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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN
MUSIC AND LITERATURE
The Poetic Music of

Wallace Stevens
Bart Eeckhout · Lisa Goldfarb
Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature
Series Editors
Paul Lumsden
City Centre Campus
MacEwan University
Edmonton, AB, Canada
Marco Katz Montiel

Facultad de Letras
Pontifical Catholic University of Chile
Santiago, RM - Santiago, Chile
This leading-edge series joins two disciplines in an exploration of how
music and literature confront each other as dissonant antagonists while
also functioning as consonant companions. By establishing a critical con-
nection between literature and music, this series highlights the interaction
between what we read and hear. Investigating the influence music has on
narrative through history, theory, culture, or global perspectives provides
a concrete framework for a seemingly abstract arena. Titles in the series,
both monographs and edited volumes, explore musical encounters in nov-
els and poetry, considerations of the ways in which narratives appropriate
musical structures, examinations of musical form and function, and studies
of interactions with sound.
Editorial Advisory Board

Frances R. Aparicio, Northwestern University, US
Timothy Brennan, University of Minnesota, US
Barbara Brinson Curiel, Critical Race, Gender & Sexuality Studies,
Humboldt State University, US
Gary Burns, Northern Illinois University, US
Peter Dayan, Word and Music Studies, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Shuhei Hosokawa, International Research Center for Japanese
Studies, Japan
Javier F. León, Latin American Music Center of the Jacobs School of
Music, Indiana University, US
Marilyn G. Miller, Tulane University, US
Robin Moore, University of Texas at Austin, US
Nduka Otiono, Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, Canada
Gerry Smyth, Liverpool John Moores University, England
Jesús Tejada, Universitat de València, Spain
Alejandro Ulloa Sanmiguel, Universidad del Valle, Colombia
Bart Eeckhout • Lisa Goldfarb
The Poetic Music of

Wallace Stevens
Bart Eeckhout Lisa Goldfarb
Department of Literature Gallatin School
University of Antwerp New York University
Antwerp, Belgium New York, NY, USA
Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature

ISBN 978-3-031-07031-0 ISBN 978-3-031-07032-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07032-7
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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Acknowledgments
So many years of collaborative work and intellectual exchange come

together in this book that we hesitate to draw up a list of institutional and
individual names to express our gratitude, as the list is bound to be
incomplete.
Over the years in which we prepared different components of our book,
we enjoyed the institutional support of our respective employers, the
Gallatin School of New York University (Lisa) and the University of
Antwerp (Bart). During the academic year 2016–2017, Bart was able to
plot and draft some of his contributions through a Residential Fellowship
of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and
Social Sciences, combined with a sabbatical fellowship of the Flemish
Research Council (FWO). Lisa received a Gallatin Faculty Research
Fellowship 2017–2019, which enabled her to work on the book proposal
and begin the research for some of her contributions, and a fellowship
from the NYU Center for the Humanities during the academic year
2020–2021 to work on her own chapters. We were also given the oppor-
tunity to try out early versions of our chapters at conferences and other
academic gatherings: a conference entitled “Melodies and Modernisms”
at Ghent University in 2007 (Bart); an annual symposium of the Flemish
Association for Literary Theory (VAL), entitled “Music in Literature—
Literature in Music,” at the Free University of Brussels in 2016 (Bart); a
panel on Stevens and music at the Modern Language Association’s annual
convention in New York in 2018 (Lisa and Bart); and two meetings of the
NYU Center for the Humanities, which hosted workshops first on the
birdsong chapter and then our introduction (Lisa).
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Our deepest thanks always go to our families and friends for the pride
they have in our work, and the good cheer that they always provide. A
special thanks from both of us to George Burns, who read every chapter
in advance of the final preparation of the manuscript.
For more than a decade now, we have both been active as officers of
The Wallace Stevens Society and editors of both The Wallace Stevens
Journal and various volumes on the poet edited either for the Journal or
for separate publishers. These activities have allowed us to benefit con-
stantly from the inspiration and companionship offered by many col-
leagues who make the academic study of Stevens such a sophisticated,
witty, generous, and warm environment. We can do no more than honor
our longtime partners here through an alphabetical list of names: Charles
Altieri, Massimo Bacigalupo, Dennis Barone, Milton J. Bates, Jacqueline
Vaught Brogan, Stephanie Burt, Robert Buttel, Angus Cleghorn, Bonnie
Costello, Alan Filreis, Zachary Finch, James Finnegan, Florian Gargaillo,
Natalie Gerber, Thomas Gould, Gül Bilge Han, Anna Jamieson, Daniel
Jean, Lee M. Jenkins, George S. Lensing, James Longenbach, Glen
MacLeod, Rachel Malkin, Maureen N. McLane, the late J. Hillis Miller,
Axel Nesme, Marjorie Perloff, Justin Quinn, Edward Ragg, Irene Ramalho
Santos, Jahan Ramazani, Patrick Redding, Joan Richardson, Alexis Serio,
John N. Serio, Tony Sharpe, Laura Slatkin, Lisa M. Steinman, Juliette
Utard, Helen Vendler, and Krzysztof Ziarek.
At Palgrave Macmillan, we would like to thank Allie Troyanos (Senior
Editor), with whom we first discussed our project, and Vinoth Kuppan
(Project Coordinator), who has helped move the book to completion.
Additional thanks go to Heather Dubnick (independent editorial ser-
vices), who prepared our index.
We would like to thank all editors and publishers who provided invalu-
able input on and gave permission to reprint components of this book in
earlier stages of its development. A much briefer, preliminary version of
Chap. 3 appeared as “Wallace Stevens’s Modernist Melodies” in Texas
Studies in Literature and Language (vol. 55, no. 1, Spring 2013,
pp. 53–71). Portions of our introduction and of Chaps. 5 and 6 appeared
as “‘In, on, or about the Words’: The Latent Music of Stevens’s Poetry”
and “Stevens and Stravinsky: Shared Aspects of a Musical Poetics” in a
special issue, “Stevens into Music,” that we guest-edited for The Wallace
Stevens Journal (vol. 43, no. 2, Fall 2019, pp. 191–213 and 214–33). A
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii
succinct version of Chap. 7 was first published as “‘Things as they are /

Are changed upon the blue guitar’: Learning from Ned Rorem’s Last
Poems of Wallace Stevens” in a thematic issue, “Literature and Music,”
guest-edited by Inge Arteel and Bruno Forment for Cahier voor
Literatuurwetenschap (vol. 10, 2018, pp. 65–76).
Finally, the authors and publisher gratefully acknowledge the following
for permission to reproduce copyright material.
Stevens, Wallace. “Of Modern Poetry,” copyright © 1923, 1951, 1954
by Wallace Stevens; “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” copyright © 1937
by Wallace Stevens; “The Plain Sense of Things,” copyright © 1952 by
Wallace Stevens; “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” copyright © 1942
by Wallace Stevens; “Credences of Summer,” copyright © 1954 by Wallace
Stevens and copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens; “Poetry Is a
Destructive Force,” copyright © 1942 by Wallace Stevens, copyright
renewed 1970 by Holly Stevens; “The Creations of Sound,” copyright ©
1947 by Wallace Stevens; “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing
Itself,” “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” “Esthétique du Mal,”
“Autumn Refrain,” “Vacancy in the Park,” “Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz,”
“Long and Sluggish Lines,” “Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of
Fine Ideas,” “A Primitive Like an Orb,” “Anglais Mort à Florence,”
“Meditation Celestial & Terrestrial,” and “Two Tales of Liadoff” from
THE COLLECTED POEMS OF WALLACE STEVENS by Wallace
Stevens, copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and copyright renewed
1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint
of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random
House LLC, and by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. All rights reserved.
Stevens, Wallace. “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” and
“Effects of Analogy” from THE NECESSARY ANGEL: ESSAYS ON
REALITY AND THE IMAGINATION by Wallace Stevens, copyright ©
1942, 1944, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1951 by Wallace Stevens. Used by per-
mission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing
Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Stevens, Wallace. Excerpt(s) from THE LETTERS OF WALLACE
STEVENS by Wallace Stevens, edited by Holly Stevens, copyright © 1966
by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of
the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random
House LLC. All rights reserved.
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Stevens, Wallace. “Of Mere Being,” copyright © 1967, 1969, 1971 by

Holly Stevens; “The Dove in Spring,” “The Irrational Element in Poetry,”
“Poetry and Meaning,” and “Adagia” from OPUS POSTHUMOUS by
Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1957 by Elsie Stevens and Holly Stevens.
Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday
Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights
reserved.
Praise for The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens
“Almost all talk about musicality in poetry concentrates on specific aural effects.
But surely there are possible questions about ways that melody, tone, pacing, and
harmonic structure can illuminate the relationship between the two arts. Then
there are questions about how a poet engages the ideas of musicians, especially a
poet like Wallace Stevens intensely concerned to escape Romantic emotion for
Modernism’s hard-edged constructions. This book heroically both engages these
questions and shapes possible ways of answering them. I think Bart Eeckhout and
Lisa Goldfarb’s The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens is an instant critical classic
because of the depth of its exposition, its loving and often stunning attention to
particular Stevens poems, and its combination of careful pedagogical presentation
with totally engaging flights of critical imagination liberated by the sharpness of its
framing questions.”
—Charles Altieri, Stageberg Professor of English,
University of California, Berkeley, USA
“There have been numbers of case studies and theoretical frameworks offered by
literary critics and art historians that have enriched the way exchanges between the
visual and literary arts are now treated, but until recently there has been far less
work done on the relationship between music and poetry. The Poetic Music of
Wallace Stevens admirably fills this gap. Erudite, lucid, and nuanced, this volume is
not simply six case studies in alternating voices, but a polyphonic rethinking of an
undertheorized area of study that offers multiple ways of approaching poetic musi-
cality and of considering exchanges between poetic and musical practices. Although
more than one hand was involved in writing The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens, it
seems apt to quote the following lines from Marianne Moore: “To explain grace
requires / a curious hand.” Eeckhout’s and Goldfarb’s curiosity is everywhere on
display in this book. Their rigorous but open-minded study is a treasure.”
—Lisa M. Steinman, Kenan Professor of English
and Humanities, Reed College, USA
Contents
1 Introduction: Musicking Stevens 1
2 The Enigmatic Relation Between Music and Memory 21
3 The Challenge of Inventing Modern Melodies 51
4 The Lifelong Lure of Birds and Their Song 85
5 The
Vibrations of Latent Music: Juxtaposing Stevens with
Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, Paul Hindemith, and
Claude Debussy113
6 Shared
Aspects of a Musical Poetics: Juxtaposing Stevens
with Igor Stravinsky149
7 Learning
from Composers: Ned Rorem’s Last Poems of
Wallace Stevens173
Index203
xi
Abbreviations1
Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose. Edited by Frank Kermode and
CPP
Joan Richardson, Library of America, 1997.
L Letters of Wallace Stevens. Edited by Holly Stevens, Alfred A. Knopf,
1966; reprint, U of California P, 1996.
Note
1. The above mentioned standard abbreviations for the works of Wallace

Stevens are used throughout. As a rule, references to poems and prose are
to the Library of America volume edited by Frank Kermode and Joan
Richardson (abbreviated as CPP). In those rare instances where a small error
in CPP occurs, we follow the editorial practice of The Wallace Stevens Journal
and make silent corrections on the basis of the Corrected Edition of The
Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, edited by John N. Serio and Chris Beyers
(Vintage Books, 2015). Page references are provided for poems only when
quotations from those poems are included in the discussion.
xiii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Musicking Stevens
1 Aims and Theoretical Inspiration

Wallace Stevens’s musicality has long been identified as one of the most
consistent and rich aspects of his verse. Scholars and critics have explored
the musical features that mark his poems—from the names of composers
and instrumental images that punctuate his work to his distinctive poetic
forms that often resemble musical structures. Stevens, as scholars have
noted, took inspiration from composers and music he appreciated, and
composers have, from Stevens’s day to ours, drawn inspiration from his
poems. As John Hollander wrote already more than forty years ago, music,
for Stevens, is a “master trope of such complexity that merely to catalogue
its elements can be bewildering” (“Sound” 235). While scholars and crit-
ics (including ourselves) have done a great deal of that cataloguing,
Stevens’s relationship to music is so profound, and at times elusive, that
there is still a great deal of work that remains to be done to deepen our
understanding of both the music of his own poetry and his ties to the art
of music. It is to some of this deeper work that we intend to devote The
Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens.
Rather than retread and synthesize work that has been done in earlier
volumes and essays, we intend to study Stevens’s music here in six elabo-
rate case studies that present different angles on the poet’s connection to
music. To describe our overall aim in this book, we have borrowed the
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
B. Eeckhout, L. Goldfarb, The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens,
Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07032-7_1
2 B. EECKHOUT AND L. GOLDFARB
term “musicking” from the musicologist Christopher Small, who coined

