MCP: Stevens, Williams, and Wylie

I completed this reading assignment:

Wallace Stevens:
"Sunday Morning"

William Carlos Williams:
"The Young Housewife"
"Tract"
"Danse Russe"
"Sympathetic Portrait of a Child"
"Portrait of a Lady"
"The Widow's Lament in Springtime"

Elinor Wylie:
"The Wild Peaches"
"Incantation"
"Let No Charitable Hope"

Here are my reflections:

Ironically, Stevens' "Sunday Morning" has a mythic and even apocalyptic texture. Here, a still morning provides the backdrop for a discourse on metaphysics, a discourse that makes use of Greco-Roman mythology, Christian doctrine, and horticultural archetypes. The author holds up the details of the natural world as preferable to the "silent shadows and dreams" of spiritual speculations (line 18). We should look for paradise within the material order, he says, not hope for ethereal deliverance. This raises the question of death; our supposedly paradisaic order is notable for its impermanence. Stevens' answer to the problem of death is to embrace it as "the mother of beauty" (line 63); as the fulfillment of life and the only imperishable quality in nature, death defines existence.

Williams' "The Widow's Lament in Springtime" also addresses the relationship between nature and death. It captures the sorrow of a woman (the poet's mother, according to the notes in the textbook) who has recently lost her husband. This widow observes the freshness of spring from a new perspective; she sees the beauty around her but can only think of her despair. I see in this poem, therefore, a modernist's parody on Romanticism. Yes, the poet says, the world is lovely--but the burdens of existence mock any attempt to idealize it. The widow is drawn to the blooms of spring, but she also desires "to sink into the marsh near them" (line 28).

Elinor Wylie uses "Let No Charitable Hope" to express an equally austere but much more tranquil outlook. Like the previous two authors, she rejects attempts to idealize the world, but she would rather resign herself to quiet enjoyment of what may be enjoyed than rhapsodize on death or pain. Yes, she says, life is difficult--but life is not to be feared any more than it is to be spiritualized.

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