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"The Whispering of Innumerable Responsive Spirits" 63

/ Of speech" to "music so profound / They seem an exaltation without

sound" (CPP 44). In "Peter Quince at the Clavier," in what are among Ste-
vens* most celebrated lines, his speaker proclaims that his "fingers" on the
piano keys—and their resultant sound—spur changes that transform those
soundings into feeling and thinking: "Music is feeling, then, not sound,"
and, to the "object" of his desire—"Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
/ Is music" (CPP 72). Stevens' later poems do more than gesture toward
the kind of "whispering," "invisible," and "shadowy" music that defies
precise definition; in poem after poem, he uses musical language to reach
toward the "infinite extension of personality" and "the unknown' (L 136)
for which he credits music so many years earlier. In "Two Tales of Liadoff:
Stevens' speaker imagines the composer playing "epi-tones" on the piano
after his death, and, in the second canto, the music allows Liadoff (today
spelled Lyadov or Liadov) a rebirth: "like a violent pulse in the cloud itself,"
he "no longer remained a ghost / And, being straw, turned green. lived
backward, shared / The fantastic fortune of fantastic blood' (CP? 303). It
is as if Stevens were poeticizing his earlier reflections in the way Liadoff's
musk, like the Schubert symphony so many years before, breaks the bather
between past and present (and between life and death), for Liadoff "turned
green" and lived backward' Sometimes, too, Stevens ponders the relation
between the physical sounds we hear—natural or musical—and the purer
or 'inaccessible" intuitive sense, as in "Montrachet-legardin" (CPP 237)
when the speaker takes a moment near the poem's end to express his wish
to reach the unreachable:

Item: The cocks crow and the birds cry and

The sun expands, like a repetition on
One string, an absolute, not varying

Toward an inaccessible, pure sound. (CPP 237)

In poems of Stevens' mature years, he uses music as a figure for the kind
of knowledge—irrational or unconscious—that we feel but cannot fully
grasp. Ile creates a poetic language that approximates what he calls in his
1909 ktter to Elsie the "mysterious effect of music, the vague effect we feel
when we hear music, without ever defining it" (L. 136). In "Description
Without Place," Stevens gives perfect yoke to an unconscious or irrational
kind of transformativc knowledge that music brings and that he had begun
to conceive in New York City so many years before:

There might be, too, a change immenser than

A poet's metaphors in which being would

Come true, a point in the fire of music where

Dazzle yields to a clarity and we observe,

23:35
24/05/2019