Wallace Stevens, "Jumbo"

The trees were plucked like iron bars
And Jumbo, the loud general-large
Singsonged and singsonged, wildly free.

Who was the musician, fatly soft
And wildly free, whose clawing thumb
Clawed on the ear these consonants?

Who the transformer, himself transformed,
Whose single being, single form
Were their resemblances to ours?

The companion in nothingness,
Loud, general, large, fat, soft
And wild and free, the secondary man,

Cloud-clown, blue painter, sun as horn,
Hill-scholar, man that never is,
The bad-bespoken lacker,

Ancestor of Narcissus, prince
Of the secondary men. There are no rocks
And stones, only this imager.


——
from Parts of a World (1942)

One way to try imagining the kind of mind that could produce this poem--or for that matter, to try to understand what that mind was getting at--is to type it out yourself, as I just have.

At the very least, such an exercise makes you more aware of the delicate phonic, lexical, and rhetorical balances that make up a good deal of the poem's structure.

Stevens was the lead pioneer of a certain brand of self-reflexive modern lyric, in which the poem refers to itself referring to parts of itself, and those parts in turn refer to the large loud general of the whole. At the risk of abusing a much-abused term, he is one of the first poets we might think of as modern lyric deconstructionists: poets, that is, whose use of paradox and pseudo-reference moves past exercises in "metaphysical" wit and into an re-thinking of the very metaphysical categories upon which such wit is based.

This poem, like many of Stevens' poems, takes the form of a series of philosophical speculations on imagination and artifice. They are philosophical, however, almost purely by virtue of vocabulary and phrasing; they do not pose logically paraphrasable problems and propositions. Or, if they do, the sources from which they are derived are so obscure as to ensure that only a very small percentage of the poems' readers will recognize them, and out of that percentage, an even smaller percentage will be able to venture an interpretation that maps Stevens' poem onto a coherent philosophical position, and even then, that interpretation is bound to satisfy only a very very small percentage of other "experts."

And yet, Stevens continues to be one of the most popular modernist poets, among academics and casual readers alike. I see the reason for this as evidence of both Stevens' genius and his shallowness, which are inseparable from each other: the poems work as philosophical candies, mouth-poppable sugar snacks in a phenomenological wrapper. This kind of shallowness is of course a defining element of what we generally recognize as postmodernism.

Stevens is one of the most "suggestive" poets of all time. He is almost nothing but suggestion. I'm always amazed when I look at books and journal articles that spend pages and pages hammering away at what they suppose to be the poems' "significance," placing them in various intellectual contexts, arguing for their importance as parts of a larger, coherent thesis. (Even more astoundingly, critics make the same assumption about and expend similar amounts of energy on the poems of John Ashbery, who is Stevens' most obvious heir in this regard.

What I hardly ever see (though I may just not know where to look for it) is commentary on how nutty Stevens is. "Jumbo"! Some crazy damn philosopher/general/poet-type circus elephant running amok!

More than being an "intellectual" poet, Stevens confounds the intellect by luring it into what looks to be intellect-friendly territory and then bringing out the clowns and funny noises and slapstick pratfalls. I've always felt slightly disappointed that O'Hara didn't like Stevens, when he seems so clearly to me to be one of the most important anticipators of the New York School (although, admittedly, more for Ashbery and Koch and others than O'Hara).

But back to the poem--the signal Stevensian gesture made by this poem is the introduction of a vivid yet irrational image early on, that then dissolves into increasing abstraction and language-play. Jumbo only exists as something like a concrete physical figure for the first stanza, before the oblique meditations take over. You could make a case that the "musician" of stanza 2 is not Jumbo at all, but the poet--Stevens himself, perhaps--who came up with him, and who continues to be the subject of the remainder of the poem.

But--and this is what I like so much--the reader (this reader anyway) is a bear of very little brain who never really gets past the amusing novelty of "Jumbo." "Jumbo"! The poem remains a poem about a rampaging circus elephant in a general's suit regardless of its divagations into high-flown musings on aesthetics.

In fact, all the stanzas after the first could be paraphrased by saying what I've been saying: "'Jumbo'! Haw! That's great!"

Stevens goofing on his own great riff....

Jean Donnelly, from Legend

Jean Donnelly
Ii


the little king says
hand me a mirror
he is handed a mirror

the little king says
there are guests in every room
there are guests in every room

the little king says
our rooms have shadows
our guests have shadows

the little king speaks
softly to his shadow

the little king is
laughing in every room


----
from Anthem (Sun & Moon, 2002)

Legend, the 26-section poem cycle from which "Ii" is excerpted, is an abecedarium of sorts: an alphabet poem, but one that is more suggested by the alphabet than ordered by it. I first read this poem in The Germ No. 3 (1999), along with several other sections of the series.

