Do you know Wallace Stevens’s poem, with its strange title, “A Postcard from the Volcano”? It’s included in Ideas of Order, published first in a limited edition in July 1935 and then in a trade edition in October 1936. I reread it recently, and I was spellbound by its first stanza, macabre and sweet, the beginning of a story about memory and imagination:

Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once  
As quick as foxes on the hill;

When I read these lines, I think about Stevens’s presence, where he is in the poems he writes. He’s inside them in the movements and meanings of the language, and, at the same time, outside or beyond them. It’s an effect that’s hard to describe. I’m in contact with Stevens, but I cannot apprehend him.

This first-person plural poem is a “postcard” sent to the generation that will follow us. A postcard often includes an illustration; there’s no envelope, and the message is short and efficient. It makes a statement, expresses a connection, functions as a souvenir. It’s personal, usually written by hand, conveying the sentiment, “I’m here, thinking of you.”

A volcano, meanwhile, is frightening, catastrophic. It transforms landscapes and buries civilizations and cultures. Alongside a volcano, a postcard is tiny. We imagine it cast into and consumed by red-hot lava. But Stevens says “from” the volcano: that’s the place of origin. How are we to comprehend this?

Stevens’s procedure differs from Matthew Arnold’s in “Empedocles on Etna” (1852) and Emily Dickinson’s in “I have never seen volcanoes” (c. 1860), where the volcano functions as the symbolic nexus for personal and philosophical reflection. In Stevens’s case, when we turn from his title to the text itself, we find the volcano has disappeared.

“Our bones”: we’re gone, dead, a grim prospect. Then again, not really, for Stevens starts with “Children” who are performing a task, a service, collecting our bones, maybe as relics. But it’s unnerving, for these children don’t know us, the vitality we had. Foxes have speed and color—the most common North American fox is red—but they’re not human.

“A Postcard from the Volcano” has the flow, the drift, that Stevens is fond of. He moves us forward even as he charms and transfixes us, setting out a narrative line that’s evocative but difficult to ascertain and understand. Where is he taking us?

And that in autumn, when the grapes  
Made sharp air sharper by their smell  
These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones  
We left much more, left what still is  
The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow  
Above the shuttered mansion-house,  
Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion’s look  
And what we said of it became

A part of what it is . . . Children,  
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems  
As if he that lived there left behind  
A spirit storming in blank walls,

A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,  
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

The second and third stanzas begin with “And.” The first four words of stanza four complete the thought of stanza three, and there’s a period, a pause mid-line. The seasons: autumn, spring. There’s repetition, e.g., “sharp air sharper”; echoes, “being, breathing”; and alliteration, as in “least, left, left, look, left.”

Some of the images glide with simple beauty: “the spring clouds,” “the windy sky.” But others are beguiling and complex, such as “the mansion-house” that’s “shuttered.” “Shuttered” means fitted with or closed by shutters, especially windows and doors fastened tight, typically to secure a house that’s empty, abandoned, or unused. This word conjures, too, the sense of a person who’s closed off, emotionally sealed in, a mind blocked from insight and new perception.

“Cries out”: I feel the forlorn thrust of the sky’s wind-propelled voice, the wounded energy of this crying in contrast to shuttered-in enclosure, the lost or inaccessible interiority.

What’s “a literate despair”? “Literate” here is a puzzle. It means the ability to read and write in a language; having knowledge or competence in a subject; well-educated, cultured or polished in expression. The implication is that the sky possesses the capacity for making a statement, which it does, but it’s in a “cry” rather than in words. And then “despair”: the Latin construction combines de- , “without,” with sperare, “to hope.” This etymology implies that despair is the negation of hope. It’s Søren Kierkegaard’s “sickness of the spirit,” the yearning “to be rid of oneself.”

We’d like to know why life came to us, why we’re here. But what does this mean? For the stark truth is that we’re aware, says Stevens, that in the future, nothing of us will remain, just bones gathered by children who can’t conceive of who we were, what we witnessed and felt.

Somehow, though, the children discern our “spirit storming,” the power, violence, upheaval. Stevens’s pronoun has shifted to “he.” This spirit (ghostly, spectral) isn’t behind “blank walls,” but, rather, is in them. There’s the solidity of a wall, yet it offers nothing on its surface, no decoration, ornament, or inscription.

Stevens pictures this despair: “A dirty house in a gutted world.” “Gutted” means destroyed or emptied, like a dwelling hollowed out by a blaze. It also means eviscerated, like a fish or animal (remember the fox) taken apart.

“A tatter of shadows peaked to white”: “tatter” is an irregularly torn piece of cloth, paper, or other material, perhaps the draft of a poem. But we’ve made progress, from “picking up” in line one to “peaked,” the point of highest activity, quality, or achievement. These “p” verbs intimate the extent of the imaginative journey that Stevens has chronicled.

The final line: “Smeared” is high impact, visceral, negative, even nasty. It means to spread or daub an oily, greasy, or wet substance across a surface; to make dirty by rubbing something that’s greasy or sticky; to blur or smudge by rubbing, causing an object to lose its clarity and definition. We smear a person’s reputation.

There’s more, however, to Stevens’s choice of “smeared.” It derives from Old English smerian, smierwan, and smyrian, to anoint or rub with grease or oil. It was associated with anointing, the ritual application of ointment in religious or ceremonial contexts. Following “smeared” in the line is “gold,” a precious metal, and, metaphorically, an article or object valued as the best of its kind, the essence, the finest exemplification.

The wordsmith and paradox-maker Stevens is rendering a desolation that’s radiant, which climaxes in “the opulent sun,” ostentatiously rich and luxurious, a source of light and heat. He suggests hope and prosperity, and the promise of a new day: life, vitality, energy, and growth. This is quite a “postcard” Stevens has composed, from the volcano at the core of the planet to the sun, the center of the solar system.

“A Postcard from the Volcano” is a beautiful work of art, alluring and contemplative. I love the way it’s stimulating at every moment even as it makes me feel there’s more in it, and more to Stevens, and more in the world than I can know. I’ve tried in this post to read the poem closely, but I haven’t caught up to it, haven’t fully gotten hold of it, and that’s what Stevens intends. He’s in his words and beyond them, in motion toward transcendence.

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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