Pagan Poetics in “Sunday Morning” by Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was an ungainly insurance executive, but his poetry is serene and secularly reverential. In particular, his poem “Sunday Morning” seems to suggest that the rhythm of the natural world—if we give it enough rapt attention—is as good as any chant or prayer. But can a return to nature worship solve the problem of nihilism, once monotheism has been eclipsed by modernity? Are memory and desire as permanent heaven, and can the poet become their high priest? “Sunday Morning” is a poetic dialogue about these questions. And whether or not we’re satisfied with its conclusion that the world is nothing more than an “old chaos of the sun,” the poem itself is an orderly and beautiful form of communion. Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, MasterClass, where you can learn from the world’s best minds–anytime, anywhere, and at your own pace. This holiday, give one annual membership and get one free by going to masterclass.com/subtext. 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And can the poet become their high priest? Sunday Morning is a poetic dialogue about these questions and whether or not we're satisfied with its conclusion, that the world is nothing more than an old chaos of the sun. The poem itself is an orderly and beautiful form of communion. This is Wes Alwan. 0:59 Erin: This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. 1:04 Wes: So, Erin, to make ends meet, if you ended up getting a job, let's say as an insurance executive, maybe at the Hartford Accident Indemnity Company. It's a cool sounding name, right? 1:16 Erin: I had an internship there. 1:17 Wes: Are you serious? 1:19 Erin: No. 1:20 Wes: Oh, my God, how naive I am. All right, well, I guess it's within the realm of possibility. You are from Connecticut, but I was going to try to make a joke about being attentive to risk or something, but anyway, no. So if you get a lucrative job, let's say paying $350,000 a year in today's salary. Today's money. But then you also became a Pulitzer Prize winning poet. I like the alliteration in that. Pulitzer Prize winning poet. Would you be tempted to quit your job or would you just, like Wallace Stevens, keep that job forever and ever? 1:57 Erin: I would keep the job because of my expensive interest in lifestyle. 2:06 Wes: Interest in money is stronger than my interest in poetry. 2:09 Erin: That's right. No, actually, realistically, I would 100% quit the job. I wouldn't be in a job like that in the first place. But it's kind of. Yeah, it's kind of amazing to think that he was maybe America's most practical. Certainly like the most practical modernist. Well, there was Williams, who was a doctor, but that's a lot different than being an insurance man. So I think that speaks to, like, the mystery at the heart of Steven's personality. I feel like I can't quite figure him out. I can't figure out the marriage. Certainly maybe I can, and I just don't want to figure it out like that. He was just like unhappy in his marriage and it was boring and he kind of didn't know what to do. Yeah, but, yeah, it's odd. 2:51 Wes: He's an interesting character because apparently he was very sto, too. So his boss once said, unless they told me he had a heart attack, I never would have known he had a heart. Ooh. So apparently he was quite a reserved person. Unless he was drinking, in which case he would get in fights with Frost and Hemingway. Once I actually got into a fist fight with Hemingway. These sorts of things happen while he's on vacation in Key West. But otherwise quite reserved. The kind of guy who composed poems on scraps of paper while walking to work. And then asked his secretary to type them up. He also turned down a. After he won the Pulitzer Prize, he was offered a faculty position at Harvard, which he turned down because it would have meant quitting that job. So the background that I got on him, I didn't ever get a firm. It must be somewhere, because he has journals and prose writings as well. I imagine somewhere he must have said why it is he kept the job. But you can kind of see it in his poetry. There's this sort of commitment to reality, maybe, let's say, and to the concrete. And he seems like the person who might have become unmoored without the day job, without being able to be locked down by that. Because there's also a very expansive quality to his poetry. And the tendency towards abstraction. And this weird balance between that expansive tendency and being anchored in sensuous detail and concrete detail. 4:24 Erin: I think that's really right. How I understand him is as a guy who just lived for his vacations. But, yeah, I think that tethering that you're describing is probably really apt. Michael Hofmann, the great poet critic who's one of my professors at University of Florida. He had, like, a really. Just an amazing character analysis of all of all the poets that we've read, of course, which, of course, is very much in evidence in his reviews. He's famously perceptive, but he thought of Stevens as being this, like, big, fat guy who loved life and loved. Like. Loved to eat and loved, you know, loved all those kinds of sensuous pleasures. So that makes him seem kind of jolly too. But there's, like, a dark side to that as well. But, yeah, you see that come out so much in Harmonium. And then you think, how could an insurance guy have written this? I don't know. It's crazy. 5:12 Wes: Yeah, exactly. So we should say for background. This was his first book, Harmonium, in which Sunday Morning appeared. It had appeared in Poetry, the journal poetry, in 1915, but didn't appear in a collection until 1923. And this is when Stevens was 44 years old. He had been writing poetry since he had been at Harvard and studied, I think, with William Carlos Williams. Is that right? No, studied with Santayana and apparently very influenced by Santayana's book, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. And then after he left Harvard, he was actually a writer in New York for a little while and then decided to do something practical. Went to law school and then ultimately got this job as an insurance executive, which he kept for the rest of his life. So, you know, I'm always fond of those late bloomer. It's not really Late bloomer story, but you'd always say, okay. He published his first book when he was 44 years old. So I guess he worked very consistently. And then he. Eventually he felt like he had enough to put together. The way he put it was he was picking a crisp salad from the garbage of the past. The way he put it to his editor when he put together Harmonium. 6:29 Erin: That's great. 6:31 Wes: There are a lot of great poems in that collection, including in the first publication, a pared down version of Sunday Morning with some stanzas missing and reordered by his editor, which is just, like, so shocking to think about. 6:44 Erin: I thought that was in Poetry. That was that Harriet Monroe. 6:48 Wes: You're right. 6:48 Erin: Yeah. 6:49 Wes: Wait. Yeah, the full thing appeared in Harmonium. Yeah. Sorry. Yes, that was the initial in Poetry. Right. Yeah. 6:55 Erin: Mm. 6:57 Wes: All right. So shall we get into Sunday Morning? 7:01 Erin: Let's do it. 7:02 Wes: We'll do our usual thing where we'll read a stanza and then talk about it. You want to start with the first one? 7:09 Erin: Sure. Sunday morning 1. Complacencies of the peignoir and late coffee and oranges in a sunny chair and the green freedom of a cockatoo upon a rug mingle to dissipate the holy hush of ancient sacrifice. She dreams a little and she feels the dark encroachment of that old catastrophe As a calm darkens among water lights. The pungent oranges and bright green wings seem things in some procession of the dead winding across wide water without sound. The day is like wide water without sound. Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet over the seas to silent Palestine, Dominion of the blood and sepulcher. 7:53 Wes: Beautiful. My experience of his poetry is, and especially this poem is immersively beautiful. What's your overall? 8:02 Erin: Yeah, it's beautiful. And it sometimes sort of resists being pinned down, like there is a lot of abstraction, like you say, you know, it's not rhymed, but it still reminds me, like, so much of this poem, of course, is probably heavily influenced by Keats. And so these sections, I noticed that they have 15 lines in them. They're like a sonnet plus, you know, sonnet plus one line, which is really nice. And then that puts me in mind of Keats's To Autumn, in which I think we talked about this. He sort of has that, like, overstuffed sonnet in each one of the stanzas of that poem. And yet. 8:35 Wes: And the ending, sorry, will sound like a direct variation to Autumn. 8:38 Erin: Right, right, right. 8:40 Wes: Stanza with the poem. 8:41 Erin: Yeah. With the birds. Yeah. Yeah. But there's still, at the same time, like, it's not, I don't know, firecrackery to me, as some of Keats. Like, there's a placid. 