Le Monocle de Mon Oncle by Wallace Stevens

Le Monocle de Mon Oncle    I.    "Mother of heaven, regina of the clouds,    O sceptre of the sun, crown of the moon,    There is not nothing, no, no, never nothing,    Like the clashed edges of two words that kill."    And so I mocked her in magnificent measure.    Or was it that I mocked myself alone?    I wish that I might be a thinking stone.    The sea of spuming thought foists up again    The radiant bubble that she was. And then    A deep up-pouring from some saltier well    Within me, bursts its watery syllable.    II.    A red bird flies across the golden floor.    It is a red bird that seeks out his choir    Among the choirs of wind and wet and wing.    A torrent will fall from him when he finds.    Shall I uncrumple this much-crumpled thing?    I am a man of fortune greeting heirs;    For it has come that thus I greet the spring.    These choirs of welcome choir for me farewell.    No spring can follow past meridian.    Yet you persist with anecdotal bliss    To make believe a starry connaissance.    III.    Is it for nothing, then, that old Chinese    Sat tittivating by their mountain pools    Or in the Yangtse studied out their beards?    I shall not play the flat historic scale.    You know how Utamaro's beauties sought    The end of love in their all-speaking braids.    You know the mountainous coiffures of Bath.    Alas! Have all the barbers lived in vain    That not one curl in nature has survived?    Why, without pity on these studious ghosts,    Do you come dripping in your hair from sleep?    IV.    This luscious and impeccable fruit of life    Falls, it appears, of its own weight to earth.    When you were Eve, its acrid juice was sweet,    Untasted, in its heavenly, orchard air.    An apple serves as well as any skull    To be the book in which to read a round,    And is as excellent, in that it is composed    Of what, like skulls, comes rotting back to ground.    But it excels in this, that as the fruit    Of love, it is a book too mad to read    Before one merely reads to pass the time.    V.    In the high west there burns a furious star.    It is for fiery boys that star was set    And for sweet-smelling virgins close to them.    The measure of the intensity of love    Is measure, also, of the verve of earth.    For me, the firefly's quick, electric stroke    Ticks tediously the time of one more year.    And you? Remember how the crickets came    Out of their mother grass, like little kin,    In the pale nights, when your first imagery    Found inklings of your bond to all that dust.    VI.    If men at forty will be painting lakes    The ephemeral blues must merge for them in one,    The basic slate, the universal hue.    There is a substance in us that prevails.    But in our amours amorists discern    Such fluctuations that their scrivening    Is breathless to attend each quirky turn.    When amorists grow bald, then amours shrink    Into the compass and curriculum    Of introspective exiles, lecturing.    It is a theme for Hyacinth alone.    VII.    The mules that angels ride come slowly down    The blazing passes, from beyond the sun.    Descensions of their tinkling bells arrive.    These muleteers are dainty of their way.    Meantime, centurions guffaw and beat    Their shrilling tankards on the table-boards.    This parable, in sense, amounts to this:    The honey of heaven may or may not come,    But that of earth both comes and goes at once.    Suppose these couriers brought amid their train    A damsel heightened by eternal bloom.    VIII.    Like a dull scholar, I behold, in love,    An ancient aspect touching a new mind.    It comes, it blooms, it bears its fruit and dies.    This trivial trope reveals a way of truth.    Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.    Two golden gourds distended on our vines,    Into the autumn weather, splashed with frost,    Distorted by hale fatness, turned grotesque.    We hang like warty squashes, streaked and rayed,    The laughing sky will see the two of us    Washed into rinds by rotting winter winds.    IX.    In verses wild with motion, full of din,    Loudened by cries, by clashes, quick and sure    As the deadly thought of men accomplishing    Their curious fates in war, come, celebrate    The faith of forty, ward of Cupido.    Most venerable heart, the lustiest conceit    Is not too lusty for your broadening.    I quiz all sounds, all thoughts, all everything    For the music and manner of the paladins    To make oblation fit. Where shall I find    Bravura adequate to this great hymn?    X.    The fops of fancy in their poems leave    Memorabilia of the mystic spouts,    Spontaneously watering their gritty soils.    I am a yeoman, as such fellows go.    I know no magic trees, no balmy boughs,    No silver-ruddy, gold-vermilion fruits.    But, after all, I know a tree that bears    A semblance to the thing I have in mind.    It stands gigantic, with a certain tip    To which all birds come sometime in their time.    But when they go that tip still tips the tree.    XI.    If sex were all, then every trembling hand    Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.    But note the unconscionable treachery of fate,    That makes us weep, laugh, grunt and groan, and shout    Doleful heroics, pinching gestures forth    From madness or delight, without regard    To that first, foremost law. Anguishing hour!    Last night, we sat beside a pool of pink,    Clippered with lilies scudding the bright chromes,    Keen to the point of starlight, while a frog    Boomed from his very belly odious chords.    XII.    A blue pigeon it is, that circles the blue sky,    On sidelong wing, around and round and round.    A white pigeon it is, that flutters to the ground,    Grown tired of flight. Like a dark rabbi, I    Observed, when young, the nature of mankind,    In lordly study. Every day, I found    Man proved a gobbet in my mincing world.    Like a rose rabbi, later, I pursued,    And still pursue, the origin and course    Of love, but until now I never knew    That fluttering things have so distinct a shade.

