Transport to Summer

Transport to Summer by Wallace Stevens, from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, 123 pages

Once again Stevens,

     ...the total man of glubbal glub

turns out a superb collection of intriguing, perplexing, delightful poetry.  At times he seemingly despairs of his work...

     This structure of ideas, these ghostly sequences

     Of the mind, result only in disaster.  It follows,

     Casual poet, that to add your own disorder to
          disaster

     Makes more of it...

At others he has complete confidence...

     This is the thesis scrivened in delight,

     The reverberating psalm, the right chorale.

His poetry sparkles with

     Happy fecundity, flor-abundant force

This is especially evident in his use of color - red, yellow, blue, violet form a secret language.

     We ought not to be awake.  It is from this

     That a bright red woman will be rising

     

     And, standing in violent golds, will brush her hair.

     She will speak thoughtfully the words of a line.

     She will think about them not quite able to sing.

     Besides, when the sky is so blue, things sing themselves...

The result is like a kaleidoscopic stained glass window, with a hidden glow within the World, and especially within people, for unlike Jeffers he is not interested in Nature as something over and against humanity but with Being under and for us.

     It is possible, possible, possible.  It must

     Be possible.  It must be in that time

     The real will from its crude compoundings come,

     

     Seeming, at first, a breast disgorged, unlike,

     Warmed by a desperate milk.  To find the real,

     To be stripped of every fiction except one...