"Art Is Not Life": R. S. Thomas And Wallace Stevens

I recently posted Wallace Stevens's "This Solitude of Cataracts," which begins with these four lines:

He never felt twice the same about the flecked river,
Which kept flowing and never the same way twice, flowing

Through many places, as if it stood still in one,
Fixed like a lake on which the wild ducks fluttered.

The third line perhaps shares an affinity with a poem by R. S. Thomas, who wrote more than a few fine poems about streams and rivers.

               Return

Taking the next train
to the city, yet always returning
to his place on a bridge
over a river, throbbing

with trout, whose widening
circles are the mandala
for contentment.  So will a poet
return to the work laid

on one side and abandoned
for the voices summoning him
to the wrong tasks.  Art
is not life.  It is not the river

carrying us away, but the motionless
image of itself on a fast-
running surface with which life
tries constantly to keep up.

R. S. Thomas, Later Poems (1983).

I haven't looked into what R. S. Thomas thought about Wallace Stevens, but I should.  Thomas did write a poem titled "Wallace Stevens," so he was familiar with his poetry.  This is the final stanza:

There was no spring in his world.
His one season was late fall;
The self ripe, but without taste.
Yet painfully on the poem's crutch
He limped on, taking despair
As a new antidote for love.

R. S. Thomas, "Wallace Stevens," in The Bread of Truth (1963).

"His one season was late fall."  Hmmm . . . I'm not so sure about that. Many of my favorite Stevens poems are indeed set in autumn.  But some might think of him as the poet of winter:  "The Course of a Particular" and, of course, "The Snow Man."  Or "deep January":  "No Possum, No Sop, No Taters."  And then there is March: "Vacancy in the Park" and "Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself."  And July:  "July Mountain."  As well as August:  "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts."

                                Pekka Halonen, "The River Bank" (1897)

"March . . . Someone Has Walked Across The Snow, Someone Looking For He Knows Not What"

Two of my favorite Wallace Stevens poems are set in March.  Stevens is a fine poet of winter (and of snow in particular).  He is equally fine when it comes to . . . well, the end of winter.  Here is the first of the two poems (the other will come in a few days).

                 Vacancy in the Park

March . . . Someone has walked across the snow,
Someone looking for he knows not what.

It is like a boat that has pulled away
From a shore at night and disappeared.

It is like a guitar left on a table
By a woman, who has forgotten it.

It is like the feeling of a man
Come back to see a certain house.

The four winds blow through the rustic arbor,
Under its mattresses of vines.

Wallace Stevens, The Rock (1954).

This poem was written when Stevens was in his seventies.  It was published the year before his death.  I have suggested previously that Stevens's late poems have a character that is quite different from his earlier work -- they are less ostentatious and abstract, more straightforward and emotional.  Yet, things are still approached at an angle -- you have to listen to the music and just let it sink in for a while.

                              Pekka Halonen, "Hare in Snow" (c. 1899) 

"No Possum, No Sop, No Taters"

Now, "in the bleak mid-winter" (to borrow from a Christmas poem by Christina Rossetti), let us once more turn to that poet of winter, Wallace Stevens, and to a poem of his set in "deep January."

          No Possum, No Sop, No Taters

He is not here, the old sun,
As absent as if we were asleep.

The field is frozen.  The leaves are dry.
Bad is final in this light.

In this bleak air the broken stalks
Have arms without hands.  They have trunks

Without legs or, for that, without heads.
They have heads in which a captive cry

Is merely the moving of a tongue.
Snow sparkles like eyesight falling to earth,

Like seeing fallen brightly away.
The leaves hop, scraping on the ground.

It is deep January.  The sky is hard.
The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.

It is in this solitude, a syllable,
Out of these gawky flitterings,

Intones its single emptiness,
The savagest hollow of winter-sound.

It is here, in this bad, that we reach
The last purity of the knowledge of good.

The crow looks rusty as he rises up.
Bright is the malice in his eye . . .

One joins him there for company,
But at a distance, in another tree.

Wallace Stevens, Transport to Summer (1947).

For many years, Stevens vacationed in Florida in order to escape the New England winters.  In January of 1940, he wrote to a friend who lived in the South:  "How happy you all seem to be down there; how you go on living in a land of milk and honey, or, to be more exact, possum, sop, and taters."  Peter Brazeau, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered (1983), page 109.

                                    Pekka Halonen, "Winter Day" (1910)

Two Chinese Snow Poems

Although I am mindful of the inevitable dangers of translation, I enjoy reading Chinese poetry -- in particular, the great poets of the T'ang Dynasty (618-907): Wang Wei, Po Chu-i, Tu Fu, and Li Po.  In recognition of the season, I offer two snow poems.  The translations are by Burton Watson, who, along with Arthur Waley, provided me with an introduction to Chinese verse.

The first poem is by Po Chu-i (772-846):

                         Night Snow

I wondered why the covers felt so cold,
and then I saw how bright my window was.
Night far gone, I know the snow must be deep --
from time to time I hear the bamboos cracking.

                                 Pekka Halonen, "Talvimaisema" (1917)

The second poem is by Liu Tsung-Yuan (773-819):

                              River Snow

From a thousand hills, bird flights have vanished;
on ten thousand paths, human traces wiped out:
lone boat, an old man in straw cape and hat,
fishing alone in the cold river snow.

                             Pekka Halonen, "Winter Landscape" (1919)