The Death of a Soldier

"The Death of a Soldier" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first bookof poetry, "Harmonium." Itwas first published in 1918, so it is in the publicdomain. [Bates, p. 133]

Overview

The poem's haiku-like simplicity reinforces the naturalistic austerityof its depiction of death. One interpretive choice point asks whether Stevens is writing about any death, or rather, as Longenbachasserts, the death of the soldier — "and not an ambiguously `fictive' soldier but Eugène Lemercier [the young French painter killed in 1915 whose letters were collected as "Lettres d'un soldat" and read by Stevens in the summer of 1917] ." Longenbach claims that the poem's "utter bareness derives from the fact that Stevens was writing not about natural death ... but about a new kind of unnatural death, the daily death of thousands of soldiers on French battlefields." [http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/steven/soldier.htm] [Longenbach, J. p. 70]

One response to Longenbach's interpretation is to invoke Stevens's distinction between the true subject of a poem and the poetry of the subject, as he draws it in "The Irrational Element in Poetry". [Kermode, F., p. 785]

Now, just as the choice of subject is unpredictable at the outset, so its development, after it has been chosen, is unpredictable. One is always writing about two things at the same time in poetry and it is this that produces the tension characteristic of poetry. One is the true subject and the other is the poetry of the subject.

Then Lemercier's death would be the true subject, and the poetry of the subject would be anyone's death.

Poems like this one lead Bates to describe Stevens as "a war poet,after his fashion," and Ramazani's "Stevens and the War Elegy" expandson that idea, especially as it relates to post-"Harmonium" poemsthat are informed by World War II. [Ramazani, J.]

Bates compares the poem to The Snow Man,particularly its final stanza, in which the snow man must be "nothinghimself" in order to behold "the nothing that is". In this respect"The Death of a Soldier" adopts the snow man's point of view,according to Bates. The soldier has a "Lockean mind":"He is the sum of his impressions," Bates writes, "identical, in thisinstance, with the nothing he does behold." [Bates, p. 133] The soldier's "blank slate" (tabula rasa) becomes ablank, so to speak, leaving the clouds to go in their direction. Evenif Bates's reading strikes one as strained, the poem marks a departurefrom Romantic and Victorian conceptions of death. Death is not personified, for instance. (Compare Invective Against Swans.)

The analogy between death and the season of autumn supports theinterpretive idea that Stevens's care about the weather is interwovenwith reflections on deeper themes such as death, the nature of time,and so on. (See the issue between Vendler and Bloom in the main
Harmonium essay, the section "Themusical Imagist".)

Buttel includes "The Death of a Soldier" as among a handful of
Harmonium poems that most notably anticipate the "more reflective,more meditative, more serene, but no less intense" poems of his later work,not excluding "those magnificent, direct, fervent and profound poemsin "The Rock" at the end — and possibly the summit — of hiscareer". [Buttel, p. 250. The others that Buttel picks out are"Sunday Morning", "The Snow Man", "Another Weeping Woman", and "Fromthe Misery of Don Joost".]

Notes

References

• Bates, Milton J. "Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self". 1985: University of California Press.
• Buttel, Robert. "Wallace Stevens: The Making of Harmonium". 1967:
• Kermode, Frank and Joan Richardson. Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose. 1997: Library of America
• Longenbach, James. "Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things". 1991: Oxford University Press.
• Ramazani, Jahan. "Stevens and the War Elegy". Wallace Stevens Journal 15 1 (Spring 1991), pp. 24-36. Princeton University Press.