Invective Against Swans
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"Invective Against Swans" from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923), was first published prior to 1923 and is therefore in the public domain.[1]
| Invective against Swans The soul, O gander, flies beyond the parks |
The poem seems to be an insult poem slamming swans, of all things, calling them ganders and saying that the chilly chariots of their bodies aren't suited to the heroic high flying that the soul undertakes.
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[edit] Stevens's ironic mode
It has been observed that Stevens has two modes. Mode 1 is a pure and orgiastic — Dionysian — celebration of life. Mode 2 is the malign and ironic observer. "Invective against Swans" is classifiable as mode 2. David Herd plausibly locates the insult at an abstract level.
One of the tasks Modernist poets set themselves, probably the chief task, was to resuscitate the all but clapped-out diction of English-language poetry. It was for this reason Wallace Stevens wrote his "Invective Against Swans"....Stevens wanted people to understand that the language of poetry (as it was passed down to him by his Victorian predecessors), with its over-dependence on swans and clouds, was all but obsolete, capable only of expressing a certain poetical mood — a mood of burdened over-sensitivity.[2]
Arguably then, the poem is insulting not swans and clouds but rather both clapped – out Victorian diction and the philosophical/poetic impulse to give up on nature, escaping it with the decrepit soul – vehicle, which figures in Platonic and Christian conceptions of immortality and a transcendent world. There is no reason to think that Stevens was comfortable in any such vehicle. In 1902 the 22-year-old Stevens enters in his journal, "An old argument with me is that the true religious force in the 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 takes its place as life's redemption."[1] See also "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman".
[edit] 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, nor relying on Victorian imagination. "Invective against Swans" perhaps "shows" how to do that re-imagining. Its allusion to Paphos, the mythical birthplace of Aphrodite — embodiment of the values of love, sex, and beauty — doesn't bespeak an attitude that exults in slipping "the surly bonds of Earth". Instead it expresses summer's end in a pungently non-Victorian way.
[edit] A contrast with Magee
The line about the surly bonds of Earth, incidentally, comes from a 1943 poem by British pilot John Magee, whose Spitfire flies him, in the poem "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 to the soul that takes flight in "Invective against Swans", and Stevens may be the malign and ironic observer of such bond-slipping, staying on Earth, sharing it with the crows whose dirt sullies statues, showing how that poetic imagination can do better than to create such statues (to which "High Flyer" might be compared). It wouldn't transcend swans and clouds, larks and eagles; it would do better by them. Stevens' summer would 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.)
[edit] Notes
- ^ Kermode and Richardson, p. 900)
[edit] References
- Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (editors), Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose. 1997: Library of America.