8:50 Wes: Oh, yeah. 8:50 Erin: You know, and a dreaminess, which I think is fitting for the subject. This opens with just a woman sitting in a chair, and she's sort of chillaxing on a Sunday morning, and her mind wanders and we sort of wander with her. There's a feeling of calm and it's troubled, like wind on the water at certain points, but very smooth kind of sound. 9:14 Wes: Just the first word. I really love. If you could say, well, what are the great first words of poems as opposed to the great first lines of poems? This has got to be one of them. So complacency, in the plural and whatever satisfactions are associated with sleeping in late and being lazy on a Sunday. And in this case, of course, not going to church, which is very significant. Relaxing in the sun. And there's kind of a hint of class and luxury with the peignoir and leisure. But there's also, in the word complacency, there's another connotation which is just that there's some sort of impending danger. Right. If you get too complacent, you might get. What's the word you might get? Smacked. I don't know. You might be surprised by something. Yeah. 10:00 Erin: That's really nice. And also the kind of. I think it combines so many senses, because also in complacency, there's a sense of, like you say, the negative sense that something might creep up on you, but also a smugness or a kind of self satisfaction. And the whole poem is about trying to take satisfaction from just the self or from just the qualities that are being offered right here in this opening image and to fashion some kind of existence out of that or some kind of higher order, which is a troubling project. 10:35 Wes: Yeah. 10:36 Erin: Causes a lot of hedging. 10:38 Wes: Yeah. I mean, we can Say if we want where we're headed, the poem will tell you explicitly too. It's not a matter of interpretation, but we're headed towards the attempt to establish a post Christian neo pagan religion to find some sense of meaning in the wake of that. The other thing that really draws me into the poem are the very charming rendition of coffee and oranges and the cockatoo. The green freedom of the cockatoo where I think of. In light of thoughts about religion and sin and knowledge of good and evil. There's a connotation of naivete to the greenness and freedom associated with naivety. Right. Pre lapsarian, pre self consciousness in animals. And the image I have is of the cockatoo having its wings out but walking, which is an interesting image because it's a bird that's been uncaged and there's freedom in that. But it's not using its full freedom. It's not flying. It's not exerting itself. It's sort of stumbling around in a comic way. At least that's the way I. Way I've always imagined it. 11:38 Erin: That's nice. I really like that. Yeah, that's the way I've imagined it too. But I never thought about the idea of extended wings because you want to get that nice swath of green. So the wings would have to be a bit extended. That's nice. 11:50 Wes: You know. And then we wonder about her freedom in relation to that. Right. There's a freedom to this level of leisure and satisfaction, the complacencies. But then isn't there. What kind of freedom? Is she uncaged? Isn't she? So. 12:03 Erin: Yeah. And these colors, you know, the oranges in the sun are orange and the lighter orange maybe are yellow and the brown of the coffee and the green of the cockatoo. She's thinking she's not free of this compulsion maybe to think of herself as doing something wrong here by not going to church. And they all dissipate the holy hush of ancient sacrifice. Do cockatoos make noises? I mean, they must like chirp and stuff like that. But they're not like parrots. 12:28 Wes: I was thinking about the same thing. Because the dissipation of the hush implies noise. Although I think it's visual noise and probably auditory noise as well. 12:37 Erin: Yeah. And it's sort of backwards. It's interesting. This florid color scheme is sort of matched by some kind of sound. Or maybe they're just really loud colors. Right. And what are they dissipating but silence. It's an interesting Usually silence is what dissipates in noise, but not the other way around. 12:53 Wes: Right? 12:54 Erin: Yeah. So there's something happy and exuberant about the image, erasing the sort of dour silence maybe. 13:02 Wes: Right. The hush involved in holiness. And of course, the ancient sacrifice, meaning Christ's crucifixion. Right. Mm. 13:12 Erin: It's as if the poem is narrating her a little bit, maybe. I mean, it's describing her, but also we get this holy hush of ancient sacrifice. And then, oh, she dreams a little and she feels the dark encroachment. 13:23 Wes: Right. 13:23 Erin: It's as if the poem has kind of punctured this or the scene, or maybe she has remembered it, been called back to what morning it is. And then she gets this flood of realization. Right. Oh, I'm not at church and now this old catastrophe is encroaching upon me. And so the old catastrophe is itself also the. The crucifixion. 13:45 Wes: Again, this sort of reminds me of Freud's there's no no in the unconscious. So she's thinking in a self satisfied way about how she doesn't need to be at church and this is all she needs. 13:56 Erin: Right, Right. 13:57 Wes: She's thinking about how she should be at a church and she's feeling guilty. 14:01 Erin: But yeah. And there's a kind of. I mean, there's so much doubling in this poem. But here already we get ancient sacrifice and old catastrophe. It's like it comes back around, you know, we're dissipating the ancient sacrifice. But yeah, like you say, we get it as a kind of a negative construction, like we're not thinking about this. And then again it comes up in like, oh, no, we are thinking about this. So it appears twice. Because her thoughts keep circling around and around throughout the entire poem. 14:26 Wes: Yeah. What induces the encroachment is this reverie that she goes into, which you would think the reverie would be the culmination of the satisfaction that she's feeling. Right. Relaxing, being in the sun, being in a state of pleasant reverie. And here it's more like an anxiety dream. Again, he uses the word dream, not daydream, not reverie. So there's some ambiguity as to her waking state. She's awake, but maybe it's closer to sleep than the average daydream. And then anxiety rears its ugly head and the catastrophe. So on the one hand it's the crucifixion. So catastrophe is an interesting word. I mean, it's got a negative connotation often. And in this case, so there's the catastrophe of Christ's suffering, of the killing of Christ. But of course on the other side of that is supposed to be salvation. 15:22 Erin: Right. 15:22 Wes: And then there's the more neutral description of just catastrophe in terms of the big turning point. Right. Historically there's BC and then there's AD that line. Things are very different on either side of it. And then of course there are other associated catastrophes, turning points that are parallel, like again the fall and then the development from animal sentience into human self consciousness. So again, it's an interesting encroachment because she's moving into a state of. In the dreaming of lower consciousness. And then it's consciousness, it's a higher level of consciousness and self consciousness that intervenes. 16:04 Erin: Well, you're making me think too that this almost predicts the end of the poem in a way, or the mere use of the term old catastrophe already contains within it the seeds of disbelief that will be sown over the course of the poem. Because it's really not a catastrophe if you're a Christian. 16:20 Wes: Right. 16:20 Erin: I mean, a catastrophe would be what, the murder, the killing of an innocent man, of a good man, but not someone who is then a God and is then. Right. Resurrected. And so it can only be a catastrophe, I think, if stripped of the resurrection as a concept. And the resurrection of course is what proves Christ's divinity. 16:39 Wes: Yeah. 16:40 Erin: So there's already a sense of like, if it's just a catastrophe, then Christ really isn't God. Yeah, it's already in that. 16:47 Wes: And if you're anti religious, as Stevens is, although it's a bit complicated ultimately. But the adventure of Christianity and its dominance of the world, including political dominance, is catastrophic. And you could point to religious war and everything that follows as well, if you're thinking in that anti religious vein. So it's not just about being separated from nature. Right. The sort of pro pagan theme of this poem, wanting to return us to the experience of nature as a kind of secular religion. But it's also about the political and social consequences of Christianity historically. 