPP 58). Since Stevens never left the U. S. except for trips to Canada or the Caribbean, I find it significant each time his poems cross out of our borders, even briefly. This poem opens in China, which I read as a willed leap of the speaker's imagination. This old man and his pine tree could be anywhere, but I think that for Stevens the act of pulling or pushing [End Page 133] his speaker to a place that was foreign to Stevens himself is supremely important. The poem gives him access to an observation or experience—a perspective—that real life denied his real self. When a poet steps out of him- or herself, I believe he steps into something with the potential to be truer, larger, more perceptive and empathetic. Something like that is enacted here, and I see it very explicitly in the lines "I measure myself / Against a tall tree. / I find that I am much taller" (CPP 59). And this kind of stretch of the self gives way to some of the poem's most beautiful images. I think it is merely the deftly imagined images running through this poem—an order of image that actually had the ability to add permanently to the dimensions of my own imagination—that speak most to me. The next poem we come to is "The American Sublime." Each stanza in this poem sets up a kind of parallel structure, so that I read the first line or two as a kind of heightened and earnest counter to the more self-conscious or earthbound lines that follow: "How does one stand / To behold the sublime," against "The mickey mockers / And plated pairs" (CPP 106), and the briefly ennobled General Jackson posing for his statue against the idea of going "barefoot / Blinking and blank" or the unembellished, searching question, "But how does one feel...