it in the 1990s. Although Small wanted to use it for very different pur-
poses than our own (mostly to broaden the understanding of how music
is produced and staged from a sociological point of view), we appreciate
the term for how it is also able to evoke the kind of studies we practice in
each of our chapters. Small introduced the intransitive participle form
“musicking” to insist that music should not be studied as an object but as
a process. All the case studies we develop in The Poetic Music of Wallace
Stevens have in common that they are primarily interested in music as a
temporal art form—one that exists only in time. They investigate the role
of a musical aesthetic of transience, ephemerality, and affective intensifica-
tion that appealed so strongly to Stevens, whose poems we do not approach
as fixed textual products but (in the tradition of American pragmatism that
also shaped his thinking) as an art of textual performance that invites
open-ended interpretive processes and embodied experiences. We high-
light this performative, open-ended, interpretive, and experiential quality
by shifting (or modulating) Small’s concept to a transitive use of the verb:
because Stevens is a verbal artist and not a musician in the strict sense,
approaching his work from the perspective of music requires a conscious
act of “musicking” his poetry that simultaneously invites reflections on its
own undertaking.
Thus, in the pages that follow, we will be doing more than just offering
the standard academic juxtaposition of Writer and Concept (in this case,
“Stevens and Music”). We will be exploring a range of heterogeneous yet
complementary case studies that seek to go beyond registering how
Stevens took an interest in music and demonstrated this interest in his
poetry and prose: we will be showing also that as critics who want to study
this poet in relation to music, we have to engage in various strategies for
translating his poetry into musical concepts and terms, allowing its music
to be heard; for grasping what its musicality might involve in relation to
time, memory, melody, and the sounds of nature; and, importantly as well,
for understanding how his poetry might be configured with the works and
theories of musical composers.
Before we turn to a few particular sources of inspiration that undergird
our work on Stevens and music, we want to acknowledge the larger field
of Word and Music Studies within which our explorations may be situated.
Since 1997, the year in which it was founded, the International Association
for Word and Music Studies has fostered interdisciplinary work that
encompasses scholarship across musical and literary genres (orchestral and
1 INTRODUCTION: MUSICKING STEVENS 3
instrumental music; opera and music composed for the theater; poetry,
fiction, drama, and film). Their ongoing book series (drawn from annual
conferences) is testament to the broad range of contributions to the field:
Essays on Performativity (Bernhart and Halliwell), Arts of Incompletion:
Fragments in Words and Music (Bernhart and Englund), and Silence and
Absence in Literature and Music (Wolf and Bernhart) are just a few titles
that are relevant to our research. These books include various essays that
either explore related theoretical aspects or parallel our aim to musicalize
Stevens’s work—from Adrian Paterson’s examination of the radio perfor-
mances of W. B. Yeats to Margaret Miner’s discussion of Charles
Baudelaire’s writings on music and Mary Breatnach’s study of the relation
between silence and music in Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés.
There are, of course, several specific historical and theoretical studies
about the relationship between poetry and music that serve as a founda-
tion for the task we set for ourselves in this book. Among them is
Hollander’s masterful study of the history of the relations between these
arts in English poetry, The Untuning of the Sky, which focuses on early
modern poetry (1500–1700), and his Vision and Resonance, which con-
siders both visual and musical dimensions of poetry. James Anderson
Winn’s Unsuspected Eloquence is another comprehensive examination of
the history of music and poetry that, like Hollander’s, concentrates on
earlier periods (up through Shakespeare), but also includes chapters on
Romantic and Symbolist poetry, the latter of which famously aimed to
achieve “the condition of music” (in Walter Pater’s phrase). Among the
many notable theoretical forays into the topic, we must number Theodor
Adorno, particularly his essay “Music, Language, and Composition”;
Lawrence Kramer’s Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After;
and Marshall Brown’s The Tooth That Nibbles at the Soul. What likens
music and language (not specifically poetic language) is that both are com-
prised, to borrow Adorno’s words, of “a temporal succession of articu-
lated sounds that are more than just sound” (113). Most striking to the
scholar of poetry are Adorno’s descriptions of music that one might apply
to lyric poetry, and it is these comments that might serve as a guide when
one studies poetic language (and Stevens’s, in particular) in relation
to music.
A few such statements must suffice for our introductory, stage-setting
purposes here. “What music says is a proposition at once distinct and con-
cealed,” Adorno writes (114), and how we interpret music relies on the
“act of execution” (115). Certainly, we can substitute “poetry” in place of
music in the first statement, and conclude that our understanding of a

poem—a Stevens poem, in particular—likewise relies on the critical “act of
execution”; that is, on how we read and, indeed, perform it. Adorno fur-
ther describes music as an art of “remembrance and expectation” (116), a
comment that powerfully echoes Paul Valéry’s description of music as the
art of “l’attente et de l’attention” (expectation and attention) (Oeuvres I
136), the principle of which the French poet goes on to extend to lyric
poetry. Applying such principles to our readings of Stevens’s poems helps
to accentuate the musicality intrinsic to them. Similarly, Adorno’s more
poetic descriptions of music seem to gesture toward, even to crave, the
poetic: “Music refracts its scattered intentions away from their own power
and brings them together into the configuration of the name.” Both his
notion of music’s “scattered intentions” (as compared with the relative
linearity of discursive prose) and his emphasis on mobility—what he calls
music as a “wandering journey”—underpin our analyses of Stevens’s
poems and the relationship of his work to that of composers (116).
Drawing on the common origins of music and poetry as art forms,
Lawrence Kramer, too, probes their relation in modernity: “In the begin-
ning was the song. Is it fair to add that, once separated, music and poetry
tend to become nostalgic for each other?” To begin an answer to this ques-
tion, citing the language of a Ludwig van Beethoven letter of 1817 and a
stanza from Stevens’s “Variations on a Summer Day,” he writes, “Both
Beethoven and Wallace Stevens seem to have thought so” (Music 3). Both
arts, Kramer insists, demand to be studied in relation to one another, for in
both “the alliance of connotative and combinatory features becomes sig-
nificant in two ways: intertextually, through allusion, generic affiliation,
and the play of stylistic codes; and intratextually, through rhythmic design
and the play of likeness and difference among particulars” (5). Kramer sees
a “complementarity in the roles that the two arts assign to their connota-
tive and combinatory aspects: each art makes explicit the dimension that
the other leaves tacit” (6). Marshall Brown, as well, especially in his chapter
entitled “Negative Poetics: On Skepticism and the Lyric Voice,” offers a
thought-provoking musical understanding of lyric. The music of lyric
poetry, Brown maintains, occurs in the tension between its two voices—
that of the poet and the speaker of the poem (Brown calls it a kind of musi-
cal “doubling”). “Whether called music, aura, or haunting, the interior
distance achieved by lyric is an opening onto a dynamic mental space whose
power has often been felt” (97). To study the voicing of a given lyric—the
poem as “act,” as Stevens might say (CPP 218–19)—is to understand its
innate musicality, Brown insists. Thus, Adorno, Kramer, and Brown all
carve out a critical vocabulary that opens the interdisciplinary conversation
and invites further critical study.
In her introduction to The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound, a vol-
ume of essays coedited with Craig Dworkin, Marjorie Perloff argues that
sound and music have long been understudied in poetry criticism.
“[H]owever central the sound dimension is to any and all poetry,” she
asserts, “no other poetic feature is currently as neglected” (1). Critical
discourse, she maintains, still prioritizes meaning, and “regards the sound
structure in question … as little more than a peripheral issue, a kind of
sideline” (2). Seeking to redress the neglect of sound and music in mod-
ern and contemporary poetry studies, Perloff and Dworkin devote their
collection to various methodologies and case studies that put sound at the
center of analysis. The volume includes fascinating studies that range from
Susan Stewart’s discussion of the endurance and central significance of
rhyme, and essays on translating sound in poetry by Leevi Lehto, Yunte
Huang, and Rosmarie Waldrop, to those that address the relation between
contemporary sound poetry from a musicological perspective (e.g., Nancy
Perloff). Given our focus here, it is nevertheless noteworthy, considering
how central music is in his writings, that Stevens is not mentioned any-
where in the collection. We see the absence as an open invitation to expand
upon the poet’s relevance and aesthetic rewards in the present volume.
While Hollander may have been among the first to note, in 1980, the
“bewildering” complexity of the musical trope in Stevens, he has been far
from alone in identifying the pervasive presence of music and stylized
sound in his poems. There is scarcely a critic who has not taken notice of
these features, and, indeed, many have devoted books and essays to the
topic. Stevens’s sonic experts include some familiar names to readers of
this poet: Marie Borroff, Eleanor Cook, Bart Eeckhout, Natalie Gerber,
Lisa Goldfarb, Barbara Holmes, George Lensing, Beverly Maeder, Alison
Rieke, Anca Rosu, and Helen Vendler (see, for all, our list of Works Cited).
So far three special issues of The Wallace Stevens Journal have also been
devoted to the poet in relation to sound and/or music: “Stevens and
Structures of Sound” (edited by Jaqueline Vaught Brogan in 1991);
“Wallace Stevens and ‘The Less Legible Meanings of Sounds’” (edited by
Natalie Gerber in 2009); and, most recently, our own “Stevens into
Music” (2019), a project that inspired us to undertake the present vol-
ume. For as much as previous work has covered—from the wordplay in
Cook’s early work and the metaphysics of sound in Rosu’s book to the
fine-grained discussions of the musicality in particular poems in Vendler’s

criticism—a great deal is still to be done. Crucially, while some critics have
studied affinities that Stevens shares with particular composers (notably,
Kramer’s early study on Stevens and that other idiosyncratic New
Englander in the insurance business, Charles Ives), in the arena of the rela-
tion between particular composers and this poet the field remains
wide open.
2 Stevens as Listener
Before we turn to the rationale and summary of our case studies, let us
take the time to characterize some of Stevens’s own relationship to music
more concretely by considering him as an avid listener of music. Several
patterns that may be discerned in the poet’s record collection were already
identified by Michael Stegman when he drew up his list—with the help of
the poet’s daughter, Holly—more than forty years ago: a large number of
Stevens’s records were ordered from abroad; most of the repertoire was
canonical with respect to Western art music; more than a quarter consisted
of piano solo works (Stevens’s wife, Elsie, played the piano well); late
Romantic music constituted the bulk of the recordings, though he col-
lected a more diverse range of twentieth-century composers; within the
twentieth century, he shunned the avant-garde, such as the Second
Viennese School; and, as with things literary and pictorial, he had a weak
spot for anything coming out of France (80).1 To these observations, let
us add a few more.
Stevens’s collection, which some visitors remember him being “very
proud of,” partly because he said “it thoroughly relaxed him” (Brazeau
276), was resolutely Eurocentric. In this sense, the case studies in our
book, which establish connections with such figures as Richard Strauss,
Gustav Mahler, Paul Hindemith, Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky, and the
Franco-American Ned Rorem are entirely representative. Stevens seems to
have bought almost no records of American composers or music: no jazz,
no blues, no spirituals, no Ives, George Gershwin, Samuel Barber, Aaron
Copland, or Amy Beach. The French and German repertoire were the two
obvious pillars of his collection, with a secondary interest displayed in
Russian, English, and Italian music. Little of this was opera, though that
decision may have been due in some measure to the difficulty of chopping
up operas into 78 rpm or early LP records; we do know for a fact that
Stevens listened systematically to opera on the radio and occasionally
attended performances in New York (Stegman 79; Brazeau 137, 281).

More surprisingly, perhaps, he seems to have collected none of the great
German Lied cycles, despite their ideal combination of poetry and music
and his own knowledge of the language (he was partly of German descent):
he apparently did not own Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte, had none of
the great cycles and collections by Franz Schubert (Die schöne Müllerin,
Winterreise, Schwanengesang), possessed neither Robert Schumann’s
Dichterliebe nor his Liederkreis, nor any cycles or collections by Johannes
Brahms (such as Die schöne Magelone) or Hugo Wolf (neither the
Italienisches nor the Spanisches Liederbuch). He seems to have gravitated
almost entirely to French poetry again and was clearly very fond of the
soprano Maggie Teyte in this repertoire. When it came to performers, he
tended to prefer local specialists playing music from their own national or
ethnic backgrounds, though less so in the case of Russian music.
How a lifetime of playing music as an amateur (piano and guitar),
attending concerts in New York and Hartford, listening to records and the
radio turned Stevens into a choosy connoisseur may be gauged from his
description of two famous European orchestras in letters from the final
year of his life, both addressed to his friend Barbara Church. On December
2, 1954, he reports taking Holly to “a concert of the Concertgebouw
orchestra” a few days earlier. The Amsterdam orchestra, he notes, “played
a Haydn symphony without any of [the] metronomic stiffiness [sic] which
makes Haydn a bit of an affliction. Such a sympathetic, tender and limpid
performance made us both happy” (L 854).2 Three months later, on
March 21, 1955, he appears to be anticipating another visit, this time by
the Berlin Philharmonic. “It will be our last concert, here in Hartford, for
the season,” he explains, “and I look forward to it, not merely out of curi-
osity, but because in a world so largely undisciplined the music of this
orchestra will be music from the very center of discipline” (L 877).3
It would take us too far to run down all of Stevens’s epistolary com-
ments on composers and their music; many of these are also rather per-
functory. To gesture to the potential of the topic, let us just select a handful
of composers whose names have not been mentioned yet. Stevens’s fanci-
ful attempt to define the “Teutonic,” in a 1935 letter to Ronald Lane
Latimer, is especially interesting for the opposition it sets up with the cat-
egory of the poetic. Perhaps due to his love of French lyricism, Stevens
decides to associate the Teutonic with the antipoetic, so that “It may even
be said that the sound of German poetry is not Teutonic.” Further detach-
ing the notion from a particular people or nation-state, he goes to Finland
for a musical example: “The Teutonic makes a very good foil in the music
of Sibelius; the heavy Teutonic characteristics are not what constitute its
poetry: the poetry arises as the strings rise from that volume of sound” (L
302). The character of Jean Sibelius’s music continued to puzzle him, for
ten years later, in a letter to José Rodríguez Feo, Stevens makes a distinc-
tion that seems to verge on the confessional: “in the case of the music of
Sibelius,” he proposes, “one cannot help feeling that his identity is really
to be found in melancholy melody. Sibelius, himself, recognizing this,
forces himself, with the concealment typical of so many of us, to the oppo-
site extreme and writes score after score of the harshest, most discordant,
most vigorous music. But the source of all this is the melancholy melody”
(L 519).
In such comments, we notice a recurrent impulse toward skeptical,
resistant listening, as if Stevens had also written the aphorism “Music must
resist definition almost successfully.” Thus, in 1948, he writes, “It is curi-
ous that I have never been able to go for Mozart. He makes me as nervous
as a French poodle” (L 604). As the image of the French poodle suggests,
such waving off could equally apply to Gallic composers. “Poulenc is a
beautiful instance of mignardise in music,” he notes in another 1935 letter
to Latimer. “He will take a perfectly good thing and conclude it with a
phrase that is meant to be the last word in a job of seduction. After you
have heard the thing several times, it becomes intolerable. This leads to an
antithetical commonplace; the unpalatable will often become what is most
enduringly palatable” (L 303). Yet embracing the unpalatable did not
therefore translate into an admiration for a composer such as Arnold
Schoenberg, as we learn from a third letter to Latimer. There Stevens
starts by taking his distance from the art for art’s sake he had himself prac-
ticed in his Harmonium years. “I am very much afraid,” he writes, “that
what you like in my poetry is just the sort of thing that you ought not to
like: say, its music or color. If that is true, then an appropriate experiment
would be to write poetry without music and without color” (L 297).
Thinking of how to illustrate this, Stevens then adds a footnote: “In music,
this would give you Schönberg” (L 298)—thereby bluntly suggesting that
dodecaphonic music stripped itself not only of color but even of music. If
Stevens’s formulation might seem to leave the door open, nevertheless,
for an analogous poetic pursuit, that door is quickly closed again: “But so
many of these experiments come to nothing. If they were highly success-
ful, well and good, but they so rarely are” (L 297).
That Stevens would in general insist on being the critical outsider mak-
ing up his own mind about experiments in modern art is further illus-
trated, finally, by a letter of 1934 to Harriet Monroe in which he reports
on the world premiere of Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts. This
time it was the music by Virgil Thomson that won him over. “I reached
Hartford in time for the opening performance of Gertrude Stein’s opera,”
he recounts. “While this is an elaborate bit of perversity in every respect:
text, settings, choreography, it is most agreeable musically, so that, if one
excludes aesthetic self-consciousness from one’s attitude, the opera imme-
diately becomes a delicate and joyous work all round” (L 267).
3 Compositional Principles and Overview

