As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been taking down from my poetry shelves poets I haven’t read in a long time—possibly in decades. The most recent I’ve reached for is Wallace Stevens. When I opened his Collected Poems, my first instinct was to turn to the famous “Sunday Morning” and “The Idea of Order at Key West.” But then I thought: No, these are early poems. I wonder what Stevens’s late poems are like. So I flipped to the back of the book—and was fascinated by what I found there.

I focused on the final group of poems, collected under the title The Rock. (I say “collected” because, though Stevens intended The Rock to be a book, it wasn’t published separately in his lifetime.) What I first noticed in The Rock was that two of Stevens’s other famous poems appear here: “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” and “Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself.” So I began my reading with these.

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

That’s the first stanza of “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour.” Of course I’m struck by the doubled “light” in the first line. And struck, too, by the challenging third line: its bold statement that “The world imagined is the ultimate good.” But then I notice what appear to be Stevens’s hedgings. We only “think” this, but is it true? Stevens himself seems doubtful, even scornfully so, when he adds, parenthetically, “for small reason.” But small reason isn’t the same as no reason. Maybe small reason is enough to justify thinking of “the world imagined as the ultimate good.”

And what about the fourth stanza?—

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one… [the ellipsis is Stevens’s]
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

So, “we say” this: the speaker is hedging again. We “say” it, but is it true? And if true, is it only so “within its vital boundary, in the mind”? I notice, too, his focus on the “mind” and “imagination” in both these stanzas—as I recall that the mind’s imagining is a key locale throughout much of Stevens’s poetry. And then there’s that “candle”—a source of light. Which leads to the poem’s final lines:

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

So are light and the mind the same? That seems to be the implication. And we do commonly speak of illumination as understanding. But Stevens also implies a teasing question in that “central” mind: is there a difference between this mind and the seemingly less spacious mind shared by the paramour and his silent interlocutor?

Next I turn to “Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself” — famous for its play with whether things are “in” the “mind” or “outside.” And immediately I see that the speaker is hedging again: the “seemed” in “The “scrawny cry… / seemed like a sound in his mind.” Plus the poem’s closing words: “It was like / A new knowledge of reality.” Well, was it a “new knowledge” or not?

Naturally, after all the “light” in “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” I take note here of the sun in the line “The sun was coming from outside.”

As I move on now to other poems in The Rock, I’m on the lookout for various forms of light and of the mind/imagination.

There are the final lines of “A Quiet Normal Life”:

There was no fury in transcendent forms.
But his actual candle blazed with artifice

And in “The Planet on the Table,” we get an extraordinary identification of the creative self with the very source of the world’s light:

His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of his self,
Were no less making of the sun.

But in the poem “Lebensweisheitspielerei” (a made-up word, funny because ponderously Germanic, literally meaning “Fooling Around with the Wisdom of Life”), something very different happens. Instead of the sun’s power, we have its poverty:

Weaker and weaker, the sunlight falls
In the afternoon. The proud and the strong
Have departed.

Those that are left are the unaccomplished,
The finally human,
Natives of a dwindled sphere.

Their indigence is an indigence
That is an indigence of the light,
A stellar pallor that hands on the threads.

Little by little, the poverty
Of autumnal space becomes
A look, a few words spoken.

That thrice-repeated “indigence” underscores the immensity of loss envisioned here.

There’s a sense of absence, too, in the poem “The Plain Sense of Things,” where again the scene is wintry:

After the leave have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination…

Knowing how key the imagination is to Stevens, we’re startled by its “end.” But then imagination itself seems to come to the rescue, in a mind-boggling  statement: “Yet the absence of the imagination had / Itself to be imagined.” And the poem ends with:

The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as necessity requires.

Are there a pond and lilies or not? Is there knowledge—or is it just imagined? I love how Stevens teases us here.

As I reflect on these late poems of Stevens, questions arise. What do we know? How do we know it? What illumines our minds? Or are our minds their own illumination? Stevens’s play with these questions is unmatched, and more engagingly unsettling, than that of any other poet I’m aware of.

Peggy Rosenthal has a PhD in English Literature. Her first published book was Words and Values, a close reading of popular language. Since then she has published widely on the spirituality of poetry, in periodicals such as America, The Christian Century, and Image, and in books that can be found here.