The Deep Heart's Core

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)

A Stevens Enchiridion

Although I resisted the Library of America's Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose for many years due to an emotional attachment to my tattered old editions of The Collected Poems, The Palm at the End of the Mind, The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words, and the Letters, I have come to feel that the LOA edition deserves to become the enchiridion for all who wish to learn to "speak" Stevens. That is, for those who wish to study his work carefully, chronologically, and comprehensively, if not completely--the better to absorb him and to make his vocabulary and poetic sensibility a part of one's own.

Stevens was, and remains, a difficult poet. But the blade of the intellect is sharpened upon the whetstone of difficult texts. To become learned in Stevens is to catechize oneself in the Religion of Beauty. Around Stevens, one should read Ruskin and Pater, Santayana and Proust, Hemingway, Nietzsche, Joyce, Nabokov, Kenneth Burke, Whitman, Emerson, Oscar Wilde and, eventually, Lucretius, Rumi and Kabir, and much else besides.

Nevertheless, allow the LOA Stevens to serve as an anchor to the rest of your reading and you will not lose your way in the labyrinth.

Jack London's "Instinctive Mysticism"

In his 1974 book, Jack London, Earle Labor spoke of the "instinctive mysticism" that dominates London's tales of the north country. Here is a famous passage from the short story "White Silence":

The afternoon wore on, and with the awe, born of the White Silence, the voiceless travelers bent to their work. Nature has many tricks wherewith she convinces man of his finity--the ceaseless flow of the tides, the fury of the storm, the shock of the earthquake, the long roll of heaven's artillery--but the most tremendous, the most stupefying of all, is the passive phase of the White Silence. All movement ceases, the sky clears, the heavens are as brass; the slightest whisper seems sacrilege, and man becomes timid, affrighted at the sound of his own voice. Sole speck of life journeying across the ghostly wastes of a dead world, he trembles at his audacity, realizes that his is a maggot's life, nothing more. Strange thoughts arise unsummoned, and the mystery of all things strives for utterance. And the fear of death, of God, of the universe, comes over him--the hope of the Resurrection and the Life, the yearning for immortality, the vain striving of the imprisoned essence--it is then, if ever, man walks alone with God.

The Emperor of Ice Cream

Perhaps the most important American bard of "aesthetic bliss" was Wallace Stevens. Twenty years Nabokov's senior, Stevens was, like Nabokov, a literary genius whose works are at once difficult and engaging, with a strangely seductive music that has the capacity to haunt one long after a poem has been read, dissected, and forgotten.

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.


Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

("The Emperor of Ice Cream," from Harmonium).

Throughout his remarkable body of work, Stevens wrestled with a dialectic he posed as "imagination" versus "reality." This poem illustrates an early expression of that tension as the poet juxtaposes the death of an old woman with the festivities being prepared to commemorate the occasion. The intense aestheticism of the poet's apprehension does not lose sight of the shadows of mortality; yet, it cannot help but revel in the oddly comic gloss that the funeral preparations lend to the moment at hand. One may find relief from the oppressive facts of the human condition, if only in the ridiculous--or near ridiculous. For the poet does not obviously ridicule the proceedings; he remarks upon them, albeit with the "sly smile" of the refrain.

Like Nabokov, Stevens had arrived at the place "where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm": the place where "the two seas meet."

(Qur'an 18:60).

Nabokov Interviewed

Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 40, Vladimir Nabokov

Aesthetic Bliss

For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.

--Vladimir Nabokov, On A Book Entitled Lolita.

Nabokov made it to the place where the "two seas" (the sea of lectio divina and the sea of lectio humana) meet.

Faced with the Choice between Philosophy and Candor, Richard Rorty Chose Candor