There’s a five-stanza poem by Wallace Stevens that I return to often. I’ve never seen it reprinted in a selection of his poems or in an anthology, but its story intrigues and absorbs me, and I’m mesmerized by its sounds and images. It has been on my mind recently as I’ve been thinking about close reading, what it is and the terms we use to describe it.

From Ideas of Order (1936), here’s the title and first stanza:

How to Live. What To Do

Last evening the moon rose above this rock
Impure upon a world unpurged.
The man and his companion stopped
To rest before the heroic height.

The title is two statements; each is three monosyllables, terse, didactic. We wonder whether Stevens is being straightforward or ironic. Does he truly believe that in a poem he can instruct us how to live and what to do?

Why the period after “Live,” as opposed, say, to a comma, semi-colon, or colon? Should there be a period after “Do,” which would make the second phrase more definite, not floating off into space? The speaker isn’t asking questions, but, it seems, making declarations, or offering guidance and advice, or issuing a promise.

Stevens starts with a report about an event, its time of day and setting. He’s precise: this rock, not some other one. He’s working with “o” sounds in line one, but ends with a hard consonant, “rock.”

The sense continues into line two, with the disquieting “impure.” Stevens has shifted to “p” sounds, to echoes—pur/pur. I surmise that “impure” refers to the moon, but maybe it refers to the rock that the moon is rising over. This rock: a specific one; “a world”: generalized.

Why “unpurged”? “Purge” derives from Middle English purgen, Old French purgier, in turn from Latin purgare, to cleanse or purify. Why might the world need to be unpurged, and what kind of action would this require?

Stevens invites us to ask these questions, but he doesn’t address them. Instead, he presents two anonymous figures: a generic “man” and a “companion” whose gender isn’t identified. Who is this man, how old is he, why is he here?

A companion: someone who accompanies or is in the company of another; one of a pair or set of things that match; one who’s employed to live with and serve an elderly person or an invalid. It’s not a friend, coworker, ally, intimate, attendant, or escort, but, says Stevens, a companion.

The third line tells us that the man and companion stopped. There’s no period to halt us, so we proceed to the next line; they have stopped “to rest.” Repose, absence of motion, peace of mind or spirit. But the feeling isn’t tranquil. “Stopped” is sudden, abrupt. The alliterative “heroic height” creates the impression of something that’s imposing, intimidating.

The next stanza is both clear and obscure, mysterious:

Coldly the wind fell upon them
In many majesties of sound:
They that had left the flame-freaked sun
To seek a sun of fuller fire.

The environment is hostile; the cold wind is directed against the two figures. There’s the twist, too, that it’s typically rain that falls (“fell upon them”), not wind. “Many majesties of sound”: awe-inspiring, sublime.

“Flame-freaked” is vivid and perplexing. “Freaked” means experiencing or showing extreme distress, astonishment, or discomposure. It also means streaked with color, blotched, not natural, normal, or likely.

Stevens may be implying that the man and companion were not contented or fulfilled by a sun with a streak of flames, and, aspiring to more, they’ve journeyed to locate one that’s pure, constant, and complete. How is this sun—these two suns—related to the moon? For when the poem opens, it’s not the sun that has risen, but the moon.

The two figures didn’t find what they were seeking:

Instead there was this tufted rock
Massively rising high and bare
Beyond all trees, the ridges thrown
Like giant arms among the clouds.

“Instead”: not the hoped-for destination, but this, the reality. We’re given details, daunting and formidable, of the landscape. The rock is “tufted,” rough and mossy, tactile, organic: a growing bunch of grasses or close-set plants; a bunch of soft fluffy threads cut off short and used as an ornament.

“Massively rising,” as though this were happening now, the rock in motion. “Massive”: heavy, monumental. The scene is one of surreal size and scale, inhuman, consisting not of a complete body but of body-parts. A strange simile, possibly fear-inducing, yet prodigious, causing amazement. These “arms” (how many of them?) are woven among formations of clouds in the evening, in shades of white, silvery-blue or some other hue as the dead of night approaches.

The enigmatic next stanza suggests the scene might have contained someone or something it doesn’t:

There was neither voice nor crested image,
No chorister, nor priest. There was
Only the great height of the rock
And the two of them standing still to rest.

Multiple negatives: neither, nor, no, nor. “Crested image”: plumed or decorative, possibly a heraldic device or crown, or the halo of a saint. A chorister is a member of a choir, the voice that leads the singing and sets the pitch and tempo. We know what a priest is: the figure who performs sacrificial, ritualistic, mediatorial, or ministerial functions for a religion.

The final stanza: where has Stevens taken us?

There was the cold wind and the sound
It made, away from the muck of the land
That they had left, heroic sound
Joyous and jubilant and sure.

Once more, there’s coldness, which may be antagonistic, adversarial. But the “sound” is described affirmatively: heroic, joyous, jubilant. The travelers have gotten away from “the muck.” Soft wet earth that could signify fertility, but that more often connotes dirt, slime, filth. This moon-lit scene, whatever its fearful elements, is better than the muck, a disorderedly mess.

Stevens is saying we must be attentive to place, setting, and landscape for what these are in themselves. They’re not sacred, for the world has no inherent sanctified meaning: no divine presence hallows it. Whatever plenitude it possesses is not the product of priests and choristers. It’s the creation of poets, agents of imagination.

On one level, this is the poem’s meaning, or at least an approximation of it. But for me, what close reading is, what it does, its field of activity, is different from summary statements of meaning. Close reading, as I conceive of and practice it, is exploring the flow of a poem’s language from moment to moment, its “stream of consciousness,” a phrase I borrow from the pragmatist William James. The meaning isn’t what we state at the end. It’s what’s happening every step of the way. It’s sequential, unfolding and evolving.

The questions, doubts, speculations, and revelations that arise for us as we take in a poem, from title to final word, are its meaning, a process in time: we think about the point and purpose of the language as it comes before us at each moment. The end of the journey is important, but what also matters is how we get to it, what we do along the way. That’s how to live, what to do.

William E. Cain is Mary Jewett Gaiser Professor of English at Wellesley College, where he enjoys teaching courses on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other American writers. His recent publications include essays on Edith Wharton and Ernest Hemingway.

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