Invective Against Swans

Invective Against Swans

"Invective Against Swans" from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, "Harmonium" (1923), was first published prior to 1923 andis therefore in the public domain. [http://librivox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4077]

The poem seems to be an insult poem slamming swans, of all things, calling them ganders andsaying that the chilly chariots of their bodies aren't suited to the heroic high flying that the soul undertakes.

Stevens's ironic mode

It has been observed that Stevens has two modes. Mode 1 is a pureand orgiastic — Dionysian — celebration of life. Mode 2 is themalign and ironic observer. "Invective against Swans" isclassifiable as mode 2.David Herd plausiblylocates the insult at an abstract level.

One of the tasksModernist poets set themselves, probably the chief task,was to resuscitate the all but clapped-out diction ofEnglish-language poetry. It was for this reason Wallace Stevens wrotehis "Invective Against Swans"....Stevens wanted people to understandthat the language of poetry (as it was passed down to him by hisVictorian predecessors), with its over-dependence on swans and clouds,was all but obsolete, capable only of expressing a certain poeticalmood — a mood of burdened over-sensitivity. [http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1177980,00.html]
Arguably then, the poem isinsulting not swans and clouds but rather "both" clapped – out Victoriandiction "and" the philosophical/poetic impulse to give up onnature, escaping it with the decrepit soul – vehicle, which figures inPlatonic and Christian conceptions of immortality and a transcendentworld. There is no reason to think that Stevens was comfortable inany such vehicle. In 1902 the 22-year-old Stevens enters in hisjournal, "An old argument with me is that the true religious force inthe world is not the church but the world itself." In "Adagia" he writes,"After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takesits place as life's redemption." [Kermode and Richardson, p. 900)] See also "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman".

Re-imagining the natural world

The poem is perhaps saying that the poet should re-imagine the natural world,neither escaping to Plato's world of Forms or Christian heaven, norrelying on Victorian imagination."Invective against Swans" perhaps "shows" how to do that re-imagining.Its allusionto Paphos, the mythical birthplace of Aphrodite — embodiment of thevalues of love, sex, and beauty — doesn't bespeak an attitude thatexults in slipping "the surly bonds of Earth". Instead it expressessummer's end in a pungently non-Victorian way.

A contrast with Magee

The line about the surly bonds of Earth, incidentally, comes from a 1943poem by British pilot John Magee, whose Spitfire flies him, in thepoem "High Flight",

Where never lark, nor eer eagle flew--
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high, untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

Magee's Spitfire and his "silent lifting mind" may not be dissimilar tothe soul that takes flight in "Invective against Swans", and Stevens maybethe malign and ironic observer of such bond-slipping, staying onEarth, sharing it with the crows whose dirt sullies statues, showing howthat poetic imagination can do better than to create such statues (towhich "High Flyer" might be compared). It wouldn't transcend swans andclouds, larks and eagles; it would do better by them. Stevens' summerwould be entirely different. (See for comparison the references to a widow's bird and an old horse in the concluding lines of Nuances of a Theme by Williams.)

Notes

References

  • Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (editors), "Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose". 1997: Library of America.

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