On Sunday, I reported that the dust jacket for the Library of America's edition of Wallace Stevens's Collected Poetry & Prose stated that his "
poems...have remained an inspiration to generations of poets and readers." Dust-jacket hyperbole aside, one might ask what is
inspirational to readers in the poem "The Snow Man" (
quoted on Sunday), with its final stanza:
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
It should be obvious that the brilliant play on "nothing" would be an inspiration to
poets. But what about readers not looking for verbal brilliance but emotional assurance, consolation, or uplift?
I suppose that most readers would find nothing inspirational in "The Snow Man." They're more likely to find it in words like Robert Browning's
God's in his Heaven -
All's right with the world!
or Maya Angelou's
I've learned that no matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow.
—that is, in
comforting lies.
How is a reader to respond to
uncomfortable truths? It so happens that I've been wrestling with this on my own behalf for awhile—in the face of my approaching annihilation and there being no God to resurrect me and no heaven to go to. It does make me sad sometimes.
But then, as much of late, I think on what I treasure: my wife, our children, our dog, our home, good writing, good films, good friends, my job. However old the universe, or how huge or cold, and however next-to-nothing and near to dying I am, yet while I have these things, I have something to gladden me. They're even more to treasure for being brief.
Ezra Pound's statement from the Pisan Cantos always thrills me to recite:
What thou lovest well remains,
the rest is dross
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage
But even Pound seems to lie, for what I lov'st
shall be reft from me. My wife might precede me in death, though likely not.
Siegfried (our dog) might survive us, but
Wally (his predecessor) did not. I didn't even mention my health, but it's going to worsen, perhaps to the point where I can't hold a job, or even to where I can't appreciate a book or a film. And it will all be reft from me, in any case, when I die.
Poems like "The Snow Man" don't inspire by comforting but by forcing us to
deal with it, by recognizing what we love, and loving it while we can.