Readers who are familiar with our scholarly work will guess that the pres-
ent collection has an extensive pedigree. What we have chosen to develop
on this occasion is rooted in many years—indeed, a few decades—of prior
attempts at writing about music, particularly in relation to Stevens. We
have been building actively on this previous work, extending and enrich-
ing it, reviewing and revising it, modulating it wherever we felt we should
rethink what we had written, and challenging ourselves to pursue new,
additional perspectives. This is why we have been so bold as to describe
this project in terms of a deepening of our understanding on a topic that
we never tire of exploring.
Since this book is not meant to present a single argument worked out
by two authors in supposed unison, we wondered for a while how to stage
the results of our collaborative efforts. Eventually, we opted to include the
chapters’ respective authors in the summaries below but not in our table
of contents, where we want to insist on the collective conception and
coherence of the book. Because of the extent to which we engaged in
active discussion about each other’s chapters, and felt free to propose tex-
tual changes to them, we also decided to use the first person plural
throughout, where in individually authored essays we would normally
resort to the singular pronoun. To add to the unifying effect or appear-
ance of the book, finally, we came up with a few formal structuring ele-
ments that are tailored to our subject as well. Thus, each chapter is
preceded by one or more epigraphs, along the lines of a musical motif, and
each is divided into a handful of sections with numerals and subheadings,
somewhat on the analogy of the movements of compositions in the tradi-
tion of art music. If such formal features help to pull the chapters together
into a single composition, as befits a coauthored rather than a coedited

book, we should nevertheless clarify that we have looked on our composi-
tion from the start as a musical duet for two distinct voices involving two
singers with their own personalities. While we have sought to avoid pitting
too many discordant melodies against each other (the book is not polemi-
cal but aesthetically curious), we have given each other the room to play
into our respective strengths and complement each other’s work. The
result is more polyphonic and methodologically diverse, we believe, than
if either of us had attempted to author a single book on the topic.
We begin Chap. 2 (Goldfarb) with an exploration of Stevens’s writings
on music and memory from his youthful journals and early letters, for
these often presage what will become a core feature of how music works
in his later verse. In his journal entries and letters, the young Stevens offers
extended reflections and meditations on music that foreshadow his later
poetic music and suggest that he reflected on music and memory long
before he composed poems that set forth their relation. In one crucial let-
ter to Elsie, Stevens reflects on a performance of Schubert’s Unfinished
Symphony that he had attended, and he offers a nearly Proustian medita-
tion on music’s transformative power of sparking memory. The musical
scale, he writes, transports us from one time and place to another—into
the domain of the imagination or into the very substance of memory:
“that ten-year-old do-re-mi-fa reanimates—and by closing the eyes—it is
ten years ago” (L 117). In another such letter, he ruminates on the power
of music to awaken memory. Stevens’s meditations in these early prose
writings look ahead to his own more abstract figurations of music in the
Collected Poems. His language in early letters anticipates the enigmatic role
that music and the musical-poetic analogy play in his work—the way that
music, as he writes in a 1909 letter to his wife, “vibrate[s] on the unknown”
(L 151). This initial chapter comprises three main parts: the first examines
Stevens’s reflections on music and memory in journals and letters; the
second provides some critical background on the topic of memory; and
the third and most extensive part explores the resonance of these medita-
tions in later poems, where we have selected poems across his oeuvre, early
to late, from “Domination of Black” to “Anglais Mort à Florence,” the
understudied “Two Tales of Liadoff,” and “Long and Sluggish Lines.”
Our third chapter (Eeckhout) addresses a second fundamental feature
of music that has rarely been explored in relation to Stevens’s (or, for that
matter, any poet’s) writings: melody. In poetry criticism, the notion of
melody is not part of the traditional arsenal of concepts and analogies,
although the analysis of sound has long been a staple of critical practice.
Similarly, critical attention to the place of melody in Stevens’s work has

been either implicit—as in Beverly Maeder’s claim that the poet “success-
fully integrated limited moments of suggestive consonant and vowel
effects into an auditory experience of momentous developments”
(“Sound” 40)—or else thematic, as when Alison Rieke interprets the
poet’s swan figures as encrypted comments on melody (53–54). There are
some very good reasons why melody has received short shrift in poetry
criticism, and these are acknowledged at the outset. Yet we will argue that
the potential of the concept as an analytical tool that can enrich the experi-
ence of poetic texts has not been fully explored. In this more experimental
chapter, we attempt to undertake a minute and methodical dissection of
the notion of melody so as to understand its relevance to the act of reading
poetry in general, and Stevens’s work in particular. We focus predomi-
nantly on three material elements and investigate how they might inform
a musical reading of Stevens’s verse. This involves, first, the vertical axis of
the units out of which verse melodies may be composed. Such a study may
in turn be split into a consideration of three features: (1) the character and
variety of the stylistic register Stevens employs; (2) the extent to which he
values the production of phonemes as an autotelic aesthetic sensation; and
(3) the relative autonomy of the sonic material in his poetry. Second, the
notion of melody presupposes the combination of such units along a hori-
zontal axis. An analysis of this feature likewise requires attention to three
aspects: (1) how Stevens uses recurring sonic units (analogous to pitches
in musical composition); (2) how he develops sonic patterns that change
and interact; and (3) how he builds connections between sonic units in
relatively short sequence. Here, it helps to fall back on the discussion of
melodies, tunes, themes, motives, and phrases offered by Leonard
Bernstein in one of his popularizing works, and how these elements play
out in the history of Western art music. Such framing, combined with vari-
ous examples from Stevens’s work, allows us to situate the poet’s style in
the musical traditions of late Romanticism and early, non-avant-garde
Modernism. Finally, when we seek to identify the rhythmical organization
and pacing of Stevens’s characteristic melodies, we find that in this respect,
too, his work may be inserted in those same musical traditions. By provid-
ing a wide range of concrete material drawn not only from Stevens’s
poetry but also from his reflections on its musical elements in letters and
essays, we become better attuned to how he attempted to meet the
demands of modern melody making with a high degree of self-
consciousness and startlingly original, idiomatic results.
Stevens’s recurrent staging of birdsong, discussed in Chap. 4 (Goldfarb),

continues the topic of melodies from the previous chapter, but from a dif-
ferent perspective, with the poet responding to so-called melodies coming
from nature. One of the most consistent features of Stevens’s verse is the
abundance of raw natural sounds that enter—sometimes softly and sweetly,
sometimes boldly—in poem after poem. In sharp contrast to the bird-
songs of British and American Romantic poetry (John Keats’s nightingale,
Percy Shelley’s skylark, Walt Whitman’s thrush, W. B. Yeats’s swans and
golden bird), typically measured in relation to the poet’s own sound,
Stevens’s birdsong contributes to a “mountainous music” (according to
“The Man with the Blue Guitar”) that “always seemed / To be falling and
to be passing away” (CPP 147). We look at birdsong in Stevens to under-
stand the ways it demonstrates musical temporality, its motion, and ever-
changing qualities captured in the moment of its sounding. This chapter
investigates the myriad kinds of birdsong in the Collected Poems, from the
quails that “Whistle about us their spontaneous cries” in “Sunday
Morning” (CPP 56) to the sparrows, wrens, and robins in “Notes Toward
a Supreme Fiction,” which seem to engage in a musical dialogue all their
own, to the “scrawny cry” of the bird “In the early March wind” in “Not
Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself” that augurs the music of
spring (CPP 451). Some of the questions that guide this chapter include:
How do Stevens’s bird sounds and songs compare with those of his Anglo-
American Romantic forebears and, more importantly, how might we dif-
ferentiate Stevens’s practice ? Is there a relationship between birdsong and
the poet’s song, and, if so, how might we describe its contours? Do the
accumulated birdsongs of the poems constitute what we might call a har-
mony? How do birds move and sing in particular poems and across poems
and volumes of Stevens’s verse? We pursue these questions as they arise
throughout Stevens’s poetry, with a concluding section of the chapter
devoted to more detailed analysis of a number of poems that demonstrate
recurring musical principles, such as the way Stevens transposes musical
counterpointing and creates a call-and-response effect between bird and
poet, between birdsong and his own evolving poetics. Close readings of
poems here include “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,”
“Meditation Celestial & Terrestrial,” “The Dove in Spring” (the last of
many dove poems), as well as two other late poems, among the most
musical in his oeuvre, “Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself”
and “Of Mere Being.”
Chapter 5 (Eeckhout) continues at first with the inspiration of birdsong

in “Of Mere Being,” but this time not as Stevens heard and enjoyed it on
so many of his walks. In this concrete instance, the sound of birds has first
been translated into orchestral music by Richard Strauss in the final of his
Four Last Songs. Taking our cue from Stevens’s observation that he some-
times actively sought to translate Strauss’s music into poetry, we juxtapose
the German composer’s farewell composition with what is generally taken
to be the poet’s own farewell composition. The kind of analogical reading
we propose here between a canonical musical work and a poem by Stevens
is remarkably rare in criticism on the poet, although there are many oppor-
tunities for pursuing it. In some cases, as with these two farewell works, it
is possible even to speculate on actual influence, even if in Stevens’s trans-
formative poetics the inspiration provided by a musical work should always
be regarded only as the creative starting point for an autonomous verbal
artifact that is never derivative or naively imitative.
To demonstrate the potential for establishing significant connections
between extant musical works and Stevens’s poetry, the chapter then pur-
sues a second, more elaborate case—that of the grotesque funeral march
in Gustav Mahler’s First Symphony and Stevens’s equally grotesque
funeral march in his poem “The Worms at Heaven’s Gate.” We argue,
with respect for all the historical evidence that is available, that Stevens
may have been present at the New York premiere of this symphony con-
ducted by Mahler himself in 1909. Although the question whether he did
so must ultimately be left open, a juxtaposition of symphonic movement
and poem is revelatory in that it allows us to understand both composi-
tions within a larger cultural framework of modern art making and the
new modes that innovative artists sought to explore. Case studies such as
these invite theoretical reflections as well on the presence of latent (as
opposed to patent or implicit) music in Stevens’s poetry. Even though the
identification of latent music in Stevens’s case is almost always a matter of
speculation, this does not diminish its validity as a critical practice. After
all, speculating about latent musical inspirations is standard fare for musi-
cians who study scores with an eye to performing them. To keep our
thinking about such issues sufficiently open, the rest of the chapter pur-
sues two similar but slightly modified types of connection with extant
music by composers that Stevens knew. One is with Paul Hindemith,
whose Concerto for Trumpet, Bassoon, and Strings was commissioned for
the same celebration of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences for
which Stevens’s long poem “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” was
commissioned. Here again, a juxtaposition between composer and poet,

