The Imperfect Is Our Paradise

[BurtWorm]

Discuss.

(Points for identifying the source of the quote.)

[LearnedHand]

1. Wallace Stevens...

...but I googled the quote (no points for me!)

Great line. It reminds me in tone of Eliot's "In the end is my beginning...."

I struggle a bit with Stevens' meaning in the context of today's world. Is the imperfect all we are to expect, and thus it is, by default, our paradise? Or are we too ignorant to understand that any view of paradise we might have is by definition "imperfect"?

Or even, if this world IS paradise, and we should not expect some hereafter experience of some perfect paradise, should we then relax in the imperfection in which we live?

[BurtWorm]

3. I'm not clear about the meaning of the poem either

but I take it to mean something like your reading of it: compare the cold aethetic perfection of a still life to the imperfection that is so hot in us and choose. The imperfect is our paradise. This muddled, vital, mess of a world is our paradise. Is he arguing that it's to be taken on its terms and left in its imperfect state? Wouldn't that be, paradoxically, too perfect for us. Wouldn't that be, like the cold, dead still life he describes in the first part of the poem, not enough for us?

[On the Road]

2. Wallace Stevens

in that poem about the carnations floating in a bowl of water on a winter day, about how "one would want so much more than that." I believe it ends with:

"Note that in the bitterness, delight
(since the imperfect is so hot in us)
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds."

And for the life of me, I do not understand his philosophy or what he meant by that. I assume it was part of his belief about finding enjoyment in a natural world without God.

Its meaning for me is more like this: as desperately as the world needs improvement, seeking peace means contentment with imperfection.

[BurtWorm]

4. I think it's called "The Poems of Our Climate"

You got it! And your reading seems as good as a reading of the poem can be. I mean, I think he's expressing a kind of ecstatic acceptance of life.

[LearnedHand]

5. Note that Stevens died in 1955

I'm not sure when this poem was published, but I'm thinking about all the postwar poets (WWI and WWII) whose poetry addressed the "rough beast" of the new world.

"Ecstatic" didn't seem, to me, to be the mood of the narrator. Maybe more like "inevitable"? Or just "acceptance"?

[BurtWorm]

7. Ecstatic

I took from these words:

"delight
(since the imperfect is so hot in us)"

And of course, I may be misreading or reading too much into it.

[On the Road]

10. Yes, I Think Ecstacy (or Delight) is in CONTRAST

with the rest of the poem. I think the carnations floating in the bowl of water on a kitchen table in an empty house in mid-winter are a vision of sterile beauty. Asthetic perfection of a kind, but no delight, no heat, no ecstasy, and ultimately no paradise.

From 'Sunday Morning':

"She says; 'I am content when wakened birds before they fly
Test the reality of misty fields by their sweet questionings,
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields return no more,
Where then is paradise?

There is not any haunt of prophecy, nor any old spirit of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, Nor isle melodious where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor tree-lined palm Remote on heaven's hill,
That has endured as April's green endures,
Or will endure like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening
Tipped by the consummation of the swallows' wings."

[On the Road]

6. I'm Not Sure Stevens Knew What He Meant All the Time

It's one of the advantages of being obscure.

Sunday Morning, for example, has a similar theme of living in the present natural world. But parts of don't seem to belong -- the stanzas havong to do with Zeus and the "dividing indifferent blue (sky)". I've never got those stanzas.

Stevens fascinates me, especially the weird dichotomy between his poetry and insurance law. He was a strange, dominating, repressed Yankee. His poetry generates power through restraint and abstraction in a way that I've never seen.

[BurtWorm]

8. That dichotomy fascinates me, too.

And while I love his language, I find him extremely difficult to get.

[On the Road]

11. What's Even Worse is His Prose

I can make absolutely no sense out of it whatsoever.

Along with a lot of his poetry. But when he hits the right note, WOW!

[BurtWorm]

9. The Poems of Our Climate

I

Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations -- one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there.

II

Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one's torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.

III

There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

-- Wallace Stevens

[On the Road]

12. Thanks for Posing

Reading the whole thing again after our discussion, it makes pretty straightforward sense. Funny how that happens sometimes.

[BurtWorm]

13. I think that's why I posted it

I was reading it today, and I think I needed other eyes and minds to help me with it. That's the great thing about DU. One day sex puns. Next day poetry parsing.