at Haddam ‘shines and sways’. Frank Kermode, in an essay on these late poems, argues that Stevens in speaking here, as he always has, of the local and the particular.37 That is the one point on which I would take issue with what is surely one of his finest essays and one which has coloured my own thinking on the subject. For it seems to me that we are no longer in the world of ‘An Ordinary Evening at New Haven’. The river may not be the gloomy Styx, the classical boundary between this world and the realm of the dead, but it certainly is not ‘ordinary’. Though the sun shines on it, it is a strangely silent and unpeopled place. And though it is ‘this side of Styx’, the very mention of the river casts a shadow, as does the way we come to it in the poem, ‘Before one comes to the first black cataracts’. This is a river that ‘flows nowhere, like a sea’, an overwhelming force against which no ferryman can navigate his barge: ‘Call it once more, a river, an unnamed flowing.’ And after Styx, we know, comes Lethe, the river of ultimate forgetfulness. The narrator advances towards them both, not looking back.

But Stevens the poet has one more surprise up his sleeve. Out of the blue he presents us, in a poem unpublished in his lifetime, with a dirge to rival the greatest in the language, Shakespeare’s ‘Fear no more the heat of the sun’ in Cymbeline. In ‘Farewell without a Guitar’ Stevens had said goodbye to poetry and its gaudy trappings, giving us not a noble rider but a riderless horse, a horse which ‘walks home without a rider, / Head down.’ Now we discover that though he has discarded the guitar he has kept his banjo, for the poem is entitled ‘Banjo Boomer’:

The mulberry is a double tree. Mulberry, shade me, shade me awhile. 37 ‘Wallace Stevens: Dwelling Poetically in Connecticut’, in Frank Kermode, An Appetite for Poetry (London; 1989), pp.79–96.

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