Paradiso

I have admired and read Wallace Stevens for years (see my appreciation of Stevens here), and just the other night, while re-reading my way through Harold Bloom’s exuberant A Map Of Misreading (1975), in which Stevens is a central figure, I took to my Complete Poetry & Prose edition of Stevens (The Library of America edition), and read through his brilliant “The Rock“.

I was rather struck by the poem Prologues To What Is Possible, which I have read before, but this time, somehow, I read it in a Homerian sort of fever. It seemed clear to me that this lovely two-part poem belonged to just that fever-dream, which I was “possessed” by, as lately, I have rather intensely, rather stubbornly, focused on memorising Tennyson’s Ulysses—one of the great miracles of post-Shakespearian poetry. The connection between the two poems can seem vague, to say the least. Hence this issue, contrary to issues previous, is more experimental, possibly rambling—nevertheless, not without (if I may say so) a certain merit.

To be sure, the connection can seem vague. In Ulysses we have to contend with the ageing, discontented king who is dreaming about the adventures that once were: of the sea, of breaking with the monotony in which he has been stuck, or, as it was, with the domestication in which he feels himself trapped. In Stevens’s Prologues To What Is Possible, we are dealing with the subject of transformation, change, the power of metaphor (imagination, or, the limits of imagination) and new perceptions. But. . . is this really so far from what our ageing king is struggling with?

I dare say it is not.

Tennyson’s Ulysses has become infatuated with the idea of returning to his adventures, with the notion that it is truly never too late. Reading through Stevens’s Prologues To What Is Possible, I felt myself, wildly, transported into Ulysses’s struggling mind in which he is caught in the old, dusty cobwebs of metaphors and dreams; them serving, literally, as the “prologues to what is possible“, for, well, anyone of us. But, in the case of the old, Tennysonean Ulysses, it seems to be anything!

Tennyson wrote the melancholic poem, which looks more like a soliloquy or monologue written by Shakespeare, when he was in a state of ripe grief over the death of his friend Hallam. Yet, there is little doubt that the major inspiration for this poem (despite his melancholia) came from Dante, who in his Commedia, depicted his own Ulysses in The Inferno. Here, Ulysses is described as a sinful, cunning, and persuasive man, whose journey is but: “folle volo,” or a “mad flight.”

“With this brief speech I had my companions
so ardent for the journey
I could scarce have held them back.

And, having set our stern to sunrise,
in our mad flight we turned our oars to wings,
always gaming on the left.”
(The Inferno, canto XXVI, Hollander’s translation).

But where Dante’s Ulysses is a bone fide sinner, Tennyson’s focus, contrary to that of Dante, is on Ulysses’s description of his last, great journey, to:

“explore the world, and search the ways of life,
Man’s evil and his virtue.”
(Hollander’s translation).

Now, let us look at Tennyson’s Ulysses, and see how Stevens’s poet may very well manifest Ulysses’s deep, melancholic sensucht in the metaphor that — almost intoxicatedly — infects him.

“I cannot rest from travel” (l. 6) proclaims Tennyson’s Ulysses, as he is now surrounded by the “barren crags, match’d with an aged wife” (l. 2-3). He is melancholic, he is longing for past adventures, and he feels stuck in a life with “hoard, and sleep, and feed,” an existence in which he: “know not me.” (l. 5). That is to say, know not himself. One must remember that Ulysses is now back in Ithaca, after having fought in the Trojan war. And the “savage race” (l. 4) he now governs is for him but a farce, a medium of discontent, for:

“Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.”
(l. 13-17)

The contrast between Ulysses’s life of outrageous adventure contrasted with an existence of domestication is an acute psychological, existential, not to mention, poetic crisis. One saw much the same tendency when The Civil War broke out (as pointed out by Gary W. Gallagher), when everyday-man, stuck in the same such state as Ulysses, sought to fight a war for reasons (more often than not) that were less ideological than a chance to break free from their rural confinement. Another wonderful canonical example is Prince Andrei in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, who is disillusioned with married life, and who finds his wife’s preoccupation with everyday-trivialities a great hollow drum. To which he responds by joining the war against his hero Napoleon Bonaparte. Prince Andrei famously says to Pierre Bezukhov:

“I’m going because this life I lead here, this life—is not for me!”
(Part 1, War & Peace, Maude translation).

