Things…


Nemerov’s quantification of the common man’s life brings this poem to mind. (Honestly, it doesn’t take much to bring this poem to my mind.) Though speech does not enter into it, living seems to be a collection of things, but those things are tricky.

The Man on the Dump

Day creeps down. The moon is creeping up.
The sun is a corbeil of flowers the moon Blanche
Places there, a bouquet. Ho-ho…The dump is full
Of images. Days pass like papers from a press.
The bouquets come here in the papers. So the sun,
And so the moon, both come, and the janitor’s poems
Of every day, the wrapper on the can of pears,
The cat in the paper-bag, the corset, the box
From Esthonia: the tiger chest, for tea.

The freshness of night has been fresh a long time.
The freshness of morning, the blowing of day, one says
That it puffs as Cornelius Nepos reads, it puffs
More than, less than or it puffs like this or that.
The green smacks in the eye, the dew in the green
Smacks like fresh water in a can, like the sea
On a cocoanut—how many men have copied dew
For buttons, how many women have covered themselves
With dew, dew dresses, stones and chains of dew, heads
Of the floweriest flowers dewed with the dewiest dew.
One grows to hate these things except on the dump.

Now in the time of spring (azaleas, trilliums,
Myrtle, viburnums, daffodils, blue phlox),
Between that disgust and this, between the things
That are on the dump (azaleas and so on)
And those that will be (azaleas and so on),
One feels the purifying change. One rejects
The trash.

           That’s the moment when the moon creeps up
To the bubbling of bassoons. That’s the time
One looks at the elephant-colorings of tires.
Everything is shed; and the moon comes up as the moon
(All its images are in the dump) and you see
As a man (not like an image of a man),
You see the moon rise in the empty sky.

One sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail.
One beats and beats for that which one believes.
That’s what one wants to get near. Could it after all
Be merely oneself, as superior as the ear
To a crow’s voice? Did the nightingale torture the ear,
Pack the heart and scratch the mind? And does the ear
Solace itself in peevish birds? Is it peace,
Is it a philosopher’s honeymoon, one finds
On the dump? Is it to sit among mattresses of the dead,
Bottles, pots, shoes, and grass and murmur aptest eve:
Is it to hear the blatter of grackles and say
Invisible priest; is it to eject, to pull
The day to pieces and cry stanza my stone?
Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.


2 responses to “Things…”

  1. I have wanted to post something about this for months now. The trouble is that I find it so hard to struggle with Stevens on my own. Where he is difficult to me I can usually find no way out. This poem, though, has a good amount of light in it.

    What I have done, then, is to write impressions on each stanza that are responses to what I was able to grab on to. If I get a chance to talk to someone, one of you probably, about this poem, these will congeal into real ideas.

    The Man on the Dump

    by Wallace Stevens

    Day creeps down. The moon is creeping up.
    The sun is a corbeil of flowers the moon Blanche
    Places there, a bouquet. Ho-ho…The dump is full
    Of images. Days pass like papers from a press.
    The bouquets come here in the papers. So the sun,
    And so the moon, both come, and the janitor’s poems
    Of every day, the wrapper on the can of pears,
    The cat in the paper-bag, the corset, the box
    From Esthonia: the tiger chest, for tea.

    The sun/day is inanimate. The moon/night is an actor, at work. So many forms of paper in the dump—paper wrapping flowers, wrapped flowers the image of the sun… so the sun and moon come. Poems, can wrappers, cat sarcophagi. Then, these: Corset and box, tiger chest.

    The dump stimulates reflection. Why? Time, which we passed through is collected in one place. The transient is collected. Our own history—a piece of it, not the sewer—is in piles. Importantly, too, it is not my history there but ours. Co-mingling. Some run-off from the invisible hand, the zeitgeist, the tradition, original sin, general daily weakness.

