Michael Ruby : part two

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

When I was in college in the late 1970s, my friends and I worshipped the poetry of Wallace Stevens, especially his later poetry. I would subsequently “tergiversate” and prefer his first book, Harmonium. More lines of late Stevens are imprinted in my brain than of any other poet. I reflexively quote Stevens lines to myself in situations that sometimes require far more than renewal, sometimes far less. Here are some of those lines.

When I left work in the early morning hours on election night in 2010, 2014 and 2016, I thought this line from “The Auroras of Autumn”:

                                  The cancellings,
The negations are never final.

I think this on the occasion of the big defeats in life, the big losses, even the ones I can’t recover from. I want to think it.

On a summer afternoon when big clouds fill a vast blue sky and what year it is in my life briefly doesn’t matter, I think these lines, also from “The Auroras of Autumn”:

It is a theater floating through the clouds,
Itself a cloud, although of misted rock
And mountains running like water, wave on wave...

By the way, how about the title “The Auroras of Autumn”! And yet, when I recently re-read the poem, I blanched at a likely racist line, which I will not quote.

When someone disses me, I try to walk away thinking Stevens’ late title, “A Clear Day and No Memories”.

When my mother was dying in 2012, as an experiment, I pulled out my favorite poetry books to see which would have the most beneficial effect on me. Normally, I just listen to Mahler’s 9th and 10th symphonies at such a time. Nothing spoke to me more than the opening lines of “To an Old Philosoper in Rome”:

On the threshold of heaven, the figures in the street
become the figures of heaven,…
 
Sometimes when I think back to my teens or early twenties, I think of the penultimate stanza of “Long and Sluggish Lines”:

…Wanderer, this is the prehistory of February.
The life of the poem of the mind has not yet begun.

Another phrase from that same poem I find myself thinking more and more:

…one has been there before.

In the subway, trying to describe what my relation is to an unknown person I’m observing, I often settle on the famous final phrase of “The Snow Man”:

the nothing that is

I wrote a paper as a college sophomore about one of Stevens’ last poems, “Of Mere Being,” that includes these lines:

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.

I use these lines to explain anything I can’t explain.