never before undertaken, proves to be enlightening, as it is also in our
final, elaborately pursued case, where we identify a rich range of affinities
between Claude Debussy’s piano piece “Des pas sur la neige” (from Book
1 of his Préludes) and Stevens’s late poem “Vacancy in the Park.”
In the next chapter (Goldfarb), we stay with composers but turn our
attention to Stevens’s prose and a more theoretical consideration of musi-
cal poetics. Over a few years in the early 1940s, Stevens was preoccupied
with establishing a Chair of Poetry, and in a number of letters to his friend
Henry Church, he laid out the parameters for such a position: “The Henry
Church Chair of Poetry at Harvard” would be “a chair for the study of the
history of poetic thought and of the theory of poetry” (L 358). Letters
indicate that Stevens wrestled with what would be extraneous to such a
chair and what it would comprise. “The intention,” he writes, “is not to
read poetry from archaic to contemporary; nor is the intention to teach
the writing of poetry.” He makes it clear that the subject of what consti-
tutes the poetic is not easily defined, and it is this hard-to-define dimen-
sion of poetry that he seeks to explore: “It is the aspects of the world and
of men and women that have been added to them by poetry. These aspects
are difficult to recognize and to measure” (L 377). At the same time that
Stevens ruminated about a Chair of Poetry, Igor Stravinsky delivered (in
1942) a series of lectures at Harvard as the Charles Eliot Norton Lecturer.
Drawing on Aristotle’s definition of “poetics,” Stravinsky declares his aim
“to talk about making in the field of music”—the principles, form, and
physical phenomenon of music itself as well as his own personal reflections
on his experiences as an “inventor of music” (4, 53). It is the shared
aspects of Stravinsky’s and Stevens’s musical poetics that we will take up in
Chap. 6, whose first section comprises a brief historical and contextual
introduction, which is followed by a close consideration of the parallels in
their respective poetics. In the third and last section, we demonstrate how
an understanding of Stravinsky’s poetics, and of the ideas Stevens and
Stravinsky seem to have held in common, might yield a deeper grasp of the
musicality that characterizes Stevens’s verse. We will look at a range of
poems that exhibit the two artists’ shared ideas about birdsong (expand-
ing upon work in Chap. 4), about variety and unity (variations on a theme
and the relation between the one and the many), and about what both
Stravinsky and Stevens have to say on musical and poetic ways of finding a
“center” at the heart of their respective poetics.
For our final chapter (Eeckhout), the focus moves beyond Stevens’s
own writings to study how one major American composer from the sec-
ond half of the twentieth century who is well known for his literary sensi-
bilities and temperament, Ned Rorem, has responded to the poet’s work.
Here we return to the claim, made by Stevens and many others, that the
foundational principle of all poetry is transformational, and we ask whether
the main value of intermedial transpositions might lie precisely in the way
they manage to refresh and, at best, intensify such intrinsic transformative
processes. These questions will be grounded in a detailed empirical inves-
tigation of Rorem’s twenty-five-minute song cycle for voice, cello, and
piano entitled Last Poems of Wallace Stevens. Composed between December
1971 and February 1972, Rorem’s cycle sets seven of Stevens’s lyrics from
the period 1953–1955 to music. Our main interest here is to find what we
might learn from analyzing such a musical setting, not just about various
qualities of the original poetry as well as the subsequent music, but also
about the relationship between these two arts and the critical interest in
returning to their confluence today. Once again it is striking that, despite
the hundreds of musical settings of Stevens’s poetry that have been com-
posed over the decades, such an extended analysis, which avails itself not
only of the published score but also of an audio recording and a range of
contextual material, has never been undertaken. After an introduction in
which we bring in two further composers who have set the poet to music
(Elliott Carter and Matthew Barber), this case study starts with a substan-
tial portrait of Rorem as a composer, in particular his love of the art song
as a genre and the Francophilia of his style (conspicuously shared by
Stevens), and proceeds to build on the work of musicologists as well as on
Rorem’s own writings. We then analyze such issues as Rorem’s selection
of poems and their idiosyncratic sequencing; his choice of genre and
instrumentation; the question of a late style; the musical enhancing of
particular images, sounds, and ideas from the selected texts; and, at last,
the question of how Rorem’s music allows us to hear, experience, and
understand Stevens’s poetry in new ways.
4 Final Notes

Despite Stevens’s countless visits to museums and galleries, the many cata-
logues he collected, or the money he spent on occasional paintings shipped
from Paris, he could never really enjoy the same active connection with
painting as he did with music, which he was able to play, sing, hum, and
whistle to himself. And he could never import his favorite painters’ works
into the meditative space of his home in quite the same manner as he was
able to do with the musical canon, which he turned into his regular eve-
ning companion. Yet the connections with specific composers and their
music have never received as much attention in Stevens criticism as those
with painters and their works. Certainly, it is more convenient for literary
scholars to illustrate arguments that involve the visual arts than those
involving music. The former can be instantly effective by including literal
illustrations, whereas music cannot be scanned quickly or viewed as a sin-
gle gestalt; musical compositions require time and patience, as well as
active effort and re-listening, before one is able to develop a mental image
of them that one can then also remember. And there is always the chal-
lenge posed by the difficulty of writing about music. As the musicologist
Nicholas Cook notes, quoting either Thelonious Monk or Elvis Costello
(he is not sure which), “writing about music is like dancing about archi-
tecture” ([ix]; see also 131). Cook points out that music, as an experience
occurring over time in body and mind, is a fundamentally imaginary object
that is only problematically represented by musical notation. In postwar
academia, moreover, previously marginal disciplines such as music theory
“tried to make themselves look as ‘hard’ as possible by adopting scientific
language and symbol systems,” the result being that “theory and analysis
became increasingly technical, increasingly incomprehensible to anyone
except specialists” (93). Poetry critics wishing to trace musical links, affini-
ties, or allusions are thus likely to feel incompetent trespassers on the ter-
rain of musicologists more easily than those who stray onto the terrain of
visual art historians. We are very much aware of the strain that such chal-
lenges place upon us, yet we still hope that our chapters, in all their careful
and slow attention to sonic detail, will manage to remind readers of the
basic fact that even the most sensitive analysis of a Stevens poem remains
fundamentally impoverished if it does not also take the risk of sounding
out the music enacted by, or circling behind or around, the words.
Our final hope is that this book’s duet-like form, with its six exploratory
case studies in alternating voices, will appeal not only to Stevens experts,
students of Modernism in the arts, and a wider audience interested in the
relationship between music and poetry, but also to readers and practitio-
ners with a specific interest in the dynamic interchange between these two
arts. What should differentiate our treatment of Stevens in relation to
music is that we are not only deepening what has already been written on
the topic over several decades, but also revitalizing some of the ways in
which to think and write about the two arts in conjunction.
Notes
1. For further discussion of the most important facts and figures about
Stevens’s relation to music, see especially Stegman; Goldfarb, “Music”;
and Holmes.
2. A quick search through the online archives of the Royal Concertgebouw
Orchestra tells us that this must have been the concert in Hartford on
November 26, 1954, conducted by the orchestra’s chief conductor at the
time, Eduard van Beinum. The entire program must have been to Stevens’s
liking, with Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, Rudolf Escher’s
Musique pour l’esprit en deuil, Haydn’s Symphony No. 103, and Stravinsky’s
1909 suite compiled from his ballet The Firebird. Stevens was an admirer of
van Beinum; when the dissertation-writing Bernard Heringman made notes
of a conversation he had with the poet, they included the following: “He
was quite enthusiastic about Bruckner. He raved about the van Beinum
recording of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony. He was emphatic enough that
I made a note about the specific recording. He told me to be sure and listen
to it” (Brazeau 200).
3. According to the Berlin Philharmonic’s website, this was the orchestra’s first
tour in the United States under the young Herbert von Karajan, who had
been elected its new conductor a few months earlier.
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across the Atlantic, edited by Bart Eeckhout and Edward Ragg, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008, pp. 151–62.
Hollander, John. “The Sound of the Music of Music and Sound.” Wallace Stevens:
A Celebration, edited by Frank Doggett and Robert Buttel, Princeton UP,
1980, pp. 235–55.
———. The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry, 1500–1700.
W. W. Norton, 1970.
———. Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form. Second ed., Yale UP, 1985.
Holmes, Barbara. The Decomposer’s Art: Ideas of Music in the Poetry of Wallace
Stevens. Peter Lang, 1990.
Kramer, Lawrence. “‘A Completely New Set of Objects’: Wallace Stevens and
Charles Ives.” The Wallace Stevens Journal, vol. 2, nos. 3–4, Fall 1978, pp. 3–15.
———. Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After. U of California P, 1984.
Lensing, George S. “Stevens’s Prosody.” Teaching Wallace Stevens: Practical Essays,
edited by John N. Serio and B. J. Leggett, U of Tennessee P, 1994, pp. 100–18.
Maeder, Beverly. “Sound and Sensuous Awakening in Harmonium.” The Wallace
Stevens Journal, vol. 33, no. 1, Spring 2009, pp. 24–43.
———. Wallace Stevens’ Experimental Language: The Lion in the Lute.
Macmillan, 1999.
Miner, Margaret. “The Fragmentary and the Musical: Baudelaire’s Bits and
Pieces.” Arts of Incompletion: Fragments in Words and Music, edited by Walter
Bernhart and Axel Englund, Brill, 2021, pp. 67–81.
Paterson, Adrian. “‘Music will keep out temporary ideas’: W. B. Yeats’s Radio
Performances.” Word and Music Studies: Essays on Performativity and on
Surveying the Field, edited by Walter Bernhart and Michael Halliwell, Rodopi,
2011, pp. 101–20.
Perloff, Marjorie, and Craig Dworkin, editors. The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of
Sound. U of Chicago P, 2009.
Rieke, Alison. The Senses of Nonsense. U of Iowa P, 1992.
———. “The Sound of the Queen’s Seemings in ‘Description Without Place.’”
The Wallace Stevens Journal, vol. 33, no. 1, Spring 2009, pp. 44–60.
Rosu, Anca. The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens. U of Alabama P, 1995.
Small, Christopher. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening.
Wesleyan UP, 1998.
Stegman, Michael O. “Wallace Stevens and Music: A Discography of Stevens’
Phonograph Record Collection.” The Wallace Stevens Journal, vol. 3, nos. 3–4,
Fall 1979, pp. 79–97.
Stevens, Wallace. Letters of Wallace Stevens. Edited by Holly Stevens, U of
California P, 1996.
———. Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose. Edited by Frank Kermode and
Joan Richardson, Library of America, 1997.
Stravinsky, Igor. Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons. Translated by Arthur
Knodel and Ingolf Dahl, Harvard UP, 1970.
Vendler, Helen. On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’ Longer Poems.
Harvard UP, 1969.
———. Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire. U of Tennessee P, 1984.
Winn, James Anderson. Unsuspected Eloquence: A History of the Relations between
Poetry and Music. Yale UP, 1981.
Wolf, Werner, and Walter Bernhart, editors. Silence and Absence in Literature and
Music. Brill, 2016.
CHAPTER 2
The Enigmatic Relation Between Music

and Memory
To-day I did not write a single line. But I planned much, read much,
and thought much. A city is a splendid place for thinking. I have a
sonnet in my head the last line of which is—
And hear the bells of Trinity at night—
bells which start ringing in my remotest fancies.
—Wallace Stevens, journal entry, July 4, 1900
To-night, after dinner, … I thought I should like to play my guitar, so I

dug it up from the bottom of my wardrobe, dusted it, strummed a
half-dozen chords, and then felt bored by it. I have played those
half-dozen chords so often. I wish I were gifted enough to learn a new
half-dozen.—Some day I may be like one of the old ladies with whom I
lived in Cambridge, who played a hymn on her guitar. The hymn had
thousands of verses, all alike. She played about two hundred every
night—until the house-dog whined for mercy and liberty.—Alas! It is a
sign of old age to be so full of reminiscences.
—Wallace Stevens, letter to Elsie, December 7, 1908
There is a church in the neighborhood that has the grace to ring its bell
on Sundays. It has just stopped. It is so pleasant to hear bells on Sunday
morning. By long usage, we have become accustomed to bells turning
this ordinary day into a holy one.
—Wallace Stevens, letter to Elsie, January 10, 1909
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 21

Switzerland AG 2022
B. Eeckhout, L. Goldfarb, The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens,
Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07032-7_2
1 Musings on Memory and Music

Journal entries shortly after the young Wallace Stevens’s arrival in
New York City and letters during the first decade of his time in the city
provide glimpses of how he would later come to see the relation between
music and remembrance. On July 4, 1900, the year he arrived in New York,
Stevens hails the city as “a splendid place” for the kind of “thinking” that
bestows him with the last lines of a sonnet. In the church bells that sound
in these fragmentary lines, Stevens registers the power of music: the
“bells … start ringing in my remotest fancies”; the sonorous chimes have
the power to draw what is “remotest” in his mind nearer (L 42). In a letter
to his fiancée, Elsie, in December of 1908, he recounts, in a more jocular
tone, his experience of taking out his guitar, and his wish to know more
than the “half-dozen chords” that he often plays (L 110). His effort to
strum the strings occasions a memory of “one of the old ladies with whom
I lived in Cambridge,” who, in contrast to himself, “played about two
hundred” hymnal verses every night. Even before he began to pen the
poems from New York for which he is still best known—“Sunday Morning”
and “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” both of which tie music to memory—
he gestures to their relation and enviously exclaims, “Alas! It is a sign of
old age to be so full of reminiscences” (L 111). A month later, on January
10, 1909, in another letter to Elsie, Stevens records the impact of bells
“on Sunday morning,” which, he writes, we have long understood, turn
“this ordinary day into a holy one” (L 117). Whether it is the guitar,
hymns, or bells, Stevens, in these very early writings, hints at music’s
expression and evocation of memory that will resound in his poems: music
draws the remote close; its chords express “reminiscences”; and instru-
mental sounds transform our perception of one day into another.
We propose to begin this first case study with an exploration of Stevens’s
early prose writings on music and memory from his journals and early let-
ters, for these often presage what will become a core feature of how music
is both represented and enacted in his poems. In these writings, the young
Stevens offers extended meditations on music that foreshadow his more
abstract poetic music, and suggest that he reflected on music and memory
long before he composed poems that explore how they intertwine.
Stevens’s meditations, especially in a few letters of the first decade of the
twentieth century, look ahead to his figurations of music in the Collected
Poems. His language in these letters anticipates the enigmatic role of music
in his poems—the way that “the long chords of the harp,” as he writes in
2 THE ENIGMATIC RELATION BETWEEN MUSIC AND MEMORY 23
a 1909 letter to Elsie, “vibrate on more than the ‘sensual ear’—vibrate on