    I wish I knew how he, Stevens, knew that box was from Esthonia. Did it bear some distinctive characteristic of Balkan craftsmanship? Or was it a cardboard shipping box with a return address in Tallinn?

    The freshness of night has been fresh a long time.
    The freshness of morning, the blowing of day, one says
    That it puffs as Cornelius Nepos reads, it puffs
    More than, less than or it puffs like this or that.
    The green smacks in the eye, the dew in the green
    Smacks like fresh water in a can, like the sea
    On a cocoanut—how many men have copied dew
    For buttons, how many women have covered themselves
    With dew, dew dresses, stones and chains of dew, heads
    Of the floweriest flowers dewed with the dewiest dew.
    One grows to hate these things except on the dump.

    Not much is said about night. Day is too much described—“like this or that” is to say “I am impatient” and not much else. Cornelius Nepos was a Roman historian/biographer. Green color catches the poet’s eye. Color stands out here—so the dump is not merely reflective to the powers of abstraction (time collected, this and that) but stimulating to the sense.
    Dew is just water with a particular history. Again: dew is not some thing more than water. Do all these folks copy dew or the green the dew advertises? They copy dew for buttons, cover with dew, dew with dew. Their coverings and adornments, their fashions and tastes are mere dew, until the dump redeems them by making them recognized as dew.
    Wikipedia: “Dew results from atmospheric moisture that condenses after a warm day and appears during the night on cooled surfaces as small drops.”

    Now in the time of spring (azaleas, trilliums,
    Myrtle, viburnums, daffodils, blue phlox),
    Between that disgust and this, between the things
    That are on the dump (azaleas and so on)
    And those that will be (azaleas and so on),
    One feels the purifying change. One rejects
    The trash.
    That’s the moment when the moon creeps up
    To the bubbling of bassoons. That’s the time
    One looks at the elephant-colorings of tires.
    Everything is shed; and the moon comes up as the moon
    (All its images are in the dump) and you see
    As a man (not like an image of a man),
    You see the moon rise in the empty sky.

    Everything comes to the dump. What was, what is, what will be. The world is the dump, with a small area of objects carved out for each of us about which we say I own this. The things that have passed to the dump are those things that I have given up ownership of—refused to continue to accept as part of me. The dump is in my house, even on some shelves (though Heidi, economist, does well to keep it out). The dump is the repository of the unloved.
    Spring is love. Spring/love is the engine that grinds unloved into unloved. One feels that, despite the sound of it, this is something. In the glow of that feeling, the veil of illusion parts and one can see. The moon rises and it is really the moon. No poet worth a damn would argue with the posiiton that ordinary experience of the world is muddled and dark. Poetry is slashing through the veil. No… poetry is the weak, nearly inarticulate. jabbering of one who has returned.
    Night is the time of seeing. Spring, night.

    One sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail.
    One beats and beats for that which one believes.
    That’s what one wants to get near. Could it after all
    Be merely oneself, as superior as the ear
    To a crow’s voice? Did the nightingale torture the ear,
    Pack the heart and scratch the mind? And does the ear
    Solace itself in peevish birds? Is it peace,
    Is it a philosopher’s honeymoon, one finds
    On the dump? Is it to sit among mattresses of the dead,
    Bottles, pots, shoes, and grass and murmur aptest eve:
    Is it to hear the blatter of grackles and say
    Invisible priest; is it to eject, to pull
    The day to pieces and cry stanza my stone?
    Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.

    The second stanza and the start of the fourth are of a piece. There fashion, here politcs. The causes are in the dump, the tin cans with their clamour. “Could it after all/ Be merely oneself” I am lost in the birds.

    The dump is a place for reflection. Since here is the run-off of life, here must be the answer to it. The day is pulled to pieces in all the collection of objects with a history of love, individual love, now turning into a mass noun. Stevens is looking for redemption—a reason to believe that in the collection of our lives that has gone on behind our backs there is an indicator that we should hope to live beyond the clutter of the world.

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