Who asks who exclaims, What visions in the shadeless dark of light and shade! Yet another still? Devising it all for company. What a further addition to company that would be! Yet another still devising it all for company. Quick leave him. With Stevens, on the other hand, there is always the sense that in the end he accepts this as an unexpected gift, an unmitigated blessing rather than the final act of treachery. Here the metaphorical shawl, ‘wrapped tightly round us’, serves not to remind us of our solitude but on the contrary to make us forget ourselves and feel ‘the obscurity of an order, a whole, / … that which arranged the rendezvous’ – more the loving embrace of a mother than the shudder-inducing touch of the winding-sheet:

We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough. Having reached this stage, he is ready to say his goodbyes to the world which had given him so much pleasure and to the poetry which had been at the centre of his life. ‘The Planet on the Table’ takes stock of the second: ‘Ariel was glad he had written his poems’, it begins. They were good he feels because though they were of course ‘makings of the self ’, they were also ‘makings of the sun’. However:

It was not important that they survive. What mattered was that they should bear Some lineaments of character, Some affluence, if only half-perceived, In the poverty of their words, Of the planet of which they were a part. (450)

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