the unknown” (L 136). This chapter will unfold in three parts: the first
examines Stevens’s reflections on music and memory in key journal entries
and letters; the second briefly considers a few critical studies that approach
the subject of memory in Stevens; and then in the third part, we explore
the resonance of Stevens’s prose meditations on music and memory in a
range of poems across different volumes. By including examples from each
of the main decades in which Stevens was most active as a writer (the
decade leading up to Harmonium and then the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s),
we should be able to demonstrate some of the shifting and varying ways in
which the relation between music and memory is enacted in Stevens’s poetry.
Stevens is keen to note the sounds that abound in his environment—
urban and bucolic—and their musical promise even in his earliest writings.
In a letter to his mother from Ivyland, Pennsylvania, dispatched on July
31, 1896, the sixteen-year-old boy not only details the instruments of
“Innes band” but also characterizes their sounds: “The piping of flamboy-
ant flutes, the wriggling of shrieking fifes with rasping dagger-voices, the
sighing of bass-viols, drums that beat and rattle, the crescendo of cracked
trombones” (L 8). Later in the same letter, he remarks on the sounds of a
clock, “a vigilant sentinal [sic] of the hours,” almost as though he were
looking ahead to later reflections and poems in which he connects sound,
music, and memory, describing the clock as if it were a living creature: “oh
that clock,” he writes, “every quarter hour or so the trembling creature
springs with a whirr into its covert among the depths of the springs” (L 9).
A few years later, after he has moved to New York, he records the sounds
he heard while wandering on the New Jersey side of the Hudson, and
indicates their “spiritual” significance: “An old argument with me is that
the true religious force in the world is not the church but the world itself:
the mysterious callings of Nature and our responses. What incessant mur-
murs fill that ever-laboring, tireless church!” (L 58–59). At the same time,
several journal entries show him ruminating about memory, if not the
explicit relation between music and memory. Walking on West Street in
the city, Stevens details its colorful inhabitants and merchants, writing of
the street that it is “as cosmopolitan and republican as any in the world. It
is the only one that leaves the memory full of pictures, of color and move-
ment” (L 47). Stevens also frequently remarks on what he reads, noting in
another passage, “Homer’s only a little story—and so are all the others;
and yet men have not memory enough even to remember a little story” (L
87). And in a letter to Elsie on December 7, 1908, he writes of his journals
as a record of his own memories: “It is the most amusing thing in the
world—that long record of states of mind—and of historic events, like the
famous night when I read ‘To Have and To Hold’ until half-past three in
the morning. I had completely forgotten it. Is it worth remembering?”
(L 111).
That Stevens begins to think more about what is “worth remember-
ing,” and of the relationship between music and memory, is clear from a
series of letters he writes over the course of a year, from 1909 to 1910, and
it is in these writings that we see the seeds of his musical poetic. In the
first, dated January 10, 1909, he reflects on a performance of Franz
Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony that he had attended the evening before;
in the second, a couple of months later, on March 3, he expands on those
reflections to offer a more abstract theory of the relation between music
and memory. Given the importance of these letters, we should include a
lengthy passage from each. Of his response to Schubert, he writes as
follows:
It is ten years since I heard [Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony]. An echo ten

years old—surely the world is a magical place. But think of music a hundred
years old.—There is a difference between the thought of motions long ago
and the thought of sound long ago. I think of the siege of Rome, say, simply
as motion, without sound—take an ancient siege. The trenches are dug, the
guns are brought up, the regiments manouevre [sic], the walls tumble. It is
all visionary. The firing of the guns is merely a flash of color—a flick in the
mind. The regiments are as quiet as leaves in the wind. The wall falls down
mutely as all things happen in times far off.—But let sound enter—the hum
of the men, the roar of the guns, the thunder of collapsing walls. The scene
has its shock.—So that ten-year-old do-re-mi-fa reanimates—and by closing
the eyes—it is ten years ago. (L 117)
As if in anticipation of the opening stanza of “Sunday Morning,” when

the unnamed dreaming woman who is being conjured up imagines “silent
Palestine” (“Winding across wide water, without sound. / The day is like
wide water, without sound” [CPP 53]), Stevens’s experience of the sym-
phony prompts him to meditate on the difference between our thinking of
past time with and without sound. Relying solely on visual images, Stevens
asserts that all that transpires is “a flash of color—a flick in the mind.”
Sound, however, has the unique property of transporting us from the
immediate present to an altogether distinct moment in time. “The scene
has its shock,” Stevens writes, and he maintains that the musical scale
makes the crucial difference and brings back his decade-old experience of
listening to the symphony: “that ten-year-old do-re-mi-fa reanimates—
and by closing the eyes—it is ten years ago.”
Less than three months later, Stevens again contemplates the relation
between music and memory, this time more abstractly, as he posits music’s
effects. If in the January letter he considers music’s power to reanimate a
personal memory and to revive a ten-year-old experience, in the following,
he imagines music’s far more extensive reach into a deeper collective past:
A little phantasy to beguile you—a bit of patch-work—and about music …

What is the mysterious effect of music, the vague effect we feel when we
hear music, without ever defining it? … It is considered that music, stirring
something within us, stirs the Memory. I do not mean our personal
Memory—the memory of our twenty years and more—but our inherited
Memory, the Memory we have derived from those who lived before us in
our own race, and in other races, illimitable, in which we resume the whole
past life of the world, all the emotions, passions, experiences of the millions
and millions of men and women now dead, whose lives have insensibly
passed into our own, and compose them. (L 136)
Stevens muses on memory in this passage and, importantly, distinguishes

between the personal memory (as, say, his experience listening to the
Schubert symphony) and a notion of a longer and deeper cultural memory
that connects us to times past in a less direct but nonetheless profound
manner. To make that distinction, he uses the upper-case “M” to under-
line that he wishes to describe a conception of “Memory” different from
personal recollection. Music, he suggests, “stirs the Memory” in such a
way that we sense, rather than rationally grasp, our connection to all those
who have come before; such deep Memory is “illimitable,” he insists, and
music enlivens it “insensibly,” almost without our conscious participation
in eliciting it. As if he were returning to his own memory of listening to
Schubert’s symphony, and other such concert experiences, Stevens con-
nects his own listening to his more expansive “phantasy” of deep memory.
He extends his thought when he imagines that “what one listens to at a
concert” is not simply the “harmony of sounds” but rather “the whisper-
ing of innumerable responsive spirits within one, momentarily revived,
that stir like the invisible motions of the mind wavering between dreams
and sleep” (L 136).
Stevens’s reflections on music in these early letters seem to look ahead

to poems in which the poet imagines a kind of music that is beyond sound
(“listening to what we have never heard” [L 149]): “A sunken voice, both
of remembering / And of forgetfulness, in alternate strain,” in “The
Comedian as the Letter C”; or “A music more than a breath, but less /
Than the wind, sub-music like sub-speech,” in “Variations on a Summer
Day” (CPP 23, 212). His rendering of the effect of sounds inducing a
dream-like state also sharply anticipates Marcel Proust’s meditations on
the power of music in Remembrance of Things Past, particularly in Swann
in Love, when the “little phrase” of Vinteuil’s sonata throws the protago-
nist into an emotional turmoil that temporally and spatially displaces him
from his surroundings.1 So in Stevens’s letter, the “whispering of innu-
merable responsive spirits” similarly displaces or reorients the listener in
time and space. “‘[G]reat music’ agitates,” he writes in the same letter,
quoting an unacknowledged passage from Paul Elmer More’s Shelburne
Essays, “‘to fathomless depths, the mystery of the past within us’” (L 136).
We cannot resist citing one more letter, for it is important to note that
for Stevens—in letters and poems alike—music may issue from natural
sounds as much as from instruments, and in a beautiful letter to Elsie just
before the arrival of summer, on June 17, 1909, he ponders the effect of
the persistent sound of rain:
The sweet sound of the down-right rain changes the city into something
very much like the country—for rain falls on roofs, pavements etc. with
pretty much the same sound with which it falls on trees or fields: no, trees;
for surely it falls on fields (and the grass of them) with a softer sound than
this.—So much for the sweet sound of the down-right rain!—The whistles
on the river are drowned in it, the noise of the Elevated is swallowed up, a
neighborly mandoline [sic] is quite lost (except in snatches.)—One long,
unbroken, constant sound—the sound of the falling of water.—A sound not
dependent on breath. One sound made up of a multitude. A dark chorus
blending in wide tone. A numerous sound, to speak so (and it wouldn’t be
shocking at all.)—A sound native to the mind, remembered by the mind.—
Therefore, the ancient and immemorial sweet sound of the down-right
rain. (L 145)
Stevens’s rhythmic prose here reads as a kind of prose poem in which he

charts the transformative nature of sound—it “changes the city into some-
thing very much like the country”—and then its evolution into music, as
he measures its tone in relation to others—the “whistles on the river,” the
“noise” of the elevated urban trains, and the instrumental sounds of a

nearby “mandoline.”2 Anchoring his more abstract meditation on music
and Memory from several months earlier in the physical sound of the rain,
Stevens then considers the sounds converging, as a gathering of many
sounds together (as “of a multitude”) into a “chorus blending in wide
tone.” Such music, Stevens suggests, is “native” to humans, and, crucially
for our subject of music and memory, it is “remembered by the mind.”
The “down-right” rain is not merely a physical or natural shower falling
on pavement or on leaves; it is an “ancient and immemorial sweet sound”
that bespeaks a deep, ancestral memory.
2 Critical Considerations
“It would be worth while, given the prevalence of the theme of memory
in Stevens,” Helen Vendler writes, “to track his many descriptions and
enactings of memory” (259). To trace the “enactings” of memory in
Stevens’s poetry is to connect the theme of memory to his musical poetic.
Considering how ubiquitous the theme and how musical a poet he is, it is
surprising how few critics have devoted attention to it. Vendler takes on
the theme of memory in Stevens most directly in her 2004 article “Wallace
Stevens: Memory, Dead and Alive,” in which she offers brilliant close
readings of two important memory poems, “A Dish of Peaches in Russia”
and “Arcades of Philadelphia the Past,” yet she does not connect the
poet’s treatment of memory to his musicality; rather, she seeks to differen-
tiate Stevens from William Wordsworth and other Romantic predecessors
in his treatment of the theme. In contrast to Wordsworth, who finds in
memory “a rich and renovating source,” Stevens, she writes, “is taken
aback by the poverty of memory. When we summon up the past,” she
contends, “it is usually … in the form of a set of visual images” (249).
Vendler then focuses her readings specifically on the visual aspects of
memory (lilacs and so forth) and does not pursue the acoustic or musical
dimension except to show its diminishment in these particular poems.
While several Stevens scholars hint at the relation between music and
memory, none seems to take on the subject directly. Simon Critchley notes
the poet’s philosophical aspects and, alluding to “Of Modern Poetry,”
maintains that the poet’s “dark metaphysical talk is only successful insofar
as the sounds passing achieve sudden rightnesses”; Critchley contends that
“such rightness possesses the transience of music” (39). One might sur-
mise that memory has a part in that “dark metaphysical talk,” yet Critchley
does not include memory in the discussion. Juliette Utard focuses intently
on Stevens’s late work, and notes the presence of personal memory in
many poems. She finds in the poems of The Rock a “highly self-referential”
verse that includes “specific references to his age” (especially in the title
poem, “The Rock”), though it is not her aim to connect these retrospec-
tive poems specifically to Stevens’s musicality (194).
In an early Wallace Stevens Journal article, “Santayana on Memory and
‘The World as Meditation,’” Jerome Griswold explores the latter poem
through the lens of George Santayana’s chapter on memory in Scepticism
and Animal Faith (1923). He demonstrates how in “The World as
Meditation” “Stevens particularizes the philosopher’s discussion by pro-
viding an example of memory at work—Penelope remembering the absent
Ulysses.” Santayana (and, by extension, Stevens in his poem) “means to
correct the mistaken notion that in remembrance we drift back to the past;
instead, the memory is lifted out of the past, comes forward, invades the
present, and creates ‘a waking dream’” (113). Griswold edges toward the
music that Stevens composes as he traces “the memory [that] is lifted out
of the past,” yet does not follow a musical stream of thought. In another
Wallace Stevens Journal essay, “The Poetry of Matter: Stevens and
Bergson,” Temenuga Trifonova relates Henri Bergson’s understanding of
memory, perception, and matter to Stevens’s understanding of imagina-
tion and metaphor. When she compares the two figures, she touches on
aspects of Stevens’s musical aesthetic that enable him to express our ever-
moving and temporal experience. “Stevens’ poetry and Bergson’s philoso-
phy of becoming,” she writes, “bear witness to the evanescence, the
ephemerality of life” (43). For Bergson, the memory is “always a part of
perception” and therefore “dematerializes or subtilizes the world” (61),
while for Stevens, Trifonova maintains, “the very structure of poetry—
metaphor being the form of poetry as metamorphosis—is that of mem-
ory” (62). Trifonova comes close to linking music and memory in her
study of “Domination of Black,” when she refers to the “continuity of a
melody” (65; the phrase is Bergson’s), but does not develop her analysis
along explicitly musical lines. In the readings that follow, we will address
Stevens’s treatment of music and memory more extensively with a focus
on how he performs their relation—how the poems themselves evoke
memory often through flexible, interpretive, and open-ended musical
processes.
3 Poems of Music and Memory