17:29 Erin: The next line is as a calm darkens among water lights, we get that same kind of doubling. First the hush is dissipated, then the calm returns. And I get this really strong mental image of, I want to say maybe in a Lord of the Rings movie or something, you know, where everyone's like happy and having a good time and they're eating their, their fourth breakfast or whatever it is, and then all of a sudden, you know, maybe one of those ring wraiths comes out of nowhere and then Everything, like, you know, the sky gets clouded over and everyone immediately stops laughing. And there's this hush that happens, and everything gets still and dark and. Yeah, it's very cinematic for me. 18:06 Wes: I was actually looking up water lights. I was like, what the. You know, it's not night, so it can't be, like, lights floating on the water. And then so I was like, is this some kind of thing that I don't know about? Of course, it's just Steven's coinage. And I think he's thinking about the light being reflected off the water. Right. And maybe sparkling. And so there's an interesting image of the. Something sparkling. There are sort of dark recesses to it or the dark recesses of waves. And then one can become focused on that darkness. So the calm becomes something different now in the beginning, and I think it's associated with complacency. And now calm starts to have a sinister tinge to it. 18:47 Erin: Yeah. So we get this transformation of even the happy things around her and the colors around her becoming a kind of funeral procession winding across wide water. And these are maybe the two most difficult lines in the poem for me. Almost a repeated line. The day is like wide water without sound. And she passes over the water. I'm wondering if there's supposed to be a chime here with Christ walking on water. She makes an imaginative flight. 19:12 Wes: The encroachment turns into her actually walking and imagination over walking to Palestine. You know, she's gonna wrestle with the idea that she can give up Christianity in a way, but it begins with a pilgrimage. Begins with a journey in which she imitates Christ by walking on water. 19:29 Erin: Oh, that's great. I love that. 19:30 Wes: Yeah. 19:31 Erin: And then she goes to silent Palestine. This is really. Things that are silent are very bad. Dominion of the blood and sepulchre. There's no resurrection here. I think I might have mentioned this in a previous episode, but there are always, like, two types of Christians. They're the crucifixion Christians and the resurrection Christ. And this is very much. Stevens is very much a crucifixion Christian. There's nothing happy. 19:53 Wes: Yeah. So I think she's leaning against. But the dominion of the blood and sepulchre. I mean, you could think of it as the blood of Christ, but you could also think of it as the blood of religious and ethnic warfare. Right. That's long afflicted the area. And then the sepulcher, Christ's tomb. And then the question was, whether was he really resurrected? The answer is going to be the negative. And the negative at the end of the poem, that's going to be her insight, her realization. She's going to answer that question. The negative. I like this idea, too, of the procession of the dead across the winding water. And then the day is like white water without sound. The kind of expansiveness of her day becoming this expansiveness of pilgrimage and inquiry. So, inner pilgrimage. 20:36 Erin: Nice. 20:36 Wes: So each stanza now is going to pose questions. And later on it'll be. I think from the four stanza on, it'll be quotation marks or she'll say things. But here it's still the poet channeling or the narrator channeling her point of view. So why should she give her bounty to the dead? 20:54 Erin: Right. Yeah. The turn of her mind, immediately recalled from Palestine to present. Should I read that stanza? 21:01 Wes: Yes. 21:02 Erin: Okay. 2. Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams shall she not find in comforts of the sun, in pungent fruit and bright green wings, or else in any balm or beauty of the earth, things to be cherished, like the thought of heaven, Divinity must live within herself. Passions of rain or moods in falling snow, grievings in loneliness or unsubdued elations when the forest blooms, gusty emotions on wet roads, on autumn nights, all pleasures and all pains, remembering the bough of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul. 21:45 Wes: Yeah. So the question is, whatever is to be gained by religion? Her sense is that it takes her away from her bounty, you know, which turned out to be her current comforts in the sun and all the rest of it, her bounty of the cockatoo, even though it's now it's just the green wings and the fruit or a form of bounty that she would have to sacrifice that if she were to go to church, turn her. Or turn her attention to religion. And of course, you know, religion generally calls for certain sacrifices in terms of pleasure here maybe there's an invocation of giving up, of youth or virgin sacrifice, something like that. That may be a bit of a stretch, but giving her bounty right to the dead. And then there's the larger. And we discussed this, James Joyce's the dead. There's a larger sense in which we, in adherence to norms and in the effects of culture, the influence of those things, we sort of are sacrificed to the previous generations. We are no longer just creatures of instinct, but we follow the rules of the dead. The dead pass that onto us. The second part of the stanza is interesting because she begins with Divinity living in herself. And then we get a lot of stuff about the environment and the weather or nature. 22:56 Erin: Yeah. All her emotions seem to be this divinity in herself. So the emotions are the response to the outside world. They're all passions of weather. Like having seasonal affective disorder or something like that. 23:13 Wes: Yeah, there's this sort of collapse of distinction between inside and outside. Gusty emotions on wet roads. So at a certain point the emotions become the wind, for instance, there's moods in falling snow and then there's passions of rain. Yeah. So this collapse of distinction between inner emotional state and the natural world. 23:36 Erin: Yeah, I like this turn that happens really after line seven. The first half of that stanza really repeats the words and images from section 1. We get the silent shadows and dreams again. We get the wings and the fruit and everything. But then line 8, Divinity must live within herself. We finally get this new direction. So we move forward. And then we get rain and snow. I marked this out. Spring and fall and then winter and summer in the last two lines. So we get a whole kind of year compressed from lines eight to 15. 24:10 Wes: Yeah. 24:11 Erin: And there does seem to be a permeable membrane between the seasons, the moods, the passions, whatever that are happening inside her and whatever is going on outside. Which is interesting to me because so much of. At least in the Catholic liturgical year, you know, so much of the calendar is so attentive to. And so much of very old religions are attentive to the seasons and the passing of time and sort of like the marking of time in the seasons. So there's a stripping away of that. Where then what we have left is just the seasons. You know, we don't have like the Easter, for instance, the Easter celebration of new birth and eggs and bunnies and things coming out of hibernation. Now we just have those things themselves without the sort of associative. What for Stevens or this narrator would be sort of associative baggage. 25:00 Wes: Right. Divinity living within herself is interesting, I mean, because it sounds like it could be something that you read in a self help book. Right. God just lives in you or the divine lives in you. But it speaks to a transition from the divine as guaranteeing a kind of moral order, so being a foundation for morality and for a certain set of values, as Nietzsche put it, and Nietzsche was influential on Stevens, and you can see it in this poem, because it's a question of what you do after the God is dead, after the prospect of nihilism raises its ugly head. So the divine can be regulation of the moral order. But the divine, in the sense of a more pagan divine, has to do more with the regulation of the natural order and seasons and those cycles. And there's a connection between that and our inner lives and the regulation of our emotions, which is not unconnected to the regulation of the moral order. Right. And this is a pagan and Nietzsche idea as well, which is that we replace morality in the Christian sense with a kind of virtue ethics in which we cultivate various excellences, or we develop this ability to have a certain type of psychological integration. I mean, ultimately its legacy is psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. But the idea of the divine being in oneself here becomes this, I think, an idea of self regulation, which in psychoanalysis has something to do with the internalization of the things that a mother does for a baby. Right. Mentalization and something called mirroring. But we integrate maternal function into ourselves. And that's almost like a sort of pagan thing. Right. So instead of God the Father laying down the law, it's the maternal earth mother saying we regulate our behavior according to the concept of psychological integration, or something like that. So anyway, sorry, I won't do too much of that, get us off track with that kind of speculation. 