"Le Monocle de Mon Oncle" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1918, which puts it in the public domain in the United States.

Commentary

Stanza I includes the line "I wish that I might be a thinking stone."

Harold Bloom regaled his students with an off-beat interpretation of Stanza II's line, "Shall I uncrumple this much-crumpled thing?", as alluding to an inactive sexual relationship to Elsie ("you", the Other).

Stanza IV includes the verse,

This luscious and impeccable fruit of life
Falls, it appears, of its own weight to earth.
When you were Eve, its acrid juice was sweet,
Untasted, in its heavenly, orchard air.

Stanza XI includes the verse,

If sex were all, then every trembling hand
Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.

And in stanza XII the poem concludes with the verse,

Like a rose rabbi, later, I pursued,
And still pursue, the origin and course
Of love, but until now I never knew
That fluttering things have so distinct a shade.

Holly Stevens quotes a letter of her father in which he writes, "I had in mind simply a man fairly well along in life, looking back and talking in a more or less personal way about life." This is widely regarded as reticence about the poem's commentary on his domestic life, or, as Helen Vendler phrases it, the poem is "about Stevens' failed marriage", "about [his] middle age and romantic disillusion". She defends herself against the accusation of biographical reduction, which elsewhere she directs against Joan Richardson's psychobiography of

Stevens,[2][3] as follows.

It has been objected that a criticism suggesting that poems spring from life is reductive, that is to say that "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle" is about Stevens' failed marriage is somehow injurious to the poem. It seems to me normal to begin with the life-occasion as we deduce it from the poem; it is only an error when one ends there. To tether Stevens' poems to human feeling is at least to remove him from the "world of ghosts" where he is so often located, and to insist that he is a poet of more than epistemological questions alone.

Vendler and Richardson disagree about how to understand Stevens' distinction between the "true subject" of a poem and "the poetry of the subject". For Richardson it corresponds to the difference between the infantile kernel of a Stevens poem and the surface of his words' appearance. For Vendler the true subject is an experience and the poetry of the subject is a rendering of it. Richardson is led from her conception of the subject -- "the fears and uncertainties of the boy who still crouched inside him" -- to diagnose the surface of the poem as reflecting "the American dissociation of sensibility that began with the first Puritans giving the rhetorical lie to the truth of their experience." Vendler thinks this is even worse than simply "ending there" in biography, for it leads away from the poetry of the subject, which in her view requires understanding the special role of syntax that allows Stevens to achieve his poetic effects. ("Stevens's words are almost always deflected from their common denotation, and his syntax serves to delay and to disarticulate....What an image was to Pound, a syllable was to Stevens.")[4]

See also "Two Figures in Dense Violet Night".

References

• Buttel, Robert. The Making of Harmonium. 1967: Princeton University Press.
• Richardson, Joan. Wallace Stevens: The Early Years 1879-1923. 1986: William Morrow
• Stevens, Holly. The Letters of Wallace Stevens. 1966: University of California Press.
• Vendler, Helen. "The Hunting of Wallace Stevens". New York Review of Books Volume 33 Number 18 (Nov 20, 1986)
• Vendler, Helen. Words Chosen Out Of Desire. 1984: University of Tennessee Press.