Ulysses, likewise, despite his old age, is still possessed with the Homerian warrior spirit:

“Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.”
(l. 56-61).

It is touching, moving, and as universal a statement as far as universalism is concerned. Tennyson speaks to each and everyone one of us; despite our age, or our predisposition. It is Tennyson touching the very essence of the Bloomian “Sublime.” In The Art Of Reading Poetry (2004), prof. Bloom writes: “One definition of poetic power is that it so fuses thinking and remembering that we cannot separate the two processes.” (p.9-10). If this is the case, then Tennyson’s poetic power is of the highest order. The deep intellectual thinking that is suffused with remembering, that it is to say, us (the reader) suffering from the very same despair Ulysses is internalising, is masterly executed. And Tennyson shows, as he often does, that his psychological understanding is at the level of Shakespeare.

Tennyson ends the poem with four profound lines of spectacular cadence and riveting aesthetic architecture, rivalling Milton’s Satan.

“That which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
(l. 67-70).

Contrast this the Miltonic Satan whose speech in book 1 echoes in hell’s fiery chambers:

“What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what is else not to be overcome?
That glory never shall his wrath or might
Extort from me.”
(l. 105-111).

I wish now to look more closely at what Wallace Stevens does (whether it be conscious or not) in his Prologues To What Is Possible, a poem that is as brilliant as any poem I have read in years. Now, who exactly is Tennyson’s Ulysses thinking of when he addresses his “friends”? Ulysses was the only survivor after the Trojan War, so one must consider, if they are “phantoms” as Bloom reflects in his Take Arms Against A Sea Of Troubles (2020). Or, are they (the friends) part of the very metaphor that put our ageing king so at ease?

I beg the reader to read Wallace Stevens’s poem in its entirety, as what is written is an exuberant tale of the metaphorical substrate with which king Ulysses finds himself both lost, at ease, and, as Stevens writes, it:

“Creates a fresh universe out of nothingness by adding itself,
The way a look or a touch reveals its unexpected
magnitudes” (l. 60-63).

Stevens’s poem touches on transformation and new perceptions, but, as it is revealed in the poem, it is moreso a question of old perceptions changed or morphed into new.

Prologues To What Is Possible.

I
There was an ease of mind that was like being alone in a
boat at sea,
A boat carried forward by waves resembling the bright backs
of rowers,
Gripping their oars, as if they were sure of the way to their
destination,
Bending over and pulling themselves erect on the wooden
handles,
Wet wit water and sparkling in the one-ness of their
motion.

The boat was built of stones that had lost their weight and
being no longer heavy
Had left in them only a brilliance, of unaccustomed origin,
So that he that stood up in the boat leaning and looking
before him
Did not pass like someone voyaging out of and beyond the
familiar.
He belonged to the far-foreign departure of his vessel and
was part of it,
Part of the speculum of fire on its brow, its symbol,
whatever it was,
Part of the glass-like sides on which it glided over the salt-
stained water,
As he traveled alone, like a man lured on by a syllable
without any meaning,
A syllable of which he felt, with an appointed sureness,
That it contained the meaning into which he wanted to
enter,
A meaning which, as he entered it, would shatter the boat
and leave the oarsmen quiet
As at a point of central arrival, an instant moment, much or
little,
Removed from any shore, from any man or woman, and
needing none.

II
The metaphor stirred his fear. The object with which he was
compared
Was beyond his recognizing. By this he knew that likeness
of him extended
Only a little way, and not beyond, unless between himself
And things beyond resemblance there was this and that
intended to be recognized,
The this and that in the enclosure of hypotheses
On which men speculated in summer when they were half
asleep.

What self, for example, did he contain that had not yet been
loosed,
Snarling in him for discovery as his attentions spread,
As if all his hereditary lights were suddenly increased
By an access of color, a new and unobserved, slight
dithering,
The smallest lamp, which added its puissant flick, to which
he gave
A name and privilege over the ordinary of his
commonplace —

A flick which added to what was real and its vocabulary,
The way some first things coming into Northern trees
Adds to them the whole vocabulary of the South,
The way the earliest single light in the evening sky, in
spring,
Creates a fresh universe out of nothingness by adding itself,
The way a look or a touch reveals its unexpected
magnitudes.
(1952).