27:01 Erin: But no, I think that's good because it does come up later when we get the mother of beauty. So shall we move on? 27:07 Wes: Yep. 27:08 Erin: 3. Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth. No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave large mannered motions to his mythy mind. He moved among us as a muttering king magnificent, would move among his hinds. Until our blood, commingling virginal with heaven brought such requital to desire. The very hinds discerned it in a star. Shall our blood fail, or shall it come to be the blood of paradise? And shall the earth seem all of paradise that we shall know? The sky will be much friendlier then than now. A part of labor and a part of pain. And next in glory to enduring love. Not this dividing and indifferent blue. 27:49 Wes: This to me is the most difficult stanza of the poem. 27:53 Erin: It might be my favorite, though, I don't know. Yeah, I especially love the last part. But Jove or Jupiter, right? Born entirely of gods, not at all human in the way that Christ is human. He didn't have a mom. He didn't have a growing up land like Palestine for us to travel to on this earth. And I love this idea that he's huge and moving among us like a king would move among deer. 28:20 Wes: This is interesting because I was very confused about that. The idea of him moving amongst deer. And what I found. Is that what Stevens, I think, meant is he's using a. And this is something he would do. He's using this in an archaic way to mean, like subordinate peasants, basically. 28:39 Erin: Okay. That's what I thought too, because I looked that up and it said, yeah, that could be old English peasants. 28:44 Wes: Yeah. And I think there's evidence in the. I don't know, his correspondence or other. I think that is the critical decision, is that that's what he meant. 28:51 Erin: But. But I like the idea of deer, though, because then we have the idea 28:54 Wes: of a hunter, which is initially the way I interpreted all this. I did a whole big thing where I was like, on board with the whole deer thing and I was like, okay, he's a hunter, he's. But go ahead. 29:03 Erin: I just like the idea too, that we're just fodder for this myth. Like Jupiter is always coming down and raping maidens and turning people into things. Right. Yeah. So we're just. 29:12 Wes: That's the way I read that as well. Yeah. And that still holds. Yeah. I don't think the deer thing leads the reader astray. So he could have meant both, really, Because I think when we talk about the star, I think that's going to be ambiguous as well, or polyvalent polysemus between the planet and maybe the star that led the apostles to Jesus. But the inhuman birth is important because it's not. So Christ was a real human being, whether you're religious or not. And Zeus has much murkier origins. That's why there's this mention of mythology. So no Sweet Land gave large mannered motions to his mythy mind. He moved among us as a muttering king. The muttering is because there's less distinctness because he's not a historical being. It's almost like it's a matter of rumor or it's not as impressed upon us or distinct. Right. There's a different relationship where there was, you know, for the ancient Greeks and Romans, to their gods, it seemed like a much more, say, casual relationship. 30:18 Erin: Right. 30:19 Wes: I don't know if that's fair because, of course, there's temples and there's sacrifices. There's evident, of course, they took it seriously in a sense, but it's hard not to look at that from the perspective of Christian civilization. Think. Well, I don't know if they took it all that seriously. 30:32 Erin: Right. The importance of Jupiter beginning as an idea. 30:35 Wes: Yes. 30:36 Erin: Right. So the idea of an invented God, something that we've just come up with so that even when the sentence continues and we add to that the incarnational theology of Christ, it still seems to have this origin in God as being just an idea that we've come up with, you know, now we've added flesh to it, now we've elaborated on the idea, we've made the idea better, but it is in fact still just an invention of our own humanity. 31:01 Wes: Yeah. For Jesus there's a feedback loop between the people, his hinds, right. His followers, his flock and his self conception. It's almost the idea that large mannered motions. I don't know if this is right, but who Jesus became as a prophet, proselytizer, who he was to his contemporaries, to the apostles is self fashioned. And ironically, Jupiter is not self fashioned in the same way. If he's a product simply of myth. Right. If he's simply a product of human beings, there's the political element to this. There's Palestine being under Roman rule and the prospect of liberating themselves from Roman rule and everything that goes into that. So then there's this amazing image of the blood commingling and the requital of 31:49 Erin: desire as if Jove becomes man. Yeah. And we have the idea of the virgin birth in here. 31:55 Wes: So Jupiter moves among us until our blood commingles with heaven. So what is the desire being requited? It's a desire for the divine, but it's requited in the sense that the divine is really brought down to earth. Right. I don't know. The gods are humanoid and they have human passions. And maybe ultimately by locating Jupiter in the heavens, in a star which turns out to be a physical entity, there's sort of a deflationary aspect to that. So discerning Jupiter in a star actually so finding God or finding out that God is in nature, but paradise is here. And then the inverse reading, I think you could say, well maybe this has something to do with Christianity. 32:38 Erin: Yeah. So you're saying that the requital is desire for what? 32:42 Wes: I mean it's the desire of the hinds for something in relation to heaven and the divine and Jupiter. 32:48 Erin: Right. So it seems to be the compensation for the fact that Jupiter is too far above the hinds and therefore there must be some loss or the difference has to be made up in some way. There's a demand to have a more human God, to have someone closer to 33:06 Wes: us, or there's some way in which the pagan pantheon requites desire for the divine that's different than the Christian. The other reading for Christianity is that it has something to do with God incarnate in Christ. Right. Or something like that. So there's the union of the Christianity itself involves this union of the human and the divine, the synthesis of the human and the divine in a personage on earth. And then the parallel here is a synthesis of is Jupiter ending up as a star? So I'm not sure. I'm wondering if both those readings go in parallel. But he's looking forward now to a paradise that's non Christian, that's not this severe distinction between the earthly and the heavens is what he calls the indifferent blue. Or maybe the indifferent blue is just the dividing line, but a friendlier sky that's more connected to what happens in daily life, to labor and to pain, and the idea of this paradise on earth. So there seems to be a contrast between shall our blood fail or shall it come to be the blood of paradise? As if it's almost like are we going to lose our nerve? Or can we follow this pagan requital to the bitter end? Let's pause to talk about our sponsor for this episode. Masterclass With Masterclass, you can learn from the world's best artists, icons and leaders anytime, anywhere and at your own pace. 