THE EXPRESSION WITHOUT THE SONG
225
lace Stevens, "Disillusionment of Ten
O'Clock." It is one of the few poems written
by an American, until the last few years,
which is mostly expression.
DISILLUSIONMENT OF TEN O'CLOCK
The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.
The paraphrase here is as banal as the paraphrase of Hardy's poem: "Folks around here
don't have any imagination," or "These
proper people are unimaginative; improper
people have a more exciting inner life."
However you paraphrase it, you are not
going to cope with a sailor who catches tigers in red weather. This poem is obscure,
like Hardy's, in that the words move and delight us in our irrational selves. The poem
lives in the country of dream, asleep in its
boots.
For most of the years since Stevens wrote
'Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" (it was
published more than fifty years ago), American poets have written poems the old way,
with ostensible contents fully visible. Sometimes they have written very well; Robert
Frost is moving and mysterious, and always
keeps up a surface. But in the last decade, as
part of a general opening-up of the imagination in poetry, young poets have increasingly
sought to discover and express their irrational selves. They have not followed any
rigid program-the rule book hurt French
surrealism-though they have learned from
modem European and Latin American poetry in general.
One of the methods of this new poetry is
to suppress old progressive forms like narrative or argument. The precise reverseanti-narrative is a story that makes no sense;
illogic is useful if it is gross enough-can
suppress trite associations, but of course
takes some of its shapeliness from the order
it is mocking. (An old example is "Jabberwocky.") There is also a poetry-more like
the Wallace Stevens poem-in which the
progress is purely fantastic, in which expression sings loud and clear, without a song. A
tiny example is Robert Bly's "Taking the
Hands":
Taking the hands of someone you love,
You see they are delicate cages...
Tiny birds are singing
In the secluded prairies
And in the deep valleys of the hand.
LOVERS IN MIDDLE AGE
The young girls look up
as we walk past the line at the movie,
and go back to examining their fingernails.
Their boy friends are combing their hair,
and chew gum
as if they meant to insult us.
Today we made love all day.
I look at you. You are smiling at the sidewalk,
dear wrinkled face.
