What We See

What We See Is What We Think

 At twelve, the disintegrations of afternoon

 Began, the return to phantomerei, if not

 To phantoms. Till then, it had been the other way:

 One imagines the violet trees but the trees stood green,

 At twelve, as green as they would ever be. 

The sky was blue beyond the vaultiest praise. 

 Twelve meant as much as: the end of normal time,

 Straight up, an élan without harrowing, 

The imprescriptible zenith, free of harangue, 

 Twelve and the first gray second after, a kind 

Of violet gray, a green violet, a thread

 To weave a shadow's leg or sleeve, a scrawl

 On the pedestal, an ambitious page dog-eared

 At the upper right, a pyramid with one side

 Like a spectral cut in its perception, a tilt

 And its tawny caricature and tawny life,

 Another thought, the paramount ado …

 Since what we think is never what we see.

--Wallace Stevens 

 Those moderns! In poems of the past—of the 19th century English Romantics, for instance—the poet usually stated what the poem is about, or at least where the poet is while making the observations. Modern(ist) poets tend to leave that out. T.S. Eliot is a notorious example. 

 While the basic situation of the modernist Wallace Stevens poem is clear enough—he’s observing the sun and the shadows at noon, as well as the pictures in his imagination—there are other elements that are obscure. In his book on Stevens’ poetry titled Musing the Obscure, all Ronald Sukenick says about this poem is the Stevensesque non sequiter: “As reality becomes less adequate, imagination becomes more necessary.” Well, maybe.

 In his science-oriented interpretation, Mike White helpfully suggests that the passage beginning “To weave a shadow’s leg or sleeve...” refers to a traditional sundial, as in the recent past often was placed in a garden, and at which the poet is presumably including in his gaze. So that’s something.

 As for me, I like its music. It may be as Stevens’ asserts, that poetry is the scholar’s art, at least in modernist times. But just the phrase “an elan without harrowing” is reason enough for me.