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And one thing that's really great about this is you get to be a fly on the wall in group workshops where Sorkin has given writers assignments and then they workshop those scripts. He also simulates a writer's room for a TV series, so specifically the West Wing, he sits down with writers to brainstorm episode ideas for the for the series. So I highly recommend you check out Masterclass this holiday, give the perfect gift of an annual Masterclass membership and get one free. Go to masterclass.com subtext today. That's masterclass.com subtext terms apply. Okay, now Back to the show. 36:12 Erin: I see that as maybe something about just accepting that this existence that we're currently in is just a precursor to some sort of heavenly, truer afterlife. So that would be the blood failing, and then the opposite of that would be accepting that we are in the paradise now and the blood is the real thing. I don't know if that's right, but that's the way that I. Because there's so much compression here now. He's sort of pointing to this future prospect. There's kind of no present here. It's either past or future. So shall it come to be the blood of paradise? Can we become gods ourselves? Can we have divinity within ourselves and just accept that the blood that we have in this present moment requires no sacrifice? This is the heaven. This is the only reality that we will know. And therefore we have to make of this earth a paradise ourselves. Is that. 37:07 Wes: Yeah, I think that that sounds right on. 37:10 Erin: And shall the earth seem all of paradise that we shall know goes with that. But then the idea is, it's so interesting. Like, the friendly sky then becomes a matter of imagination and just perspective. And this is my favorite part, maybe, of the whole poem, because it's the reversal of what we might think. So in a Christian world, we would imagine that the sky would be friendly to us because there's actually a God up there, right opposite. The dividing line, as you say, between us and God is the sky. But he imagines the opposite. He imagines that the sky is indifferent to us and it actually divides us from God. So it prevents us from seeing. And in that way, it's like a wall that we feel sort of antagonistic towards almost because it prevents us from seeing whatever we perceive to be the TR reality behind it. Instead, if there's nothing behind it, then it becomes friendly. Like, if there's no cognition or something that's kind of operating this divider, then it becomes friendly to us. 38:12 Wes: Part of the unfriendliness of the division is just that it's otherworldly. It's not of this world. It's something that we can only look forward to and only after death. Right. If we're thinking of now, heaven in paradise, you know, and there's the sense of the indifference of God within the natural world, unless you believe in miracles. Right. So that's another element of this sharp division in which the indifferent blue actually cuts us off from the divine. Whereas if we are finding the divine within ourselves, and then our right and labor and pain, and then above it was the emotional States and concert with the natural world. That's sort of an intimate experience of the divine. Now, of course, I think Christians would themselves talk about an intimate experience of the divine, but this is not a miscomplacent experience or Steven's experience. Hmm, I don't know. Did I get any of that wrong? 39:15 Erin: No. That's good. 4. She says I am content when wakened birds before they fly test the reality of misty fields by their sweet questionings. But when the birds are gone and their warm fields return no more, where then is paradise? There is not any haunt of prophecy, nor any old chimera of the grave, neither the golden underground nor isle melodious where spirits gat them home, nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm remote on heaven's hill that has endured as April's green endures, or will endure, like her remembrance of awakened birds or her desire for June and evening tipped by the consummation of the swallow's wings. 39:57 Wes: This image is really nice of the reality testing birds. I assume their sweet questionings are. They're chirping, right? You know, we know while Stevens was familiar with Freud, so I assume when he says test the reality, he's thinking about reality testing, which would be Freud called the reality principle, as opposed to the pleasure principle. Reality principle says you can't always do what's pleasurable because you might get punished for it, even if that's just getting burnt if you put your hand on the stove. So this idea of the birds doing something like that before they take off, like that sort of pausing, it's almost as if there's a reflectiveness to the birds. The fields are misty, so they're about to take off, and weather conditions, they're gonna have to fly on instruments, so to speak, they're not gonna be able to see. So I really love that. 40:52 Erin: Yeah, I love that too. I wanna make some connection to the sky at the end of the previous section. I don't know if that quite works. We also have in this almost like an image of plumbing the depths, like plumbing the ocean, to test how deep it is or how far they could fly out, or is it really there? And so they're sort of testing the friendliness of the sky. 41:20 Wes: It's a navigational problem ultimately that they have and they, like her, are figuring out where to go. It's of course, a much simpler navigational problem, not a spiritual one. And it's one in which she can take satisfaction. I think when you read these lines, you understand that contentment, right? What it means to be so Contented by seeing this happen with the birds, the reality testing, the questionings, being able to look at the birds through that lens, as almost engaged in reflective activity, as if they reveal a teleology to nature. Right. As if they reveal some sort of design, ironically, given the theme of the poem, but some sort of purpose to things or maybe universal intelligence or something like that. So it's that contentment that she begins with, and that seems to be the ideal, right. That that could be the pagan way, is just to be content with that sort of experience. Make that one's religious experience. But now she's worried, right? I don't know if I can do that. You know, when they're gone and they return no more, where is. Then I lose paradise. Paradise becomes this transient thing rather than something eternal. So it's not fulfilling the same function. That idea of paradise, you know, the function that it serves in a religion like Christianity, cannot really do that if it's an earthly conception of paradise, because it involves becoming. It involves not just comforts and complacencies, but also death and pain. 42:54 Erin: So in the quoted section, then, she's again kind of swinging back around to doubt, you're saying. So the transience of these birds and even of the fields means that her paradise is under question here. She can't just be content with this. So the rest of this stanza responds to the question that she poses by saying that it presents all of these afterlives, these potential paradises of ancient myth or of Christianity that one could conceive of. And none of these, he says, or the narrator says, has endured as April's green endures. And it all hinges on her remembrance of these birds and her desire. So her perspective, her desire are what keep these birds alive, if I'm understanding this correctly. 43:44 Wes: Yeah. 43:44 Erin: Not even these paradises, which I suppose if the paradises aren't real, then they don't endure because they weren't there in the first place. So the only thing that does endure is her thought. Her thought and her desire within her. 44:00 Wes: Well, even if they did exist, I think he's saying they can't really do the thing that they purport to do, which is an interesting idea. Right. So I think we'll get more about that idea as we go on. They can't really do as well for us as memory and desire can do. And ultimately as becoming and even death, which turned out to be essential. Later on, he's going to imagine what paradise would be like. It's very Keatsian, I think, reminiscent of the Urn, right. Imagining everything like what's on earth but frozen. When you analyze paradise, it stops making sense in its eternalness. Its eternalness becomes a contradiction, the paradox. We wonder how that's actually going to serve us. So, yes, those things will not be able to endure as April's Green endures, right? So in the same way, in the relevant way, in the way that's actually relevant to what we want out of paradise. So remembrance and desire turn out to be the constant things, right? Those things are essentially about change. Because you remember things because they're gone. They've come and gone. They're an element of becoming. And that what you're left with is the memory. So that it's not a reality that persists, but something within the mind, within consciousness. And the same thing for desire, right? Even if we don't possess the object of desire, the desire is the thing that stays with us. The object is objects of desire come and go and satisfaction wanes and, you know, increases and decreases and all of that stuff. But those sorts of vectors within consciousness, backward looking and forward looking, are the things that stay with us. And it turns out those will be. I think the argument will be those are the only ones that will be relevant. 