Wallace Stevens, ‘The Reader’ (1935)
The speaker of this poem is reading a book at night. S/he considers the night itself to be a kind of book. It’s a cold, autumnal night, moonlit and starry, and the leaves have fallen from the trees — though there are muscadine grapes, melons and pears red with ripeness: in a greenhouse, perhaps, or in the fruitbowl inside the house. What kind of a book is such a night? Well, presumably it is a book about (inter alia, I suppose) a person reading a book. It is, typographically speaking, stark:
The somber pages bore no print
Except the trace of burning stars
In the frosty heaven.
This is to elaborate the conceit of the poem. The night is a book. Books are letters printed upon pages. What are the letters printed on the night-time (sombre) pages of this book? Only the stars in the frosty sky.
Gary Kuchar [‘Spiritual Poetics and Poetic Spirituality: Distraction and the Ethics of Poetic Form in The Temple’, Christianity and Literature 66:1 (2016)] thinks Stevens, here, is in dialogue with George Herbert’s The Temple (1633), and specifically ‘Scriptures II’:
Oh that I knew how all thy lights combine,
And the configurations of their glorie!
Seeing not onely how each verse doth shine,
But all the constellations of the storie.
This verse marks that, and both do make a motion
Unto a third, that ten leaves off doth lie:
Then as dispersed herbs do watch a potion,
These three make up some Christians destinie:
Such are thy secrets, which my life makes good,
And comments on thee: for in ev’ry thing
Thy words do finde me out, & parallels bring,
And in another make me understood.
Starres are poore books, & oftentimes do misse:
This book of starres lights to eternall blisse.
The book of starres. Kuchar thinks Stevens poem moves contrariwise to Herbert: ‘rather than moving from an analogy of Bible-as-stars to Bible-as-transcending the stars, Stevens moves in the opposite direction. The “‘sombre pages” of his nameless book turn out in the end to have “no print” except “the trace of burning stars/In the frosty heaven.” The resulting mood is of a stark, palled beauty falling over all things’ [Kuchar, 6].
I’m not so sure. The poem construes its author (and, in a way, interpellates its reader) as somebody reading a book who is struck by the parallel between what s/he is doing and the situation they are in — a person, reading a book, at night-time, in a dark world which is, in a way, also a book. And this in turn scales the initial situation, in which the book has a reader (an ‘I’: ‘all night I sat reading a book’) to a cosmic perspective. The book of the cosmos, though dark, must have a reader too. God, presumably. Does God, whom we can assume has written the ‘book’, also read it? I suppose He does. There’s a moment I often think about, from Bruce Thomas’s 1991 The Big Wheel, a greatly underappreciated work. Thomas was bassist in the Attractions and toured with Elvis Costello during the 1980s. The Big Wheel is his account of that time, pointed and hilarious and insightful. The moment I have in mind sees Thomas in a motel room, somewhere in the Mid-West, bored, killing time before the evening performance. He turns on the TV.
A cartoon was on. It had dubbed laughter. Non-existent characters played to an equally non-existent audience. Best left to each other.
Click.
He has turned off the TV. This, I think, is quite a theologically-cosmically profound observation.
Back to Stevens: there are two things about this poem that jar. One is prosodic. The text is five three-line stanzas, each one two tetrameter lines capped by a dimeter. So far as this goes, Stevens is fluently expressive: his tetrameters are never metronomically regular and dull, he has a lovely musical balance of monosyllabic and polysllabic words, and the way each stanza’s final line ends on an unstressed syllable — what used to be called ‘feminine line-endings’ — is very fine, a repeated dying fall. But there’s a glitch, a fly in the moonlight-chilly cold cream ointment of the poem: line 5.
Covered the shrivelled forms
There’s a whole foot missing here, metrically speaking. It’s a real howler in the prosody of the whole, actually: so much so that I’m almost tempted to pronounce the line coveréd the shrivelléd forms, just so it scans — though of course, that won’t work: shrivelléd is a mess, and actually would, in whichever cod-Herbertian Early Modern sound-world we are imagining, be pronounced shriv’léd, such that we’re forced back on some such shift as had covered all the shrivelled forms. But that’s not what the poem gives us.
The second jarring thing (‘the jar was round upon the ground’ and so on) is the line: No lamp was burning as I read. But this is unambiguous. The speaker of the poem is sitting in unlit darkness, and yet is still reading a book. How?
At the risk of perpetrating a kind of fatuous literalism, I wonder: is s/he blind? It is a function of the automatic assumption, the ableism of the sighted, that ‘reading a book’ means: looking with one’s eyes at a page printed with Gutenbergian letters. But there are other methods of reading. Louis Braille first published his system for tactile reading in 1829. By the twentieth-century — as today, although it is losing ground because of the primacy of audio books — it is a global matter, widely practised.
Suddenly the poem comes into a different focus. The speaker, blind, is running his/her hand over the dots of a braille book (Louis Braille’s first system included dashes as well as dots, but he abandoned this because, in practice, dashes are harder to read with a finger; the second edition, of 1837, was simply dots, and that’s what braille now is, worldwide). Braille is sometimes called ‘night writing’, since soldiers, trained in it, can read messages in the dead of night without needing the betraying and possibly deadly illumination of a light. The comparison the poem makes between the book that is read and the night sky makes, suddenly, more sense, as does the poem’s focus on auditory (‘a voice was mumbling, “Everything Falls back to coldness”’) and smell-taste sensoria (those luscious fruits). No lamp was burning as I read now means, simply, what it says: for a blind person can sit in their house, reading a book, and have no need for a light.
This suggests a rather different dynamic in the poem. Its tension is: reading, and darkness. We are all, it suggests, reading in darkness, overcoming our various symbolic and actual blindnesses to access the word. As the page is printed, as the braille-bumps dot out the meaning, so the starry skies declare the glory of God. Or is this too triumphalist a reading of the poem? There’s also that strangely lamed line, covered the shrivelled forms. Cold makes us shrivel up. Shrivelled forms is a strikingly dismissive way of comparing the dots of braille to the more elaborated shapes of printed letters (we could say: the western orthographies of lettering are shrivelled and cold compared to the gorgeous richness of Chinese pictograms). Those grapes, melons, pears, are blobs, braille-like units in a larger syntax. It’s almost too neat that the one line in the poem that includes the word shrivelled is, prosodically, shrunken. Does this have to do with the limitations of world-sense associated with blindness? Faith, which I think this poem is about, is tangled-in with blindness: to talk of blind faith is to talk of a kind of unconsidered strength of belief. And blindness, according to Saint John, exists not as an index of fault, but rather to enable the mercy and magic of God to be seen.
Now as Jesus passed by, He saw a man who was blind from birth. And His disciples asked Him, saying, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but that the works of God should be revealed in him. I must work the works of Him who sent Me while it is day; the night is coming when no one can work. [John 9:1–7]
The night is coming when no one can read, we might say. Jesus heals the blind man (‘he spat on the ground and made clay with the saliva; and He anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay. And He said to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” So he went and washed, and came back seeing’). Faith, it seems. Faith we read, though it is dark, and no light shines.
