“Somnambulisma” by Wallace Stevens
On an old shore, the vulgar ocean rolls
Noiselessly, noiselessly, resembling a thin bird,
That thinks of settling, yet never settles, on a nest.The wings keep spreading and yet are never wings.
The claws keep scratching on the shale, the shallow shale,
The sounding shallow, until by water washed away.The generations of the bird are all
By water washed away. They follow after.
They follow, follow, follow, in water washed away.Without this bird that never settles, without
Its generations that follow in their universe,
The ocean, falling and falling on the hollow shore,Would be a geography of the dead: not of that land
To which they may have gone, but of the place in which
They lived, in which they lacked a pervasive being,In which no scholar, separately dwelling,
Poured forth the fine fins, the gawky beaks, the personalia,
Which, as a man feeling everything, were his.
Poet/scholar Helen Vendler, the 2004 Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities, last night gave her address, “The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar,” which is as inspiring a defense of the arts as you’re likely to read.
The arts present the whole uncensored human person–in emotional, physical, and intellectual being, and in single and collective form–as no other branch of human accomplishment does. In the arts we see both the nature of human predicaments–in Job, in Lear, in Isabel Archer–and the evolution of representation over long spans of time (as the taste for the Gothic replaces the taste for the Romanesque, as the composition of opera replaces the composition of plainchant). The arts bring into play historical and philosophical questions without implying the prevalence of a single system or of universal solutions. Artworks embody the individuality that fades into insignificance in the massive canvas of history and is suppressed in philosophy by the desire for impersonal assertion.
The arts are true to the way we are and were, to the way we actually live and have lived–as singular persons swept by drives and affections, not as collective entities or sociological paradigms. The case histories developed within the arts are in part idiosyncratic, but in part applicable by analogy to a class larger than the individual entities they depict. Hamlet is a very specific figure–a Danish prince who has been to school in Germany–but when Prufrock says, “I am not Prince Hamlet,” he is in a way testifying to the fact that Hamlet means something to every one who knows about the play.
Wonderful stuff, and her inclusion of Stevens’ “Somnambulisma” is a brilliant touch.