45:47 Erin: Yeah, it's so fascinating because there's an allowance made for subjectivity or even like the subjectivity is built in to this conception of what the actual paradise is. Because we think of April's Green enduring. You know, so often our memories are tinged with unreality. So often we remember things as being better or worse than they actually were. We remember them in this kind of heightened state and desire too. Like we remember things or we experience things in the present as being heightened from their actual reality in some kind of idealization. It's interesting. It's like he's found a way for the subjective experience which is so transient and which is maybe based in unreality, like some kind of fundamental unreality. Something that is not the way it really was. That is the thing he says, that actually endures, that actually sustains us. Not the seasonal change, right? Because seasons are over quickly and they may not be particularly splendid in some years compared to others. And we might remember them as being more splendid than they really were. And I don't know if you experienced this, but every single time the colors change in the fall, everybody, it seems over the age of 50, says, this wasn't anything like in my youth, you know, like the leaves just don't. They're just not as beautiful anymore. You know, they used to be so spectacular, the foliage and now it's just. It doesn't compare. And this past year it actually was really splendid. And everyone was really reluctant to say that it was really as beautiful as it was when they were kids. You know, it's just interesting to me that he makes allowances for that subjectivity. So it really is the mind itself, like the workings of the mind itself, even if it's making something better out of a reality, that is the thing that endures. 47:37 Wes: Yeah, I think that's very good. You're reminding me of Tintern Abbey. And apparently Wordsworth was some influence here on Stevens as well. And in Tintern Abbey in particular, I could see that. So we got the transition, that poem from nature as, you know, what does nature give us? There's sensation. We talked about good character and then ultimately contemplation. I mean, when he was younger, it was just more about being randy. Right. Wordsworth's poem. And then later on it becomes the memory of nature that stays with us. Right. To deal with life's drudgeries and distractions. Many shapes of joyless daylight, the fever of the world, all that stuff. So his love of nature goes from being about sensuous desire in his youth to being more about these elevated thoughts and about spirit and morality. And he's coming back to that scene, enjoying nature in a different way, partly as a function of seeing it through his younger self's eyes from a mature perspective, but then also seeing it through his sister's eyes and the idea that now she has a seed of a memory that will help her through life's hardships and will help her mature. So I think, am I making a relevant association here? 48:58 Erin: Yeah, I think so. 49:00 Wes: There's a quasi romantic quality to this poem because of this idea of what nature can, you know, what can nature do for us? 49:08 Erin: I think that Wordsworth in that poem is more high minded than this is. I think Wordsworth is still more interested in the objective natural experience and yes, of like taking pleasure in that, but only like in some sort of real sense. I would say that the narrator here cares about the natural in the sense that it sparked the remembrance. But the extent to which that can become unmoored from the reality of what was being remembered. Like if you looked at a picture and said, okay, this is what it was really like, and here's how I'm remembering it, and maybe the remembrance looks like it's gone through an Instagram filter or something, then he would be okay with that Instagram filter where I think, like Wordsworth would be suspicious of that filter. 49:53 Wes: I get what he's saying. 49:54 Erin: Yeah. Steven seems to be saying that the filter is really what makes it. And it doesn't matter how many filters you put it through, because the subjectivity of the experience, that's the pleasure. It's what you make of it. Whereas I think Wordsworth is far more bound to the actual natural beauty. I don't know. Maybe I'm carrying that too far, but 50:13 Wes: I think that's a good point. I think I'm thinking about, how does the world of becoming serve the world of permanence? Because that's how he's trying to answer her. Paradise is here now, but how can a world of becoming serve that? And Stevens, or the narrator is asking her to reconceive her conception of permanence as rooted somehow in becoming, but via subjectivity. Right. The permanence happens in memory and desire. And I thought I saw some of 50:40 Erin: that in Wordsworth, but, yeah, I think that's right. But I think Stevens is just taking it a step further, like I say. 50:48 Wes: Yeah, yeah, I agree. All right. 50:50 Erin: Five. 50:50 Wes: Yep. 50:51 Erin: Okay, five, she says, but in contentment I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss. Death is the mother of beauty. Hence from her alone shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires. Though she strews the leaves of sure obliteration on our paths, the path sick sorrow took, the many paths where triumph rang its brassy phrase or love whispered a little out of tenderness. She makes the willow shiver in the sun for maidens who were wont to sit and gaze upon the grass relinquished to their feet. She causes boys to pile new plums and pears on disregarded plate. The maidens taste and stray impassioned in the littering leaves. 51:33 Wes: Love it. 51:34 Erin: Yeah. 51:34 Wes: If there's anything that's quintessential Wallace Stevens, it causes boys to pile new plums and pears on disregarded plate. 51:42 Erin: Yeah, that's great. That is even the absence of an article which seems to be pretty. 51:47 Wes: Yes. Yeah. 51:48 Erin: Characteristic. 51:49 Wes: What is the line from the Emperor of Ice Cream, the roller of big cigars bid him whip in kitchen cups concupiscent curds or something like that. 51:58 Erin: Yeah, yeah, Very similar. 51:59 Wes: I think one is evocative of the other. But this was a line, actually, that his editor did not understand and he explained it to her in a letter. And what he said about it. Let me just read that. 52:12 Erin: Yeah. 52:13 Wes: So he says to Monroe, his editor, disregarded refers to the disuse into which things fall that have been possessed for A long time. I mean, therefore, that death releases and renews what the old have come to disregard the use, inherit and make use of. Which I thought was pretty clear, because at this point, it's a cycle of life. Your parents stop using a plate, and then you use that to seduce other people by piling it up with fruit. You dust it off. You get it out of the dusty cabinet, you dust it off, and then you get yourself a boyfriend or girlfriend with it. All right, maybe that's not as funny as I thought it was. 52:52 Erin: Oh, so the parents have disregarded it because they've long since. You're saying they've long since put away their good china or something. 52:57 Wes: What's fallen into disuse by the leaves. Right. The leavings. In a way, it's a mundane point which Wallace Stevens actually acknowledged. He said something like, you can put this stuff in poems, but if you were to spell it out literally, it sounds trite, which is just that death paves the way for new things. He's going to claim death as the mother of beauty and strews the leaves of sure obliteration on our paths. Our plans, in a way, come to naught, or things come to an end. So the path Sig sorrow took. But even our triumphs and our love, those pathways through life, get strewn with leaves of obliteration. So even within life, before we actually die, we experience all these losses. But those leavings, those losses, those leaves become the basis for new life, new experience, et cetera, et cetera. 53:58 Erin: Yeah, it's just such a fascinating. I mean, I think death is the mother of beauty is probably the most famous line from this poem. Right? 54:05 Wes: Yeah. 54:06 Erin: What's fascinating about the line is that beauty is not beautiful in itself. The thing that creates the beauty is not, we would think, it's not the fact that it's pleasing or symmetrical or somehow there's some inherent quality of it that is making it beautiful in some way. It's the fact that it's transient. The fundamental quality of things that are beautiful are things that will stop being beautiful someday. 54:34 Wes: Yeah, I like what you're pointing out with transience because it's also that beauty is a flowering. Right? Beauty is a certain point in a process, growth and degeneration. And degeneration is necessarily the other side of that. So in order to have beauty, you need becoming, and then becoming implies death. This appears in philosophical theodicy where you're trying to justify Augustine. Right. You try to say how God could allow evil, and you say, well, actually, evil is just the necessary component, the good is not possible without it. So the positive is not possible without privation. And here it's the same sort of thing. And then. And then also, you know, on a very literal level, animals eat animals and the dead leaves fertilize the ground. So the cycle of life is a real natural thing with it. What flowers? And the next generation comes out of the death of the previous generation. 55:33 Erin: Right, that's good. 55:34 Wes: The way the stanza is structured, it's. Although Death does all those things, you know, obliteration on our paths, she also. She makes the willow shiver in the sun. For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze upon the grass relinquished to their feet. That's an interesting image. Right. What does this mean exactly? The thing that we get next is much clearer. So death is what causes boys to pile plums on plates and try to seduce the maidens and distract them into passion, even though they're walking on the death. The littering leaves, they are now distracted into desire. But the line before it is a little less clear. 