'Of Mere Being' by Wallace Stevens
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.
I was particularly touched by Wallace Steven’s poetry for its unmediated connection between the observer and the natural being that is being gazed upon – the bird and the palm. What I meant by “unmediated” is that the speaker intends not to add voice of his own and tried to detach himself from interpreting the natural landscape presented in front of his eyes, though the speaker has left the readers to contemplate over those images.
In the first stanza, it seemed to me that the poet was portraying the moment when a peacock is spreading its palm-like tail. If not a peacock, it could be any kind of bird with elongated, furry tail tainted with lustrous bronze colour. “The palm at the end of the mind, beyond the last thought, rises” narrates from the poet’s point of view, witnessing the bird’s tail rises and blossoms from behind his head into the shape of palm tree leaves, radiating outwards from the centre. If interpreting from this angle, the poet uses anthropomorphism when he writes, “the end of the mind” and “beyond the last thought”. It outlines the perspective of the image that the poet sees, and perhaps he was insinuating the bird’s decision to attract a mate after giving the last thought of evaluating a potential partner or simply showing off its feathers to its audience. On the other hand, the poet might be describing his own gesture while he was sitting, palms behind his head, looking upwards, thinking, and then suddenly thought of writing a poem when he spotted the gold-feathered bird flaunting its tail.
While the poet was listening to the bird chirping, he dissociates the bird’s songs from human songs. “Without human meaning, without human feeling”, the singer was then dis-anthropomorphised, thinning the human interpretation. The poet was distinguishing and recognising the foreign language that the bird speaks. The word “foreign” adds a notion of intelligence and otherness that we cannot apprehend, inducing an enigmatic feeling from the reader. The repetition of “human” is an attentive renunciation of the human voice that he intends to disperse the self.
The poet attempts to use logic to withdraw his feelings from the bird’s singing by saying, “you know then that it is not the reason that makes us happy or unhappy. The bird sings. Its feather shines”. Bird’s singing itself evokes a pleasurable human feeling, especially if it is melodious and rhythmic, and the beautifully glaring feather is also not for human enjoyment. It’s simply aesthetic, regardless of how humans feel about them. Our happiness is not dependent on how birds, or other animals act, in other words, we ought not to hate animals that make sounds that we don’t like, they are what they are regardless what experience they bring to the humans. Morton brought up similar question as well in his essay, “should things only become meaningful when defined by their relationship to the human? (39)” The meaning of their existence is independent of our understanding since we can never grasp the real essence of it.The creation of being is beyond our ability to understand, hence, the appreciation of nature is an initiative, one-sided feeling of humans, although we have the gift to be able to admire other beings with feelings and to speculate the meaning with our intelligence, there is a boundary, a distance that we should respect, and thus only look from afar.
In the last stanza, the poet’s gaze returns to the palm tree, noticing the slow motion of branches and leaves, gently push and pulled by the wind. Lastly, there seemed to be a cinematic montage between the image of the dangling branches and the fire-fangled feathers. Those intersecting images are mashed together, mixing colour of the vibrant green and the flame, and having both gravity and lightness. “The edge of the space” suggests a sense of humility, a quiet corner where nature silently does its magic.
The eco-diegetic voice was used as if the nature transcribed its secrets through the hand of the poet. The poet refrains from over-interpreting the nature, only captures what can be received by his senses and feelings. Irigaray similarly mediates upon such gaze, and references Buddha’s gaze upon lily flower, and describes it as an image of “thought… ready to listen to nature, to the sensible.” The gaze is “without uprooting it”, preserving. It also resembles the philosophy in her essay To Be Two, “we learn to perceive the world around us, that we learn to perceive each other between us: as life, as freedom as difference.” She suggests the necessity of space, which I presume is physical, emotional and cognitive, and should not be trespassed by human ego.
Steven’s gaze towards the palm and the bird is meditative, withdrawn, alien, yet appreciative. This made me think about how we gaze at ecology or nature. The human gaze should be more inward looking, and not to project too much onto other beings, such that the sublime would be more activated that brings us closer to the shape of truth.
References:
Marder, Michael, and Mathilde Roussel. “Irigaray’s Water Lily”. The Philosopher's Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium. Columbia University Press, 2014, pp.213-230.
Morton, Timothy. ‘From Modernity to the Anthropocene: Ecology and Art in the Age of Asymmetry’. International Social Science Journal, vol. 63, no. 207–208, 2012, pp. 39–51. primoa.library.unsw.edu.au, doi:10.1111/issj.12014.