I promised you some poetry readings — this is a favorite short poem of mine, and this is why I think it’s so nifty — awhile back. I’m going to get started on this shortlist with Wallace Stevens’ “Of Mere Being.”
The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,
A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.
You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.
The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.
Yep, this is a kooky late Wallace Stevens poem. He died in 1955, and this was probably written in the last year or two of his life. It appears as the last poem in the lovely volume of selected poetry called *The Palm at the End of the Mind*, and — given the title of the volume and the location of this poem at the very end — I’ve always enjoyed the silly idea that this was the last poem he ever wrote.
This is a quintessential Wallace Stevens poem. Many of the identifiable characteristics are there. Totally abstract? Check. Relatively simple language that seems to gesture toward something profound yet perhaps ultimately mysterious or even ungraspable? Check. Use of birds and/or vegetation as a main object in the poem? Check.
I adore the opening of this poem: “The palm at the end of the mind, / Beyond the last thought, rises / In the bronze decor.” We’re chucked off the end of the pier and into the lake; we can’t really swim. The poem is asking us to think of a place “[b]eyond the last thought”; this could be a cheap parlor trick, but in hands as accomplished as Stevens, it certainly isn’t. The riveting part about this opening, though, is its quiet confidence. Stevens will often just tell you these marvelous things. No “imagine this!” or scenes of grandiose imagery and highfalutin language. Two super-abstract ideas (palm at end of mind AND beyond the last thought) are brought together with a super-active verb: “rises.” Somehow these abstract ideas are taking hold. This scene might seem ridiculous, but that’s our problem; the speaker states it as if he’s stating a fact.
There’s this bird singing a “foreign song,” that seems to escape our categories of comprehension. Singing birds are a favorite of poets — think of Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” or the bird in the tree at the end of Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” — and here Stevens takes this image of natural beautiful and harmony and makes it bizarre, different, other. In a masterful early poem, “Sunday Morning,” Stevens ends with scene of the world as alive and bountiful but ultimately divorced from human comprehension and meaning. The famous pigeons swooping downward to darkness on extended wings — the last lines of the poem — reappear here, sort of. In both cases there’s something haunting about these birds: they don’t need us, not at all. The birds of “Sunday Morning” are of this world; the “gold-feathered bird” here is emphatically not.
Then comes a patented Stevens stunner: “You know then that it is not the reason / That makes us happy or unhappy.” What the hell does that mean? It seems portentous, yet its meaning remains unclear. What is the most important word in that first quoted line? I can think of a few candidates: You, know, then, it, is, not, the, reason. That’s every word except “that,” folks. Lean heavily on any one of those words and you can change the reading of the line. Try it. To my mind, “it,” “not,” and “reason” are probably the three most important. “It” — what’s it? “Not” — if we don’t know “it,” this causes even more trouble by gesturing to an idea or space that is NOT “it.” “Reason” — talk about a dicey term, since it links up with logic, causal relationships, and a whole system of ways that humans make sense of their world. This line remains obdurate and opaque. And I like it for that. At one point Hamlet tells Horatio “There’s nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.” I think the first two lines of the third stanza kinda-sorta get at that idea. But Hamlet is explicitly talking about how the mind constructs the world, whereas that only may be the case here. There’s definitely a mind-world dance going on in “Of Mere Being,” but in Hamlet’s formulation the boundaries are crisp and clear, and here they are quite blurry. And, if this wasn’t enough, don’t forget that we’ve been addressed directly: “You know then. . .” Suddenly, within this atmosphere of uncertainty come two taut sentences: “The bird sings. Its feathers shine.” For some reason — there’s that word again — I find these lines incredibly moving. The bird remains, singing, shining. Wipe away all that baggage, all those categories, all that understanding, because there the bird is, singing and shining, and its going to do that whether or not you want to accept it. Two quick sentences gesture toward volumes of marvelousness.
We end with three 8-beat lines, each a complete sentence. So we’re at the end of mind, beyond the last thought, but only at the edge of space? Um, ok. (The use of the verb “stands,” though, is provocative; what does it stand on, and how is it related to the “bronze decor” that appears in line 1?) Line 1 establishes some location but keeps it static. Line 2 adds movement — the wind in the branches. Line 3 offers the sublime payoff: “The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.” Here’s some alliterative ecstasy. Doing lexical work on alliteration — that repeated letter or sound must mean that — is always dubious and slightly crazy, but: the F sounds like a burning fire (try it — it’s open and continuous) and the hard chop of the D sounds closes off the expansive Fs. “Fangled” by the way, only has one entry in the *OED*: the last recorded use is in 1727, and it means “characterized by crochets or fopperies.” Well, I suppose there is something foppish about this bird. Stevens may have known about this obsolete word — it wouldn’t surprise me — but it hardly matters either way. As wacky as this line is, it somehow works. This mysterious and reticent poem all of a sudden bursts forward. The image — the idea — is fantastical but obscure. Now you see it; now you don’t. It’s a helluva cool line. (And you might now see why I secretly want this to be the last poem. That last line is like how Mickey Mantle hit a homerun during his last at-bat. Both are good ways to go out.)