Music and memory go hand-in-hand in Stevens’s poetry in myriad ways.
He often calls forth the association between the two in particular stanzas
of poems and, at times, in entire poems. Starting with “Domination of
Black,” a poem that will make its way into Harmonium, we will proceed
to study one poem from each of the following decades: “Anglais Mort à
Florence” (1930s); “Two Tales of Liadoff” (1940s); and “Long and
Sluggish Lines” (1950s). In close readings of entire poems from each dis-
tinct period of his writing life, we can see how Stevens enacts the relation
between music and memory both thematically and structurally.
“Words are the only melodeon,” Stevens proclaims in his “Adagia”
(CPP 909), and we might start by applying the proclamation to his 1916
poem “Domination of Black.” In the course of the four stanzas that com-
prise the poem, the poet unfurls a memory. Stevens may not take on the
subject of music proper and memory thematically in this early poem from
Harmonium; however, the text is worth revisiting for how it demonstrates
memory’s musical unfolding in the poem’s very structure and restricted
vocabulary. In the first stanza, Stevens situates his speaker by the night-
time fire:
At night, by the fire,

The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding—
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks. (CPP 7)
Stevens begins the poem with a spare vocabulary that refrains from
even describing the speaker’s posture: we do not learn that he “sits” by the
fire, or that he gazes at the flames. Rather, it is the fire itself that blurs the
distinction between inside—“the fire”—and outside—“The colors of the
bushes / And of the fallen leaves”—and sparks the colors “Repeating
themselves, / … / Like the leaves themselves.” Stevens creates a sense of
temporal collapse in the first stanza: the fire spurs confusion in time and
space. He alternates verb forms, present progressive and past tense, the
leaves “Repeating themselves” as they “Turned in the room, / Like the

leaves themselves / Turning in the wind,” so as to lift the past into the
present moment. Stevens composes his lines in staccato fashion—the
opening sentence unfurls in strong, irregularly placed two-beat lines as if
he were approximating in the sounds of the language the insistent whirl-
ing movement of the leaves and their colors. Stevens marks the second
sentence with “Yes:” and, with the colon’s pause, he then draws us into
the substance of the speaker’s daytime memory. “[S]triding” echoes the
“turning” and he speaks as if from the past, for then the “heavy hemlocks
/ Came striding.” It is the last line that sounds most powerfully, for all the
activity—both real and imagined, all “Repeating,” “Turning,” and “strid-
ing”—culminates in an auditory memory, as the speaker recounts in a
declarative sentence, “And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.”
While it is, as Vendler contends is often the case in Stevens’s poems, a
visual image—the fire—that ignites the speaker’s memory, the poetic rep-
resentation of that process is decidedly musical. One might even say that
Stevens practices in “Domination of Black” what Igor Stravinsky writes of
melody. “Mélôdia,” he explains in his Poetics of Music, “in Greek, is the
intonation of the melos, which signifies a fragment, a part of a phrase. It is
these parts that strike the ear in such a way as to mark certain accentua-
tions. Melody is the musical singing of a cadenced phrase” (39). Stevens
sets forth a “melody” in the opening stanza of “Domination of Black”
(and we will have much more to say on the construction of melodies in the
following chapter) that he develops in the second and third stanzas of the
poem. He forms the next two stanzas out of each of the key words of the
first—“colors,” “leaves,” “Turned” / “Turning,” “hemlocks,” and “pea-
cocks”—thus modulating and inflecting the speaker’s voice (“the musical
singing of a cadenced phrase”).
The second stanza, which consists of three sentences, reads as follows:
The colors of their tails

Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry—the peacocks. (CPP 7)
Stevens recounts the speaker’s memory of the hours before nighttime in

the above lines. With the word “twilight,” he signals the intrusion of the
speaker’s earlier experience into the present nighttime moment, yet the
repetition of familiar words—“colors,” “leaves,” “room,” “wind,” “hem-
locks”—and of entire phrases—“the leaves themselves / Turning in the
wind” (with identical enjambment)—“strike the ear,” to borrow
Stravinsky’s definition of melody, recalling and extending the mood of the
first stanza. Adding to the repetition of whole words and the rhythm of
the lines are tonal repetitions that contribute to a chanting effect and
growing momentum. Short and long vowel sounds alternate in quick suc-
cession—repeated short “i” sounds throughout as in the twice repeated
“in the … wind”—and converge in the internal rhymes that follow the
peacock’s descent: they “flew from the boughs of the hemlocks / Down to
the ground” (emphases added). Once the speaker has relived (or re-
envisioned) the twilight scene, it is crucial to note that the visual memory
culminates once more in sound: “I heard them cry—the peacocks.”
Stevens heightens the speaker’s voice in the syntax and punctuation of the
final line: in contrast to the declarative sentence that closes the first stanza
(“And I remembered the cry of the peacocks”), the speaker’s voice is halt-
ing as he hears once more (and we hear with him) the peacock’s shrill cry.
With the pause of the em-dash now in the middle of the line, Stevens
marks the cry with what Stravinsky might call a sharp “accentuation.”
Stevens brings the emotional pitch of the poem to a peak in a series of
questions that constitutes the third stanza:
Was it a cry against the twilight

Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks? (CPP 7)
The speaker, struck by his memory of the peacock’s cry, confusedly won-
ders at the sound and its object: “Was it a cry against the twilight,” he asks,
“Or against the leaves themselves,” and in a winding question that persists
through nine of the ten lines, he heightens his voice by means of repeti-
tion. We hear of the “twilight” again, and of “the leaves themselves /
Turning in the wind” (again with the same enjambment). Such repetitions
linguistically mimic the swirling motion of the “flames,” “fire,” and “tails
of the peacocks” (these words, too, echo previous soundings), as sound
and vision coincide until whatever boundary between inside and outside,
daylight and night there is dissolves in the successive anaphoric repetitions
of the resonant verb “to turn” alternately in present progressive and past
tense: “Turning,” “Turning,” “Turned,” “Turning,” Turned.” Paul
Valéry, the French post-Symbolist poet, whom Stevens much admired,
called such key words as “turning” in “Domination of Black” “resonant”
words, for with each successive sounding they become distanced from
their referential content and operate like musical notes.3 Stevens then
emphasizes the speaker’s total displacement in time and space, and in syn-
esthetic confusion, he attributes the peacock’s shriek to the sound of the
fire and hemlocks: the bird’s tails “Turned in the loud fire,” and they are
“Loud as the hemlocks.” Finally, the exhausted speaker doubts himself
and poses, in one more breath, a final question, just one line long: “Or was
it a cry against the hemlocks?”
Stevens draws the poem to a close as the speaker looks outside:
Out of the window,

I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks.
I felt afraid—
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks. (CPP 7)
As if to underscore the speaker’s intense perception of the movement of

the fire, leaves, and the piercing sound of the peacock’s cry, Stevens
endows him with the power to perceive the very motion of the heavens: “I
saw how the planets gathered.” He voices the last stanza, however, in
contrast to the one preceding, in quieter tones, with a succession of
declarative statements: “I saw how the planets gathered,” “I saw how the
night came,” “I felt afraid,” “And I remembered,” repeating the personal
pronoun “I” four times in eight lines. But, most importantly for the sub-
ject of music and memory, Stevens closes the poem with repetitions of its
intertwining phrases or melodies. The first, “Like the leaves themselves /

Turning in the wind,” is sounded in each of the previous stanzas. The
second, which repeats the last line of the first, “And I remembered the cry
of the peacocks,” prompts us, as a composer of music might, to hear its
lines once again. “I am sorry,” Stevens writes in a 1928 letter of
“Domination of Black,” “that a poem of this sort has to contain any ideas
at all, because its sole purpose is to fill the mind with the images & sounds
that it contains,” so that we feel, as he hopes, as we would actually feel if
we saw and heard all these images and sounds in reality (L 251).
“Domination of Black” offers us one early example of the way Stevens
enacts music in Harmonium, an otherwise very heterogeneous volume in
which music assumes many different guises. In his first volume of the
1930s, Ideas of Order, music becomes more consistently an organizing
artistic analogy. In “Anglais Mort à Florence” (1936), Stevens powerfully
interweaves memory and music both thematically and structurally, as the
poet looks achingly back on his former self, and rues what he has lost. He
subtly traces a shift in the way he sees and feels, and expresses that lessen-
ing of feeling in musical terms, especially in the way he hears the nineteenth-
century composer Johannes Brahms. In the opening stanza, he considers
Brahms as a second self, “His dark familiar,” to whom he turns later in the
poem (in the movement from stanza five to six) “as alternate // In
speech” (CPP 119–20). This elegiac poem is musical not only in theme:
the speaker’s sorrowful tone is reminiscent of Brahms’s intensity of feel-
ing, and its eight stanzas, of three lines each, advance with a classical sym-
metry that echoes the composer’s stately forms. Of “Anglais Mort à
Florence,” Harold Bloom writes, “The little elegy for an imaginary English
High Romantic dead at Florence is Stevens’ saddest and most elegant ver-
sion of Wordsworth’s Immortality ode and is another anticipation of The
Auroras of Autumn, particularly in its lament for a time of lost glory,
‘before the colors deepened and grew small’” (113). Almost as if he were
reflecting back on his earlier letters, Stevens seems to ponder memory here
in musical fashion to ask himself, What can draw the distant near? What
force can draw the past closer to the present?
To say that “Anglais Mort à Florence” resembles Brahms in tone or
structure, however, is not to tie Stevens and Brahms too tightly together,
or to assert that Stevens self-consciously tries to turn poetry into music
proper. Yet, Stevens’s choice of Brahms in this tender and self-searching
poem at such a transition in the poet’s own life is not an arbitrary one. In
a letter of 1940 to Hi Simons, in which he discusses the poem, Stevens
writes that even “a strong spirit … is subject to degeneration,” and in

“states of helplessness” such a spirit may “turn to the spirit of others” (L
348). And it is to Brahms’s “spirit” that he turns in “Anglais Mort à
Florence.” It is well known that Brahms’s music is firmly Classical in form,
and, at the same time, celebrated for its evocation of deep Romantic feel-
ing. Stevens, then, takes a backward glance at his earlier self in Harmonium
much as he might have imagined that the Romantic Brahms regarded his
Classical forebears and his own self. (Like Stevens in relation to avant-
garde Modernists, Brahms was often subjected to criticism that he was
conservative.) As Michael Stegman notes, Stevens’s extensive record col-
lection reveals his strong interest in late Romantic music (the music that
was roughly contemporaneous with his own youth), and included a broad
range of Brahms in multiple genres: orchestral music (all four sympho-
nies); concertos (both piano concertos and the violin concerto); a wide
range of piano repertoire (ballades, Hungarian dances, intermezzi, rhap-
sodies, capriccios); and various items of chamber music (from piano quar-
tets to string quartets) (Stegman 84–85). Stevens’s consistent structure in
this poem and the way he voices the poem as a kind of inner dialogue
unwinding in a measured pace may be felt to parallel Brahms’s structures
in some of his intermezzi. The composer’s clarity of themes and, in par-
ticular, his stylistic use of polyrhythms have a lingering effect as if he were
aiming to recollect or preserve the past in the present moment. So it is in
“Anglais Mort à Florence,” in which Stevens’s use of voice, repetition, and
refrains similarly produces a compelling, lingering effect as the speaker
remembers his former self.
Stevens unwinds the eight stanzas of “Anglais Mort à Florence” the-
matically in two groupings of roughly four stanzas. In the first four, the
speaker, in mournful tones, expresses a sense of loss:
A little less returned for him each spring.