56:12 Erin: Why is the willow shivering? Is it the appearance? Is this a willow at its full sort of height of not flowering but, you know, of leafing, and therefore the sun is kind of dappling it and it appears to shiver and therefore it's sort of prefiguring in that shivering, the moment when it will lose its leaves and look bare is sort of punctured with fall or death in the middle of this height of dappled beauty. Yeah, it's the opposite of, you know, nor ever can those trees be bare. Right. Like on the Grecian urn. But that very shivering prefigures the time when it's going to be bare and it's cold because it has no leaves on it. Yeah, I don't know if that's stupid. 56:54 Wes: Yeah, no, no, I like it. But I'm still baffled. I thought I had. And I thought I had more to say about this too. I mean, what you're saying makes sense, you know, like the shivering. It sounds almost like the shivering that the maidens would do in response to the desire of the boys. 57:11 Erin: But there's something of the pathetic fallacy in this. Maybe because maybe it's shivering in response to the whisper, like it's shivering with desire or something. Yeah, in response to the whisper, the line before it. Yeah, it's responding to what's going on around it. Or maybe it is literally shivering because of the movement underneath their movement. They're talking, they're whispering, whatever. Or maybe literally shaking the willow branches. The leaves on the branches that are hanging down. So that their movement is causing the tree to move. 57:47 Wes: I don't know if the willow is bare of leaves. Willows do get bare of leaves. Leaves, right. It's a naked willow. So of course it's shivering because it's fall, I guess leaves are falling. So what it seems to evoke is the idea that the leaves are somehow a gift to the maidens. It becomes the things that they stray upon later with passion. Or something like that. 58:14 Erin: I like the idea that this is willow, though. Because I can't think of any tree that when it loses its leaves, looks more spectral, you know? I mean, it looks like a naked umbrella. I don't know. It's just a great choice of tree. 58:29 Wes: It's interesting. You're reminding me of something Stevens said about. This is from his Opus Posthumous, his later prose writings. All of our ideas come from the natural world. Trees equals umbrellas anyway, so I like that. That you got that out of that. 58:51 Erin: Well, Weldon Kees has. This doesn't have anything to do with anything. But I recommend this to our readers. It's one of my favorite poems. He has a great poem called the Umbrella. Which is kind of like an essay poem. That explores all the different umbrellas throughout time and history and nature. And it's just a fabulous poem. 59:10 Wes: Very cool. All right. And I would say, before we move on, just one more thing. I like this idea of the grass being relinquished to the feet of the maidens. Surrendered right by nature, in a way. 59:21 Erin: Yeah. It's going to bend with their weight. 59:23 Wes: Right. 59:23 Erin: So it's like. 59:24 Wes: Yes, that's one of the things that I thought of. Yeah. I thought, you know, in a way, it goes both ways. It's like. It's as if it's been relinquished. In the sense of it's being pushed out of the ground grown for us or for the maidens. But also. Yeah. It's relinquished in the sense that it's 59:38 Erin: bends, underweight, it's falling on its sword for us. 59:41 Wes: So we get leaves and shivering and grass bending. And nature is very nice, even when it's death operating. Anyway, let's move to six. 59:52 Erin: Six. Is there no change of death in paradise? Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs hang always heavy in that perfect sky? Unchanging yet so like our perishing earth with rivers like our own that seek for seas they never find the same receding shores that never touch with inarticulate pang why set the pear upon those river Banks or spice the shores with odors of the plum. Alas, that they should wear our colors there the silken weavings of our afternoons and pick the strings of our insipid lutes. Death is the mother of beauty, mystical within whose burning bosom we devise our earthly mothers waiting sleeplessly. Every time I read a new stanza, I'm like, oh, this one's actually my favorite. 1:00:36 Wes: Yeah. So this is like. All right, here's our Ode to a Grecian Urn stanza. It's going to end with Ode to or to Autumn. But am I right about that? Isn't this explicitly. 1:00:47 Erin: Oh, yes, definitely. And, you know, the Grecian urn has some expectancy in it. I mean, maybe there's something scary about the Grecian urn, but this is like showing that kind of the Grecian urn turned into a nightmare. The Grecian urn is right on the brink of fulfillment. So it's not quite as scary as this. Right. The people are bending toward each other and they're almost going to kiss. Right. So it's frozen in the perfect moment right before the kiss. This is like an eternal kiss where you're frozen there and your lips are getting chapped and it really sucks. Right? 1:01:24 Wes: Yeah, very good point. And so you're frozen not in the state of heightened desire prior to consummation, but in the state of consummation. 1:01:35 Erin: Yeah. So the nightmare here is the idea of eternality. Is that a word? But also expansiveness, infinite expansion. So the infinitude of paradise includes, like, if there are rivers there, then the rivers are going to go on forever. Right. Because it's infinity. So if a river is just running down to want to be emptied into some sea, some ocean, and a river is in an eternal space that goes on forever, it's never going to find that ocean, which is a terrifying thought. Like, there is no terminus. 1:02:13 Wes: So this goes against my reading of perpetual consummation, actually, because this is a state of desire that never touch within articulate pang. 1:02:24 Erin: But it's desire and consummation at the same time. I know what you're saying, but also it has to be that this is also the height of consummation, because there's no death. 1:02:33 Wes: Yeah. 1:02:34 Erin: Grecian urn is sort of like pre death. And this is post death. 1:02:38 Wes: Yeah, no change of death. That's a great phrase. 1:02:42 Erin: There are seas, but the rivers go on forever. And the seas go on forever. 1:02:47 Wes: Yeah. 1:02:48 Erin: The difference here is infinitude. I think maybe you're revealing something that is a contradiction or maybe the inherent contradiction in thinking of a space in which there is perfect fulfillment, but also it goes on forever because we can't conceive of it. So maybe you're revealing this sort of impossibility, whether it be of imagination to conceive of such a space or of such a space to exist, period. If you're not a person who believes in this. 1:03:16 Wes: Yep, I think that's right. When you think about it, the paradoxical nature of it starts to become clear. So paradise, if you think about it in these human terms, trying to transfer over earthly delights into paradise, it doesn't make sense. But why do we need to do that? Can't we just say, well, we don't really know what paradises exactly in terms of a Christian paradise. 1:03:40 Erin: What this is making me think of is I might have mentioned this on a previous episode. I'm not sure, but I studied English Gothic architecture in England and I would go around and look at all these different churches all over the south of England. And one of the things that becomes clear when you're going through those churches is that hell is really, really easy for people to imagine. I think this is still the case, but this is the reason why Inferno is read so much more frequently than Paradiso. Because Dante had so much fun coming up with Hell. And Paradiso is a little. It's not as fun, but you can see in the stained glass windows or in the tympanums of these churches, you could see the hell is just incredibly florid and fun and amazing. I mean, it's not fun, but it's like terrifying and wacky and there are all sorts of crazy things happening. You know, think of a Bosch painting where you have somebody's head. 1:04:31 Wes: You know, you meet a lot of 1:04:32 Erin: interesting people coming out of their own. That's right. That's right. And then you see the. Maybe on the opposite side of the building or something like that, you'll see the depictions of heaven. And heaven is just the worst. You know, heaven looks like maybe like a version of hell. Everybody is like, lined up. Heaven is like an eternal queue, you 1:04:49 Wes: know, it's where all the infuriatingly nice people are. 1:04:53 Erin: Right. Well, not only that, but it just looks boring. Yeah. And everybody's all orderly and everything is just, you know, because the rule followers part of the problem is the A 1:05:03 Wes: student 1:05:07 Erin: part of the problem is that. Yeah. So maybe it's not attracting a great class of people for interest's sake, but also because we can't imagine happiness that goes on forever. We can't imagine heaven anywhere near as intricately and disgustingly as we can imagine. This sort of eternal torment, which seems to always have. Maybe because, you know, on Earth we have so many different varieties of making people upset or whatever, but it's really difficult to imagine. And so heaven, which is supposed to look like where we want to be, looks like a really dour bad time. Where everyone's just, like, standing around and holding their hands clasped in front of them and just, like, just singing or something, and that's it. So it's very, very hard to imagine. I think a banquet is the most frequently probably used simile for heaven. Like an eternal banquet. That seems like a little bit of a party. It's tough. 