It has been widely discussed what Stevens is writing about, that is to say, if he truly is creating his own Melvillean tale of a man in search of adventure— rather like Ishmael:

“I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way of I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation.” (Moby-Dick, p. 1)

Or if Stevens’s poem moves within the metaphorical substrate of what may be called the Universal Psychology—which I very much ascribe to. I am certainly of the opinion that Stevens is penetrating something that, again to quote Harold Bloom, creates a “new knowledge of reality.” (The Art Of Reading Poetry, 2004).

I have reread Stevens’s Prologues To What Is Possible many times now, and I confess myself feeling quite emotional, thinking of Tennyson’s Ulysses as being Stevens’s poet:

“What self, for example, did he contain that had not yet been
loosed,
Snarling in him for discovery as his attentions spread.”

And, there is little doubt Ulysses felt:

“He belonged to the far-foreign departure of his vessel and
was part of it.”

The Tennysonean Ulysses could never separate himself from the journey more than he could separate himself from himself, unless it being with a helping hand from King Solomon. To which, naturally, he would cease to exist.

These final lines of part I are particularly interesting:

“As he traveled alone, like a man lured on by a syllable
without any meaning,
A syllable of which he felt, with an appointed sureness,
That it contained the meaning into which he wanted to
enter,
A meaning which, as he entered it, would shatter the boat
and leave the oarsmen quiet
As at a point of central arrival, an instant moment, much or
little,
Removed from any shore, from any man or woman, and
needing none.”

Was Ulysses’s adventure inherently meaningless? The meaningless syllable with which he had associated himself was most likely what Dante shamed Ulysses for in the Commedia; the fact that Ulysses left behind his family, his duty. A syllable, nonetheless, that contained the entire meaning, that is to say, the meaning of Ulysses being. Ulysses then is like Captain Ahab. In the two men there is a “point of central arrival”; for Ahab the White Whale, for Ulysses the Adventure with capitalised A. In the end, they may go with a score of men (phantoms or real), but at their core, they are,

“Removed from any shore, from any man or woman, and
needing none.”

Captain Ahab took with him to death everyone except for Ishmael in his quest. It is fair to say, I think, that Ulysses would do the same. Well, he did very much the same. Their respective adventures, however, were not, as it was, any form of meaningless quest. This is important. Rather, it was,

“A flick which added to what was real and its vocabulary.”

I think it significant that the reader does not inherit Dante’s moralist view, and unfolds a process of overly, quote: “psychoanalysing” Ulysses’s Nature from a politically charged, or ideological view. That will only muddy the waters. Instead, Ulysses should be seen (despite him leaving his family) as infinitely inward, conscious; thus the Tennysonean Ulysses proves himself more Hamlet-like than anything. Ulysses is to an intense degree aware of himself, aware of what he is, hence the,

“Flick which added to what was real and its vocabulary.”

If Hamlet’s story starts (for us anyway) when he is visited by his father’s ghost, then Ulysses story begins at the point of him being visited by the ghost of his past Adventures. It is then we see his consciousness expand to an almost infinite degree. Hence the Tennyson Ulysses, like a range of our great characters in literature: Hamlet, Falstaff, Richardson’s Clarissa, Walt Whitman in Walter Whitman Jr’s Song Of Myself, Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, Montaigne’s Montaigne, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, Dickinson’s Dickinson, Lowell’s Lowell in For Lizzie and Harriet, Mark Strand’s poet in Dark Harbour, among only a few others,

“Creates a fresh universe out of nothingness by adding itself,
The way a look or a touch reveals its unexpected
magnitudes.”

Now repeat these lines again and again, and you will truly find something exuberant, exquisite, almost intolerably deep. This is the power of Wallace Stevens. This is the power of Tennyson. This is, in a sense, the power of the Poet.

The Tennysonean Ulysses is hidden in Stevens’s poem. I certainly do not think it was intentional on Stevens’s part, far from it. Yet, he is there, and the reason is quite simple, though very complex. Both poems speaks to us at a fundamental level. They touch on Bloom’s “Sublime”. We are Ulysses, just as we are Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina or Stevens’s Ulysses-like poet. Just as we are Hamlet and Whitman’s Walt Whitman.