Music began to fail him. Brahms, although
His dark familiar, often walked apart.
His spirit grew uncertain of delight,
Certain of its uncertainty, in which
That dark companion left him unconsoled
For a self returning mostly memory.
Only last year he said that the naked moon
Was not the moon he used to see, to feel
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CHAPTER XXII.
THE CONSTRUCTION TRAIN.
I have been so busy with the history of our family affairs, and the
incidents which sent me over to Middleport, that I have not had
much to say about the Lake Shore Railroad; but before I have done
with the subject, I shall fully describe the road, and explain the
operations of the company. Only a small portion of the line had yet
been built, and the dummy was but a temporary substitute for more
complete rolling stock. Major Toppleton intended to have a charter
for the road, to be obtained at the next session of the legislature, and
to continue it to Ucayga. Although it was at the present time a mere
plaything for the students, it was designed to be a useful institution,
and to build up Middleport immensely in the end.
Just as I was about to start on the one o’clock trip, Major
Toppleton presented himself. The car was filled with students,
though a number of ladies and gentlemen had come down to the
station to have a ride in the dummy. The major immediately ordered
the boys to evacuate the premises, which they did with some
grumblings, amounting almost to rebellion. The persons waiting were
invited to get in, and I started for Spangleport with a less noisy crowd
than I had anticipated. As we went off, I heard the major call the
students together, and I concluded that he had some definite plan to
carry out.
On my return, I found the boys had loaded up the two platform
cars with rails and sleepers, and they were attached to the dummy
as soon as she arrived. Several mechanics were standing by, and it
was evident that a piece of work was to be done that day, instead of
play.
“Now, Wolf, we will run a construction train on this trip,” said
Major Toppleton, as he took his place at my side on the dummy, and
directed the students and the mechanics to load themselves into the
passenger apartment and on the cars.
“I think we need a little more construction at Spangleport, sir,” I
suggested.
“Why, what’s the matter?”
“I don’t like to run backwards, sir, on the down trips.”
“But a turn-table will cost too much for the short time we shall
make Spangleport a terminus. We will build one at Grass Springs,
for that will be as far as we shall run the road this season.”
“We need not build a turn-table, sir,” I added. “We can turn the
dummy on switches.”
“How is that?” inquired the major.
“It will take three switches to turn her. First run a track round a
curve to the right, until it comes to a right angle with the main line.
Then run another track on the reverse curve till it strikes the main
line again, a few rods from the point where the first track leaves it.”
“I don’t understand it.”
“I will explain it when we stop, sir. It will not take long to lay it
down, and when it is no longer wanted it can be taken up, and put
down in another place.”
At Spangleport, where we stopped, I made a diagram on a piece
of paper, to illustrate my plan; and here is a copy of my drawing. The
perpendicular lines are the main track. The dummy was to be
switched off at the lowest part of the diagram, and run on the curve
till it had passed a switch on the right. Then it was to be switched on
the upper curve, and run back till it passed the switch on the main
line, which being shifted, the car having been turned entirely round, it
runs back on the perpendicular lines between the curves.
Major Toppleton was satisfied with the scheme, directed that the
switches should be brought up, and the work was commenced at
once by the mechanics. All the boys but two were employed in laying
down more track; but I am sorry to say they grumbled fiercely, for
they wanted to have some fun with the dummy. Higgins was still to
serve as conductor, and the other student who had been excepted
from hard labor was one of the regularly appointed engineers of the
road. His name was Faxon. He had some taste for mechanics, and
had distinguished himself in school by making a fine diagram of the
steam-engine on the blackboard. He was to run with me on the
dummy, and learn to manage the engine. I was directed to post him
up, as well as I could, and to permit him to take an active part in
running the machine.
I was not particularly pleased with the idea of an apprentice in the
engine-room with me, for if the fellow had any “gumption” he would
soon be able to take my place, and I might be discharged whenever
it was convenient. But a second thought assured me that my fears
were mean and unworthy; that I could never succeed in making
myself useful by keeping others in ignorance. The students were
sent to the Institute to learn, and the railroad was a part of their
means of instruction. I had no right to be selfish.
We ran down to the wharf in Spangleport, for the road was built
half a mile beyond the village, when Higgins shouted, “All aboard for
Middleport!” We had quite a crowd of Spangleporters as passengers,
and we ran our trips regularly till five o’clock, to the great gratification
of the people of both places, when the gentlemanly conductor
declined to receive any more who expected to return, as the half-
past five car up would be a construction train. Mr. Higgins talked very
glibly and professionally by this time, and imitated all the
gentlemanly conductors he had ever seen.
Faxon was a very good fellow, though he cherished a bitter
antipathy against the Wimpletonians, and everything connected with
them. He was an ardent admirer of Major Toppleton, and particularly
of Major Toppleton’s eldest daughter, for which I did not like him any
the less, strange as it may appear after the developments of the last
chapter.
“I’ll tell you what it is, Wolf,” said he, as we were running up the
last trip, “this thing won’t go down with the fellows.”
“What?”
“All the fellows are mad because they had to work this afternoon.”
“I thought they considered it fun to build the road.”
“They did before the dummy came; but now they want the fun of
the thing. They are all rich men’s sons, and they won’t stand it to
work like Irish laborers. I hope there won’t be any row.”
“Of course Major Toppleton knows what he is about.”
“The students don’t growl before him. They do it to the teachers,
who dare not say their souls are their own.”
“But the major told me the boys enjoyed the fun, and insisted
upon building the road themselves when he wanted to employ
laborers for the purpose.”
“That’s played out. I heard some of the fellows say they would not
work another day.”
“Some one ought to tell the major about this. He don’t want them
to work if they don’t like it,” I suggested.
“It was fine fun when we first began to dig, and lay rails, but we
have all got about enough of it.”
“I will speak to the major about it.”
“Don’t say anything to-day,” interposed Faxon. “The students are
vexed because they were not allowed to have a good time this
afternoon; but the major is going to have a great picnic at Sandy
Shore next week, and he is in a hurry to have the road built to that
point—two miles beyond Spangleport.”
“There is only one mile more to build, and if the fellows stick to it
they will get it done.”
“But they say they won’t work another day,” replied Faxon.
Middleport was not paradise any more than Centreport. Boys
were just as foolish and just as willing to get into a scrape, on one
side as the other. The Toppletonians had insisted upon doing the
work of building the road, and then purposed to rebel because they
were required to do it. I had heard of the grand picnic which was to
take place on the occasion of the birthday of Miss Grace Toppleton.
The grove by the Sandy Shore could be reached most conveniently
by the railroad, and the major’s anxiety to have the rails laid to that
point had induced him to drive the work, instead of giving the
students a chance to have a good time with the dummy, as they had
desired to do while it was a new thing.
We ran into the engine-house, and some of the boys forced their
way into my quarters, in spite of my protest. I saw a couple of them
studying the machinery with deep interest. They asked me some
questions; and supposing they were only gratifying a reasonable
curiosity, I gave them all the information they needed, telling them
just how to manage the engine.
“Pooh! I can do that as well as anybody,” said Briscoe, as he
jumped down.
“Of course you can,” replied one of his companions.
“Don’t you think I could run her, Wolf?” asked Briscoe. “I am one
of the engineers of the road, and I ought to know how.”
“Probably you could after you had had some experience.”
They went away, and I wondered what they were thinking about.
It did not much matter, however, for I was satisfied that the major
would not permit them to run the engine till they had become
thoroughly competent to do so. I put out the fires in the dummy,
cleaned the machinery, and left her in readiness for use the next
morning. I then went to the mills; and, as my father had finished his
day’s work, we walked down to the wharf where my skiff lay. On the
way I told him about my interview with Colonel Wimpleton, and we
both enjoyed the great man’s confusion when he learned in what
manner he had punished my father.
“He will not arrest you, Wolf; you may depend upon that,” said my
father. “As the case now stands, we have the weather-gauge on him,
except in the matter of the mortgage. I am afraid I shall lose all I
have in the house. Mortimer has got back, but he hasn’t seen or
heard of Christy.”
“He may turn up yet.”
“He may, but I don’t depend much upon it. I have tried a little here
in Middleport to raise the money to pay off the mortgage; but people
here will not lend anything on real estate on the other side of the
lake.”
“Perhaps Major Toppleton will help you out,” I suggested.
“I don’t like to say anything to him about it. He has done well by
me, and I won’t ride a free horse to death; besides, I don’t want to be
in the power of either one of these rich men. I have had trouble
enough on the other side.”
I pulled across the lake, and we went into the house. My mother
looked anxiously at my father as he entered, and then at me. I
smiled, and she understood me. Father had not drunk a drop, and
she was happy. We never relished our supper any better than we did
that night, and I went to bed early, not a little surprised that we heard
nothing, during the evening, of Colonel Wimpleton and his son.
The dummy was to make her first trip at eight o’clock, and I left
the house at half-past six, with my father, to cross the lake. When we
reached the wharf, I was utterly confounded to see the dummy
streaking it at the rate of twenty miles an hour along the opposite
shore of the lake. Something was wrong, for there was no one on the
other side who knew how to run the machine, unless it was Faxon,
and I was afraid the discontented Toppletonians were in mischief.
We embarked in the skiff, and I pulled over as quickly as I had done
the day before.
CHAPTER XXIII.
OFF THE TRACK.
T he appearance of the dummy, going at full speed, filled me with

anxiety. I was sure that something was wrong, for I knew that
Major Toppleton was not stirring at that hour in the morning, and that
he could not have given any one permission to take out the car
without telling me of it. I hastened up to the engine-house; but it was
empty, and added nothing to my meagre stock of ideas on the vexed
subject. The dummy was gone, and that was all I knew about it.
The Institute buildings were only a short distance from the
engine-house, and I next went there in search of information. The
students were engaged, in large numbers, in their sports. Indeed,
there were so many of them present that the suspicion I had
entertained that some of the boys had gone on a lark in the dummy
seemed to be disarmed. Still, a dozen or twenty of them would not
be missed in the crowd, and it was possible that this number were in
mischief, though I thought, if it were so, they had chosen a singular
time of day for it.
The students were rung up in the morning at six o’clock; but, by a
merciful provision of the governors of the Institute, the first hour was
devoted to play, so that those who were behind time cheated
themselves out of just so much sport. I was informed that only a few
neglected to get up when the bell rang; and I commend this humane
and cunning arrangement to other institutions troubled by the
matutinal tardiness of students. The morning is favorable to bold
schemes and active movements; and the more I thought of the
matter, the more anxious I became to know whose places would be
vacant at the breakfast table, at seven o’clock, when the bell rang for
the morning meal.
I inquired for Faxon, and soon found him making a “home run” in
a game of base ball. Before I had time to address him the breakfast
bell rang; and with a most surprising unanimity, all games were
instantly suspended—a fact which ought to convince humanitarian
educators that breakfast, dinner, and supper should immediately
follow play, if boys are to be taught habits of promptness. The
students rushed towards “Grub Hall,” as the dining-room was called;
but, though Faxon had a good appetite, I succeeded, with some
difficulty, in intercepting his headlong flight.
“What’s the row, Wolf?” demanded he, glancing at the open door
through which the boys were filing to the breakfast table, and
possibly fearing that the delay would involve an inferior piece of
beefsteak.
“Are any of the fellows missing?” I asked.
“Not that I know of; but we can tell at the table,” replied he.
“What’s up?”
“The dummy is gone,” I answered, mysteriously.
“Gone! Gone where?”
“I don’t know. I saw her streaking it down the road as if she had
been shot off.”
“Don’t say a word about it; but hold on here till I get my grub, and
see who is missing,” said he, rushing into the building.
I did not understand what Faxon purposed to do; but I was willing
to comply with the arrangement, in compassion for his stomach, if for
no other reason. I had feared that my associate on the engine was
concerned in the conspiracy to abstract the dummy, for I did not think
any one else would be able to manage it. I was glad to find he had
not engaged in the lark, and I wondered all the more who had the
audacity to play with the machine. I walked over to a point on the
Institute grounds which commanded a view of the Lake Shore for
some distance; but I could see nothing of the dummy. Presently,
Faxon, who had satisfied the cravings of his hunger in a remarkably
short time, came out of the building.
“Briscoe and half a dozen other fellows are missing,” said he.
“Briscoe!” I exclaimed; for he was the fellow who had invaded my
quarters the night before, and declared he could handle the engine.
“He’s a first-rate fellow, in the main, and I hope he isn’t getting
into any scrape,” added Faxon, anxiously.
“I’m afraid he is. He is the fellow who has run away with the
dummy.”
“Don’t say a word. I have permission to be out an hour, and we
will see where they are. What can we do?”
“We can take one of the platform cars, and go after them.”
“Come along; but don’t say anything.”
We went to the engine-house, and lifted one of the platform cars
on the track. The Lake Shore Railroad, as I had found by running the
dummy, had a slight descent from Middleport to Spangleport. We
pushed the car, running behind it, till we had worked it up to a high
rate of speed, and then leaped upon the platform. The impetus thus
given to it kept it going for a mile, when the motive power was
applied again, as before. In this manner we ran three miles, without
making very hard work of it, and came in sight of the dummy.
“There she is!” exclaimed Faxon. “The fellows did not go a great
way in her.”
“No! but they went as far as they could,” I replied, as soon as I
had examined the situation of the car, which was not in motion when
we discovered it.
“How do you know?”
“She’s off the track.”
“That’s too bad!”
For my own part I was rather glad the enterprise of the runaways
had been nipped in the bud, for I had a professional contempt for
those who attempt to run an engine when they know nothing about
one. I only hoped the dummy and the boys were not injured. As we
approached nearer to the scene of the disaster, we saw the
conspirators hard at work trying to get the dummy on the track.
“What are you about, you spoonies!” shouted Faxon, as we
stopped the car close to the unfortunate dummy.
“We are trying to get the thing on the track,” replied Briscoe, as
coolly as though he had done nothing wrong.
“How came she out here?” demanded Faxon.
“Oh, well, we were having a little fun with her.”
“You were missed at breakfast, and you will catch fits for this.”
“I suppose we shall; but we can’t help it now.”
“What did you meddle with her for, you spoonies, when you didn’t
know anything about her?” continued Faxon, indignantly.
“I know all about her, as well as you do, Faxon. You needn’t put
on airs because you helped run the thing,” retorted Briscoe.
“I should think you did know all about her; and that’s the reason
why you ran her off the track. You don’t know so much as you think
you do.”
“That may be, but I know more than you think I do.”
“What did you run her off for?”
“I suppose it is considered rather necessary to have rails for this
thing to run on,” replied Briscoe. “If you will look ahead of her, you
will see that the track is torn up for a quarter of a mile, and the rails
carried off.”
“Is that so?” added Faxon, walking out ahead of the dummy.
“That’s so, as you may see for yourself,” said Briscoe, following
us along the track.
“Who did it? That’s the next question,” asked Faxon, vexed, as
we all were, at the discovery.
“I don’t know; we didn’t,” answered Briscoe. “If the track hadn’t
been pulled up, we should have returned at breakfast time. What’s to
be done?”
“You must get back as quick as you can,” replied the benevolent
Faxon. “I won’t blow on you. Take that car, and make time for the
Institute.”
“You’re a good fellow, Faxon,” added Briscoe, with a smile.
“If I am, don’t you play this game again.”
“I won’t, again.”
“How did it work?” I inquired, wishing to hear the experience of
the runaways.
“First rate. I had no trouble with it. She started when I pulled the
thing, and we made time on her coming down, you had better
believe.”
“I should think you did. I saw you putting her through by daylight.”
“Edwards saw the track was gone, and told me of it. I shut off
steam, and put on the brakes; but I couldn’t fetch up soon enough to
keep from running off.”
“All I have to say is, that you are lucky to come out of it with a
whole skin,” I added, solemnly. “But hurry back as fast as you can, or
you will be in hot water.”
“I’m in hot water now, and I may as well be scalded with a quart
as a pint. I am willing to stay and help you put her on the track.”
“Don’t do it, Briscoe,” interposed Faxon. “You are one of the
directors, and if the major finds out you meddled with the dummy, he
will have you turned out of office. Rush back to the Institute, and
don’t let on.”
The runaways were willing to adopt this advice. There were half a
dozen of them, and as they could make easy work of pushing the car
back, they soon disappeared behind the trees.
“You won’t let on—will you, Wolf?” said Faxon, in a coaxing tone,
as soon as we were alone.
“I won’t volunteer to tell any stories out of school; but I shall not
tell any lies about it.”
“Don’t be squeamish. Briscoe is a good fellow, and one of the
directors. The major would break him if he heard of this thing.”
“Between you and me, I think he ought to be broken. Suppose
they had burst the boiler, and been wiped out themselves?”
“That’s all very pretty; but they didn’t burst the boiler, and were
not wiped out.”
“I’m at work for Major Toppleton. If he asks me any questions, I
shall tell him the truth.”
“Oh, come now!”
“But I don’t think he is likely to ask me any questions. There will
be a breeze when he finds out the track has been torn up, and there
will be fog enough with it to cover up those fellows.”
“Be a good fellow, Wolf, and don’t say a word.”
“I will not if I can help it. I don’t think anybody will know anything
about this scrape. Those who saw the dummy come out will suppose
I was on her. But here’s a pretty kettle of fish!” I added, glancing at
the dummy, and then at the road minus the rails.
“Can we put the thing on the track again?”
“I think we can—we can try it, at least. We want some of those
rails for levers.”
“Where are they?” asked the puzzled Faxon. “Did some one steal
them for old iron?”
“No; they are not far off,” I replied, leading the way down to the
Lake Shore.
We walked along the beach, till I discovered footsteps in the
sand.
“Here is where they landed,” I added, pointing to the prints, and
also to some deep lines gored in the sand by a couple of boats,
which had been hauled up on the beach.
“Who landed? I don’t understand it.”
“I do; an enemy has done this. The Wimpletonians have been
over here during the night and torn up your track.”
“If they did, it will be a sorry day for them,” said Faxon, grating his
teeth and shaking his head.
“These footprints were made by dandy boots, and all the party
were boys. It’s as plain as the nose on Colonel Wimpleton’s face;”
and the great man of Centreport was troubled with a long proboscis.
“They’ll catch it for this.”
We walked along till we came to Grass Brook, and there we
found the rails thrown into the deep water at the mouth of it. The end
of one of them lay within my reach, and I pulled it out. Using this as a
lever, we pried up the wheels of the dummy, and, after an hour of
severe exertion, we succeeded in putting the car upon the track.
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE GRAND PICNIC.
I t is not necessary for me to quote any of the big words which

