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Daily Notes on Poetry
24 July 2004. Today I decided to again skip hard work by posting something from my past, an essay I wrote about Joyce Cary's The Horse's Mouth for a college course. I found other essays while going through my files, though, and decided, I'm not sure why, I'd rather post one about the Wallace Stevens poem below instead of the one I originally intended to.
MOZART, 1935
Poet, be seated at the piano.
Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo,
Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-rac,
Its envious cachinnation.
If they throw stones upon the roof
While you practice arpeggios,
It is because they carry down the stairs
A body in rags.
Be seated at the piano.
That lucid souvenir of the past,
The divertimento;
That airy dream of the future,
The unclouded concerto . . .
The snow is falling.
Strike the piercing chord.
Be thou the voice,
Not you. Be thou, be thou
The voice of angry fear,
The voice of this besieging pain.
Be thou that wintry sound
As of the great wind howling,
By which sorrow is released,
Dismissed, absolved
In a starry placating.
We may return to Mozart.
He was young, and we, we are old.
The snow is falling
And the streets are full of cries.
Be seated, thou.
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My untitled essay on this has a history interesting to me. I wrote it in the spring of 1981 (a fact that jolts me). I was taking a seminar on Wallace Stevens (as a 40-year-old senior) at Cal State, Northridge, and had gotten a terrible mark on an essay test from my teacher, Robert Deutsch--a C, I guess. The test required us to critique a poem of Stevens's. I protested. From what he said, I gathered he thought I was just repeating stuff I'd read about the poem in books on Stevens I'd said I'd read. He was one of those teachers who thought you should think on your own, without help from authorities. Oh, and it's the poems you should read, not commentaries on them, blah, blah, blah. I've always maintained that it's both. Aside from that, Prof. Deutsch was contemptuous of what many of the authorites said about Stevens, for they disagreed with him. He was in charge of the leading scholarly periodical on Stevens, at the time, I might add.
Now, it [i]did[/i] take me a while to get a take on Stevens, and before my first session at the seminar, I had panicked, for many of his poems seemed baffling to me. So I [i]had[/i] gone to the school library and read parts of several books on him. I'm sure they helped. During our first class with him, Prof. Deutsch asked who had read up on Stevens, and I raised my hand. He didn't compliment me on my preparedness.
I must admit that my close reading of the poem he tested us on was pretty conventional, mainly because its meaning was fairly straight-forward but also because I didn't like it very much. It was "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman." Prof. Deutsch found several things wrong with what I said about it, though--I'm not sure what. Anyway, I whined that I couldn't understand why I'd gotten so low a mark (and I was about the only one he hadn't given an A to, and you'll have to take my word for it that I was not an arrogant student trying to show him up in some way but just interpreting the poem as I saw it). The final defect in my response to the poem for the professor was that what I said seemed to him parroted.
Eventually, I talked him into giving me another chance--on a poem no one had published on (so far as he knew). It was "Mozart, 1935." What I wrote [i]did[/i] convince him I was not the robot he apparently thought I was, and we got on fairly well after that. I got an A from him in the end, but I think everyone else in the class did, too. On the other hand, I was hoping he might publish something or mine in the Wallace Stevens newsletter he edited, for he had taken work from other students for it that I didn't think much of, but he never did.
No doubt, I'd now modify a few things I said in 1981 about the poem, but here it is verbatim:
"Mozart, 1935": Interpretted (Lamely) After 4 Days of Thought
In the first strophe the poem's unidentified speaker tells a Poet, representing all artists, to "be seated at the piano" and play the present--that is, to express in art "things as they are," right now. The present, the text goes on to say, is trivial, flimsy, vulgar, & it laughs in envt of, probably, a richer past--and, perhaps, a past freer from the threat of war than 1935 was. the triviality, flimsiness & vulgarity of the present is implied by Stevens's neologisms, which sound slangy, almost stupid (why are two of them each a single syllable repeated 3 times if not for that reason?), and are, of course, nonsensical. Moreover, "ric-a-rac" sounds like "rickety" or flimsy, and "nick-knack," which suggests triviality.
In the second strophe the poet is assured that if "they," the community, complain of the poet's practicing "arpeggios," or breaking the past's unities into the present's pieces as arpeggios break unified chorads into sequences of individual notes, it is because they are too involved with the dead past--the "body in rags" they are carrying "down the stairs" (to burial, presumably)--to want the reality of things as they are now. But the poet is to play despite them.
At this point the speaker breaks off into a revery about the past which he characterizes as "lucid" and playful: a "divertimento," or suite of dances, adn about the imagined future, also lucid, or "unclouded," and structurally solid and impressive--a concerto rather than the "hoo-hoo-hoo" the poet is to play. But it is snowing--winter bleakness is here; hence, the poet is to forget past and future, divertimentos and concertos, and play the present. He is to lose his identity voicing that present's "angry fear" and "besieging pain." And he is to be a "Thou," or bardic/prophetic and highly personal voice rather than a small impersonal "you." In doing this, he is to become so universally & forcefully representative of sorrow that those hearing him will forget themselves and thier sorrow--they will experience, I would guess, a catharsis and the poet will, figuratively, blow their sorrow into the stars, or beyond earthly stress into peace. Once this has been accomplished, we might be able to return to the clarity & classical "rightness" and youthfulness unencumbered that Mozart's music represents. Meanwhile, however, we are old & suffering. Therefore, the poet must "be seated"--and play. Art will cure us of sorrow by expressing the objective now.
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