(no subject)

[proximoception]

Things that confuse me in poetry:

1. Whether the last line of this passage in the last stanza of "Sunday Morning" is just referring to the next to last line ... or what.

We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.

I.e. is he saying "we live in a free, unsponsored island solitude of that inescapable wide water," or does the clause somehow apply to all three possible homes, or might it even refer back to "we" on its own (thus: "We of that inescapable wide water live in either etc."). The meaning of the passage is pretty much the same no matter how you read it, but I'm permanently grammatically confused. I guess I must have heard of "an island of the lake," though "in" and "on" are infinitely more common, but something seems very off about "an island of that water." Chaoses and dependencies of waters sound off-er still. Whether he intended it or not, the effect works for him: the phrase's being semi-disjoined highlights our (possibly false) sense of a categorical disjunct between our world and death/time/whatever else is beyond it, and the way it appears at the end of a rhetorical chunk that's seemingly complete without it underlines how it cannot be escaped. But I still can't tell just how Stevens meant it to be read.

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

It has always been a fruitful enigma for me. I read it as having some of the obscurity of a similar French idiom, as though though whole thing somehow belonged to that wide water, which it could more easily mean if you read "of" as "de". Or at least the three adjectives are related to that wide water: unsponsered of it (=by it); free of it; inescapable of (=from) it. But thinking about it again, instead of just letting it be what it's always been to me, that French belonging, I supposed one possibility is the parallel:

old dependency of day and night

island solitude of that wide water

Which is just a way of saying I think you're right: it all works the same way, and creates its own idiom, while describing how we live on our own arbitrary, inescapable, unsponsored, free idiom and nowhere else.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

All of the likeliest readings seem equally awkward without quite being illegal, even allowing for his franglophony. But none of the awkwardness touches the meaning. The stools stands but no leg directly touches both the ground and the seat. It's the damnedest thing.

Maybe the starkness of the "free" vs. "inescapable" contradiction tripped him up, he tried to play it down by shifting commas, and ended up at this impasse where moving them again seems both necessary and impossible? I think that's what disturbs me most - clearly something happened ... there was a mind change, a story. But what?