Harmonium through the Years

Harmonium through the Years Lisa Goldfarb A FEW MONTHS AGO, around the time when the Wallace Stevens Society decided to organize an American Literature Association panel on the centenary of Stevens’s 1923 publication of Harmonium, I had a dream about the poet. I do not often remember my dreams, but this one remains vivid in my memory. I had recently been reading (and teaching) Susan Howe’s beautiful poem “118 Westerly Terrace,” so perhaps it is not surprising that in my dream I found myself in Stevens’s Hartford home, climbing the stairs to the second floor. The stairs were carpeted, so that my footsteps were hushed, and I tread carefully as I turned the corner into a hallway. I walked tentatively, thinking that if I was quiet enough, I might feel the spirit of the poet in the hall, in the walls, in the air. Suddenly, as I looked into what appeared to be a study, I saw the poet lying still on a couch, eyes closed, with a book in hand. Nearby was a woman—I thought in my dream, “This is Holly”—who held a piece of paper—a manuscript—in her hand. It was clear from the look in her eyes that she ached to share the manuscript. I could make out that it was a poem, and I felt charged with the task to reach her so that I might read the verses scribbled there. Somehow it would be necessary to lift the poet and his daughter down the stairs, to bring them to a more comfortable and fitting place, where I could talk with them. My husband needed to lift both figures to carry them down. As we descended the stairs, I could make out some of the words of the poem, which seemed to be additional verses to, or a companion poem much like, “Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu.” I woke up with the first stanza of “Waving Adieu” reverberating in my head: That would be waving and that would be crying,Crying and shouting and meaning farewell,Farewell in the eyes and farewell at the centre,Just to stand still without moving a hand. (CPP 104) What an exquisite way to express the world “without heaven to follow” (CPP 104), I thought, reflecting on my dream, and to feel the present moment, however tinged with sadness, as full and complete in itself. [End Page 148] Readers may wonder why I recount this dream at the start of an essay that focuses on my experience of Harmonium. The dream, after all, culminates in my wished-for discovery of a companion piece to a poem from Ideas of Order. What the dream signifies, however, is the extent of my engagement with Stevens’s poems over a period of fifty years, and that engagement started with the poems of Harmonium. In a personal essay such as this, it would be impossible to trace in detail or to reproduce how I heard and understood particular poems when I first encountered them, as my memory is colored by the direction that my career has taken. Still, I remember the way the poems of Harmonium held my attention, and, in retrospect, I see how, from the start, reading Stevens—particularly Harmonium—taught me how to become a reader and a scholar who, above all else, listens intently to Stevens’s poetic music and, by extension, to the music of lyric. “Modern British and American Poetry” was the only course I took during my undergraduate years that focused on lyric poetry. It was 1973 (maybe 1974) and we read a slim selection of Stevens’s poems, from Harmonium to The Rock. While I cannot recall exactly which poems we read, the two from Stevens’s first volume that made the strongest impression at the time were “The Snow Man” and “Sunday Morning.” I want to try not to project my current understanding of these poems back on the young student I was then, but rather to recall, as accurately as possible, the responses I had. The speaker’s voice in “The Snow Man” stopped me in my tracks. What does it mean to have “a mind of winter,” I...