This is a great poem to use in classroom exercises, to get students thinking about the imagery of letters: how psychological and narrative nuances can be teased out of typographical form, how repetitions and near-repetitions can develop grammatical and syntactic figures.

Edmund Spenser, Amoretti 64

Comming to kisse her lyps, (such grace I found)
me seemd I smelt a gardin of sweet flowres,
that dainty odours from them threw around
for damzels fit to decke their lovers' bowres.
Her lips did smell lyke unto Gillyflowers,
her ruddy cheekes lyke unto Roses red;
her snowy browes lyke budded Bellamoures,
her lovely eyes lyke Pincks but newly spred;
Her goodly bosome lyke a Strawberry bed,
her neck lyke to a bounch of Cullambynes;
her brest lyke lillyes, ere theyr leaves be shed,
her nipples lyke yong blossom'd Jessemynes:
Such fragrant flowres doe give most odorous smell,
but her sweet odour did them all excell.

——
1595

As far as Elizabethan sonnets go, Spenser's "Comming to kisse her lyps" ranks about 12 out of 100 on the subtlety scale: it's rhetorically rudimentary, it offers little or no resistance to paraphrase, and the conceit (such as it is) is beyond banal in its singleminded attack. Unlike many sonnets by contemporaries like Shakespeare and Sidney, it presents no significant syntactic challenges or logical paradoxes. The surface is essentially the entire story: my gurl smells purty like purty flowers.

If there is one point in the poem where one could attempt to perform some type of New Critical or deconstructive close-reading maneuver, demonstrating that the poem is metaphysically self-reflexive in some way, it is in the first quatrain, where the speaker says of the flowers he thinks he smells as he is about to kiss his mistress that they "dainty odours from them threw around / for damzels fit to decke their lovers' bowres." In other words, his mistress smells like flowers that produce odors that mistresses use to enhance their erotic appeal. This is something like saying, "My girlfriend's perfume smells like perfume. For girls." But this isn't really self-reflexive as much as just tautological--one more way in which the poem stays at one level rather than shifting into a more sophisticated discursive gear.

The extended blazon (a conventional poetic list of the beloved's beautiful features) that comprises the second and third quatrains is novel in one regard: its sensual focus is on odor as opposed to sight. This poses a challenge for the poet that quite simply is doomed to failure, if you consider that it is much easier to come up with convincingly mimetic--and varied--visual analogues for a lover's aesthetic charms than it is to come up with olfactory ones. The idea that brows might smell noticeably more like "Bellamoures," whatever those are, than cheeks, which naturally smell more like roses, is high silliness. Spenser does preserve the structural discreteness of these two quatrains by having the first focus on the beloved's face and the second on her chest-area, but even here there is some awkwardness, as he appears to believe that her bosom and her breast are two different things (although there may be some distinction of period usage here that I'm too lazy to consult the OED about).

It's important to point out, however, that the sonnet is atypical in its apparent simplemindedness of the collection of which it is a part: the Amoretti as a whole is not lacking in either formal or conceptual complexity. No one, then, would suggest that the poem represents all that Spenser is capable of in terms of elaborate structure and elevated themes. Its presence in the cycle seems almost purely decorative, the textual equivalent of an ornamental page border or section-dividing flourish. And on this level, it is refreshingly cheery-plain, like the detail on a Tudor jewelry box, both delicate and crude at the same time. The blazon of flower-smells works visually in the long run after all: the reader is far more likely to picture the flowers than mentally conjure their odors. Critics sometimes suggest that the effect here is one of synesthesia, but that's probably a little too grand a way to describe what happens: it's not that the reader combines the senses of sight and smell, but that one ends up being more the point than the one that claims to be. The flowers, or more to the point ,their colors, effectively take the place of the smell of the mistress, which they claim to embody. In fact, the reader is more likely to picture the metaphorical flowers than the literal mistress's body--except for her nipples, of course, which are the show-stopper. [ "I said 'nipples.'"] After that, the throwaway closing couplet registers even less than it would if she had kept her top on.

In short, that same slightness and silliness I mentioned above is a big part of what makes this one of my favorite Renaissance poems. It frees the poem up to be as Elizabethan as it wants to be, a vividly bodied-forth manifestation of fantastical frivolity, marginal curlicues, and stylish fussiness. Petrarchanism without tears.