The Dove in the Belly.

Wallace Stevens' poems should help you live your lives! Poems are being assigned this week: if you weren't in class today, you probably have a poem anyway.

The reason that The Snow Man is so enchanting that it uses paratactic language, language used by small children and the gospel of Mark and Hemingway. You think that the sentence is going to end and then something else comes along and then you get caught up in the moment and then suddenly it's the end of the poem and the whole story just goes on and on and on. My next project, oddly enough, is to write from the perspective of a child. What are the chances?

1 in 3.

If your blog posts are as long as Dustin's, you don't have to worry about posting very often. You should read his post (find it here). The Swerve is at the core of Lucretius.

Today is Sunday Morning. The freedom of her cockatoo is symbolic of her own freedom. The little voices in her head are like the little angel and demon sitting on your shoulders in a cartoon. We have passions, grievings, moods – if you do not have these things you are not human and should leave this class. All we have is this life, there is nothing more, but this is enough. This poem is iambic pentameter without the end rhyme.

When Stevens uses the word blue he refers to imagination; he uses green for reality.

This poem is all about the afterlife: our desire for it, and Stevens' insistence that this life is all that there is. Is this close to the sublime? Death is the mother of beauty – if we life forever, then all of this will last forever and it will become incredibly dull and boring. The fact that things will die is what makes them beautiful. If there is no death in heaven, there is no ripe fruit, no change. It is eternal summer.

Stanzas VI and VIII are the most important and the best to memorize.

She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Wow. Yeah.