Major Toppleton used when I told him the Wimpletonians had
been over and torn up a quarter of a mile of the track of the Lake
Shore Railroad. I did not deem it best, as he asked no questions, to
augment his wrath by telling him the dummy had been off the track.
He was more impatient, if possible, to have the road completed than
the boys were. He procured the services of a score of mechanics
and laborers, and we hastened with them to the dismantled portion
of the road. The rails were fished up from the deep water, and before
twelve o’clock the track was in as good order as ever.
If the students of the Wimpleton Institute looked over the lake,
and enjoyed the mischief they had done,—as of course they did,—
their satisfaction was of short duration. Before they were turned out
to play in the afternoon, the dummy was running her regular trips to
Spangleport. I have no doubt the rascals who did the mischief felt
cheap and crestfallen when they saw the car going on its way as
though nothing had happened; and I had no more doubt that they
would consider their work ill done, and attempt to do it over again.
They were not allowed to go out nights; but I am afraid the
authorities of the Institute did not punish them very severely when
they broke through the rules in order to do mischief to the
establishment on the other side. It was only following the example of
the magnate of Centreport and many of their elders; and “like
master, like man.”
When the torn-up track was relaid, the twenty men were
conveyed beyond Spangleport to build the road. Frogs and switches
had been procured, the turning apparatus was finished, and I had
the pleasure of running both ways in ship-shape style. By laying a
few rods of track, and putting down a couple of switches near the
engine-house, we were enabled to turn at the Middleport end. We
always switched off to run into the engine-house, and we had to
back in, from a point above the house. On the new track we ran out
to a point below, and came upon the main line headed towards
Spangleport. I take the more pride in describing these movements,
because they were of my own invention, though I have since learned
that similar plans had been used before.
Towards night on the second day of my railroad experience,
Major Toppleton was a passenger in the engine-room. He was in
high spirits to think the mischief done by the Wimpletonians had
been so speedily repaired; but he was afraid the daring act would be
repeated, as I was quite satisfied it would. I knew my late comrades
on the Centreport side well enough to understand that they would
never let the Lake Shore Railroad enjoy peace and prosperity until
they were provided with an equivalent. I was confident that Colonel
Wimpleton was racking his brains even then for a scheme which
would produce an equal excitement among the students of his
Institute.
“You know those villains over there better than I do, Wolf,” said
the major confidentially to me; and I was amazed to hear him own
that I knew anything better than he did. “Don’t you think they will
attempt to tear up the track again?”
“Yes, sir, I do think so,” I replied.
“The rascals! It mortifies me to have them get ahead of me in this
manner. If I could only catch them, I would cure them of night
wandering very quick. It is of no use for me to complain to the
colonel, or to the principal of the Wimpleton Institute. They would
enjoy my chagrin.”
“It is easy enough to prevent them from doing any more
mischief,” I added.
“How?” he asked, eagerly.
“By setting a watch.”
“Yes; and while we are watching in one place they will tear up the
rails in another.”
“There are two ways to do it. Your tow-boat can ply up and down
the shore, or we can run the dummy all night.”
“Do you think you can stand it to run the dummy all night, Wolf?”
laughed he.
“My father and I could for a few nights.”
The tow-boat had gone up the lake with a fleet of canal boats,
and the other plan was the only alternative. I saw my father at six
o’clock. He was ready to serve on the watch, but he was not willing
to leave my mother alone with my sisters at home all night, fearful
that some of the chivalrous Wimpletonians might undertake to annoy
her. But Faxon volunteered to serve with me, and was pleased with
the idea. We lighted up the reflecting lamp over the door of the
engine, and, though it was dark, we put her “through by daylight,” in
a figurative sense.
We talked till we were sleepy, and then by turns each of us took a
nap, lying upon the cushions of the passenger compartment. It was a
good bed, and we enjoyed the novelty of the situation. Faxon by this
time understood the machinery very well, and I was not afraid to trust
him. We did not run on regular hours, and lay still more than half the
time, after Faxon had run the car as much as he desired. We kept an
eye on the lake for boats, of which the Wimpletonians had a whole
squadron.
Only once during the night was there anything like an alarm. We
saw half a dozen boats come down through the Narrows about
eleven o’clock, but we soon lost sight of them under the shadow of
the opposite shore. We saw nothing more of them, and I concluded
that the dummy, with her bright light on the shore, had prevented
another attack upon the railroad. After this all was quiet, and there
was nothing to get up an excitement upon.
The next day I was rather sleepy at times, and so was Faxon. At
eight o’clock the major appeared, and I told him we had probably
prevented another raid upon the road, for we had seen a fleet of
boats pass through the Narrows.
“All right, Wolf; I am glad we balked the scoundrels,” answered
the major; and almost anything seemed to be a victory to the great
man of Middleport.
“I suppose they will try again some other time,” I added.
“We will see that they don’t succeed. Now we must push along
the road as fast as we can. I don’t like to disappoint the boys, but I
can’t wait for them to build the rest of it.”
I could not help smiling.
“What is it, Wolf?” he asked, smiling with me; and great men’s
smiles are sunshine to the heart.
“I don’t think they will cry if you don’t let them do any more.”
“Don’t you? Why, they begged me to let them do the work with
their own hands, and I have gratified them thus far.”
I soon convinced him that the boys were not anxious to do any
more digging, or to lay any more rails; that hard work was “played
out” with them. The magnate was delighted to hear it; and there was
no grumbling because the students were not called upon to use the
shovels and the hammers. I ran the dummy out with the men, after
that, every morning at seven o’clock, and the road progressed
rapidly towards Grass Springs.
At noon we heard astounding news from Centreport. All the boats
belonging to the Wimpleton Institute—not less than a dozen of them
—had mysteriously disappeared. No one knew what had happened
to them, and no one had heard anything in the night to indicate what
had become of them. Major Toppleton inquired very particularly
about the fleet of boats Faxon and I had seen; but our information
did not elucidate the mystery. I observed that my fellow-engineer
winked at me very significantly, as though he knew more than he
chose to tell.
“What did you wink for, Faxon?” I asked, when we started on our
trip, and were alone.
“You are blind as the major,” laughed he.
“What do you mean?”
“About forty of the Toppletonians found a way to get out of the
Institute last night. You won’t say a word about this—will you?”
“You had better not tell me, Faxon.”
“But I will tell you, for I don’t think the major or the principal will
say anything if the whole thing is blown. You know where the
quarries are, above Centreport, on that side.”
“Of course I do.”
“The Wimpleton boats, loaded with rocks, and the plugs taken
out, lie at the bottom of the lake, in twenty feet of water, off the
quarries. We are even with those fellows now for tearing up our
track.”
“That’s too bad!” I exclaimed.
“Too bad! It wasn’t too bad to tear up our track—was it?” replied
he, indignantly.
“Two wrongs don’t make a right,” I replied, sagely.
“But one evil sometimes corrects another—‘similia similibus
curantur,’ as our little-pill doctor used to say. The loss of their boats
will prevent the Wimps from coming over here again in the night to
cut up our road.”
I was a boy, like the rest of them; but I did not exactly enjoy this
“tit for tat” business. My mother had always taught me to exercise a
Christian spirit, and this “paying back” was a diabolical spirit. I would
not tell of these things, nor suffer my readers to gloat over them, if
any are disposed to do so—were it not to show how these two great
men, and all the little men who hung upon the skirts of their coats,
were finally reconciled to each other; and how, out of war and
vengeance, came “peace and good will to men.”
Before Miss Grace Toppleton’s birthday arrived the road was
finished to Sandy Beach, and the grand picnic took place. The two
platform cars had seats built upon them, and were attached to the
dummy. I conveyed about a hundred a trip until the middle of the
day, when all Middleport appeared to have been transported to the
grove. The affair was very elaborate in all its details. Tents, pavilions,
booths, and swings had been erected, and the Ucayga Cornet Band
was on the ground.
When I came in on the twelve o’clock trip, my father presented
himself at the door of the engine-room, his face wreathed in smiles.
My mother and sisters were present, for we were now regarded as
Middleporters.
“I will take care of this thing for a short time, Wolf, and you may
go and see the fun,” said my father.
“I don’t care about going now.”
“Oh, you must go; the people want to see you.”
Thus urged I entered the grove, and found myself before a
speaker’s stand, on which Major Toppleton was holding forth to the
people.
“Come here, Wolf!” called he. “I want to see you.”
A couple of the students seized me by the arms, and, dragging
me forward, actually forced me up the steps upon the speaker’s

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Editorial Advisory Board

The Poetic Music of

Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature

So many years of collaborative work and intellectual exchange come

succinct version of Chap. 7 was first published as “‘Things as they are /

Stevens, Wallace. “Of Mere Being,” copyright © 1967, 1969, 1971 by

1 Introduction: Musicking Stevens 1

2 The Enigmatic Relation Between Music and Memory 21

3 The Challenge of Inventing Modern Melodies 51

4 The Lifelong Lure of Birds and Their Song 85

1. The above mentioned standard abbreviations for the works of Wallace

Introduction: Musicking Stevens

1 Aims and Theoretical Inspiration

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

term “musicking” from the musicologist Christopher Small, who coined

music in the first statement, and conclude that our understanding of a

fine-grained discussions of the musicality in particular poems in Vendler’s

attended performances in New York (Stegman 79; Brazeau 137, 281).

3 Compositional Principles and Overview

into a single composition, as befits a coauthored rather than a coedited

Similarly, critical attention to the place of melody in Stevens’s work has

Stevens’s recurrent staging of birdsong, discussed in Chap. 4 (Goldfarb),

Chapter 5 (Eeckhout) continues at first with the inspiration of birdsong

commissioned. Here again, a juxtaposition between composer and poet,

4 Final Notes

Brogan, Jacqueline Vaught, editor. “Stevens and Structures of Sound.” Special

The Enigmatic Relation Between Music

To-night, after dinner, … I thought I should like to play my guitar, so I

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 21

1 Musings on Memory and Music

a 1909 letter to Elsie, “vibrate on more than the ‘sensual ear’—vibrate on

It is ten years since I heard [Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony]. An echo ten

As if in anticipation of the opening stanza of “Sunday Morning,” when

A little phantasy to beguile you—a bit of patch-work—and about music …

Stevens muses on memory in this passage and, importantly, distinguishes

Stevens’s reflections on music in these early letters seem to look ahead

Stevens’s rhythmic prose here reads as a kind of prose poem in which he

“noise” of the elevated urban trains, and the instrumental sounds of a

3 Poems of Music and Memory

At night, by the fire,

leaves “Repeating themselves” as they “Turned in the room, / Like the

The colors of their tails

Stevens recounts the speaker’s memory of the hours before nighttime in

Was it a cry against the twilight

Out of the window,

As if to underscore the speaker’s intense perception of the movement of

intertwining phrases or melodies. The first, “Like the leaves themselves /

writes that even “a strong spirit … is subject to degeneration,” and in

A little less returned for him each spring.

T he appearance of the dummy, going at full speed, filled me with

I t is not necessary for me to quote any of the big words which

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1 Introduction: Musicking Stevens 1

2 The Enigmatic Relation Between Music and Memory 21

3 The Challenge of Inventing Modern Melodies 51

4 The Lifelong Lure of Birds and Their Song 85