The Poem as Act: A Way to Reconcile Presentational and Mimetic Theories

Abstract

elements. The mind is enclosed in physical space and bodily af fections, yet the physical space seems to become at the same time enclosed in an act of mind. The central function of the series of appositions is to re gather the physical qualities of light while extending the idea of lighting light into realm of metaphor where it will ultimately by paralleled to God's creative Fiat lux. The appositions progress from warmth, physi cal quaUty of Ught which nonetheless only comes to consciousness through the shawl metaphor, to power, term with both physical and spiritual qualities, to the spiritual realm where one acclaims a miraculous influ ence. (Notice also that the series moves from bare nouns to one modified by an adjective as the spiritual expansion involves the emotions, and that indefinite articles give way to definite one, suggesting how on the level of imagination various specifics share the determining influence. ) The fourth stanza introduces the second half of the poem by placing the miraculous influence back into the immediate scene. Here, now echoes EUot's phrase for the sexual incarnational presence of the word. Indeed this full acceptance and celebration of the immediate present is probably the single most important triumphant theme in modern poetry. And Stevens follows the exclamation with an exphcit reference to feeling in order to express the effect of the abstractions on the speaker's concrete self. But the celebration also moves in another direction. As Hegel tells us, the expres sions and now, so dear to empirical philosophy, are really quite abstract terms; they simply express mental state unless defined by physical coordinates. And this is precisely Stevens' point: here, now re fers to sense of presence, but one which is located at once in possible concrete room and in the act of forgetting empirical reaUties as one is car ried into an awareness that transcendent order is also present. Stevens is playing here with the metaphor of incarnation?an initial sense of sexual presence becomes also secular awareness that transcendent order enters the flesh and transforms it. The fifth stanza makes explicit the synthesis which the poem has been preparing and, through the ellipses, dramatizes the changes in mental ac tivity as the mind comes to recognize where it stands. The first two lines present the mind returning in casual way to the limits of abstraction (we