1:06:03 Wes: Yeah. And I just think it points to Steven's point here. Which is that pleasure and satisfaction and beauty are necessarily. Or the appreciation of beauty are necessarily cyclical things. It's hard to make sense of them except as involving the pain and pang of desire. And then a temporary fulfillment and then that fulfillment wearing off. And there's also the role of novelty. And so if you are always sated, if it's eternity, an eternity of being content without the cycle of the up and down cycle, the becoming, then, yeah, that will sound boring to us. 1:06:44 Erin: It's also whether because of our own limited imaginations. Or because this is the only kind of heaven we can imagine. Like when I say it's most frequently compared to a kind of eternal banquet. Of course, a banquet is an earthly idea sort of being transposed into heaven. And Stevens is imagining that heaven is kind of like this eternal garbage dump. Which takes all of our things that we've created on Earth and sort of, like repurposes them. So he imagines it as a place where whatever we spent weaving on Earth, it shows up in heaven and it's there forever. Or our lutes, this is very Keatsian, of course. But the lutes that we were playing that we invented on Earth. Are then going to be transformed in heaven to be up there forever. I don't know what that means. I don't know if heaven is stealing from us on Earth or something. We come up with the stuff down here, and then it goes up into our imaginative garden in heaven forever. Or if I'm carrying that too far, and if he's just trying to say that what gave us pleasure on Earth because of its kind of transience, like the silken weavings of our afternoon. So the things that we just, like, killed an afternoon making. Have no specialness in Heaven. Because you can't kill an afternoon in heaven. You can't sort of while away. You can't while away the hours pleasantly playing on your loot when you should be doing your homework. I think it works both ways, but I like it as an eternal garbage dump. I just came up with that. 1:08:17 Wes: I mean, I think he's saying something about the nature of certain subjective states or certain states of mind. So pleasure and desire and the appreciation of beauty, they're interweaved with pain, and yet we don't want to get rid of them. So if we think of paradise as this pain free environment, then we do away with those things that are important to us. So desire is obviously painful. Right. In the sense that we lack the thing that we want. And there's a sense in which beauty is something that can't be fully possessed. Let's talk about those last three lines, by the way, in a second. But I think the idea is that there's something inherently painful about all of this stuff. And that pain doesn't get through the pearly gates, doesn't pass the threshold. So we lose out on all of these things that are necessarily interwoven with pain. So death is the mother of beauty, mystical within whose burning bosom we devise our earthly mothers waiting sleeplessly. Devise our earthly mothers waiting sleeplessly. What does that mean? 1:09:24 Erin: The most difficult word. And that of course is devise. 1:09:27 Wes: Yeah. 1:09:28 Erin: So we invent. I looked it up and in a legal sense to devise. And I think of this because it's Steven's, that maybe the legality might shed some light here to leave real estate, say to someone in a will. I mean, maybe that has nothing to do with this devising, which just means inventing. 1:09:46 Wes: Or there's our earthly mothers. I take our earthly mothers to be our literal mothers. Am I right about that? 1:09:51 Erin: Yes. 1:09:52 Wes: And they are obviously not devised by us in any literal sense. They devise us. Right. How is it that we're devising our. 1:10:01 Erin: There's kind of a bullseye quality to this. Right. Which I've already kind of pointed out at other points of the poem. Like maybe the willow shivering in the sun is because it's starting to shed its leaves. Or the dappling of the sun is prefiguring this moment where it will have no leaves. The bullseye quality is that. Or maybe the Russian doll quality seems to be that within death we're imagining our mothers waiting for us, waiting up for us. There's a kind of stalled moment, or there's like a Moment of eternity there. Like a mother maybe waiting for her child to come home and is really nervous. And so there's a kind of eternal quality at the heart of death. Which is dilated and sustained in this moment. But I'm not sure how that. How those two things are working together. But I'm getting the sense that there's, like, death. There's eternal in the death and death in the eternal. 1:10:57 Wes: I mean, it sounds like this has something to do with the way we imagine our mothers. Or the way we are related to our mothers. Right. Which is not just through the physical biological relationship. But we, in sense, have taken them inside of us psychologically. Or at least we have a fantasy of them. Maybe earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly waiting up for us. Being a watch, being a guardian angel. And that fantasy, somehow, which seems to be a form of beauty here. Right. An instance of beauty is this relationship to the mother. Imagining her as something beautiful. And so we don't get that without death. Which is to say, the whole biological cycle of mothers giving birth and then. And the mother dies. And then the new generation become mothers and fathers and so on. Right. The concept of motherhood implicates the cycle of life and death. 1:11:50 Erin: Yeah. Are these pregnant mothers, like, they're pregnant with possibility. Or are they mothers from whom we've been separated on earth? And so we divide. Like, there's a desire in death that we have actually to die. And be reunited with those who are absent from us. Like, that's the promise. And obviously, it's a promise unfulfilled. But it's a sort of fantasy. I mean, for Stevens, it's a promise unfulfilled. But there's a sort of fantasy of reunion, reunification, reconstitution, which death keeps alive for us. 1:12:19 Wes: That's an interesting reading. Because it's, you know, in the womb, there's theoretically a sense of merger. Right. And then developmentally, we have to separate and individuate. And what Lacan calls jouissance. And it's not unrelated to death drive. And Freud is this desire to return to that merged state. Because it's completely without desire and without any tension. So there's normal desire. There's a typical desire for temporary satisfaction or some more modest satisfaction. And then there's the desire to go beyond that and something more transcendent. And to merge with the mother. Which is almost like returning to death. And may have something to do with our religious impulses, that particular fantasy. But I was thinking about this simply in terms of, you know, that the argument here would be it's only in a world of becoming and hence death that we get the cycle of generation and degeneration, so that we get mothers. Right. So, hey, you. You enjoy having a mom. Well, can't do that in heaven, because that's not really, you know, there's no one being born in heaven and enjoy having the. Yeah, so I don't know if that's too literal a reading, but I think 1:13:33 Erin: this could be read all of those ways and probably more. 1:13:36 Wes: Yeah. 1:13:37 Erin: Yeah. 1:13:38 Wes: Okay. So are we ready to transition to Postscript? 1:13:42 Erin: I'd say so, yeah. 1:13:44 Wes: I know there's going to be a lot of very disappointed listeners, but I do have to say that this next stanza is kind of disappointing on my point of view. The seven stanza, the weakest. But anyway, yeah, so we are going to. If you want to listen to this, please subscribe to Postscript. Our after show. We will cover Stanza 7 and 8. 1:14:07 Erin: Thank you, thank you. 1:14:09 Wes: And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. [email protected] subtext Also, this podcast podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com AirwaveMedia.com.