Old orations of the cold
Poetry isn’t my thing really. But it does one thing prose rarely does � and that’s become part of my everyday language, even if it’s a Tourette’s-like utterance out of nowhere:
The time of year has grown indifferent.
Mildew of summer and the deepening snow
Are both alike in the routine I know.
I am too dumbly in my being pent.
That was the first stanza of Wallace Stevens� The Man Whose Pharnyx was Bad, from his first collection of poems Harmonium, published in 1923 when the poet was already 44 years old. It’s his Ode to Dejection, I suppose.
I�m reminded of it again by Mark Ford�s [abridged] TLS review of two new books on Stevens. He calls him “dandyish, awkward, epicurean [and] intensely private”. I can believe it. His unforgettable letters also express this intensity � an extraordinarily luxourious sensibility cornered by other needs inside a dead marriage and a buttoned-up, friendless daily life. But this didn�t stop him producing some persistently joyous public objects: what we called poems.
And for what, except for you, do I feel love?
Do I press the extremest book of the wisest man
Close to me, hidden in me day and night?
In the uncertain light of single, certain truth,
Equal in living changingness to the light
In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest,
For a moment in the central of our being,
The vivid transparence that you bring is peace.
Other SpikeMagazine.com posts of interest:
- The man whose larynx wasn’t so bad
- Against Oblivion It�s not often a book of liter…
- No title Literature is the last thing on our mi…
- John Peel is dead
- Critchley on poetry
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