When we look at a painting of roses, we are more apt to see them as beautiful roses, to perceive them through our senses, than we are to judge them as metaphors or symbols standing for some greater, though more abstract, truth. Perhaps the same should be true in poetry. Not everything, even in a poem, is a metaphor for something else. Stevens insistence on seeing the roses as they are, or at least as they are sensed, rather than as metaphors for love, etc. We are two that use these roses as we are,
It is like a flow of meanings with no speech It exceeds the heavy changes of the light. Our sense of these things changes and they change,
In which the sense lies still, as a man lies, In our sense of it, our sense of the fertilest red,
We feel and, therefore, is not real, except Make any imaginings of them lesser things.Īnd yet this effect is a consequence of the way Too much as they are to be changed by metaphor, To be anything else in the sunlight of the room, Pink yellows, orange whites, too much as they are Say that it is a crude effect, black reds, Whether you agree with his overall point of view or not, Stevens poems often force you to consider your own view of reality. While Im often struck by individual lines or even individual poems in these long poems, the poems as a whole simply do not resonate with me, probably because I still remain unconvinced by Stevens view of the relationship between reality and imagination. It, like the immediately preceding volumes, is dominated by long, meditative poems on the relationship of reality, imagination, and poetry. Stevens The Auroras of Autumn is a rather short volume of poetry published in 1950.
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