Le Monocle de Mon Oncle

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This annotated text of Wallace Stevens' poem "Le Monocle doe Mon Oncle" is a project of Professor Ed Gillin's Fall, 2006 course in Modern American Literature (Engl 333).

Table of contents

1 Background 2 Annotated Text 2.1 I. 2.2 II. 2.3 III. 2.4 IV. 2.5 V. 2.6 VI. 2.7 VII. 2.8 VIII. 2.9 IX. 2.10 X. 2.11 XI. 2.12 XII. 3 Scholarly Interpretations 4 References

Background

Le Monocle de Mon Oncle was first published in Others (1918) (http://www.davidson.edu/academic/english/Little_Magazines/others/synopsis.html) and was then included in Wallace Stevens' collection Harmonium (http://node51.cit.geneseo.edu/WIKKI_TEST/mediawiki/index.php/Harmonium_by_Wallace_Stevens) (1923). It is one of the longer, more philosophical poems written by Stevens and is considered to be autobiographical. In the book Wallace Stevens: Musing the Obscure, Sukenick (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Sukenick) writes that, “The title of the poem may be interpreted as “my uncle’s point of view." It is in French perhaps because of that country’s reputation for erotic enlightenment, but also, certainly, for the sake of the phrase’s comic-elegant sound” (39). It may be notable that Stevens incorporates the French language into canto II (http://node51.cit.geneseo.edu/WIKKI_TEST/mediawiki/index.php/Le_Monocle_de_Mon_Oncle#II.) of this poem. Sukenick also comments on the style of the poem, writing, “The poem is arranged in twelve eleven-line stanzas of iambic pentameter which accommodated variation freely, especially in the subsitutional of an anapest. The most notable thing about the verse is its extravagance of alliteration which is sometimes used structurally, like rhyme” (39). The poem is commonly compared to another work of Stevens' titled 'The Comedian As The Letter "C"'as (http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/5329/) well as William Wordsworth's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wordsworth) 'Ode' (http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww331.html).

Annotated Text

I.

1. "Mother of heaven, regina of the clouds,
2. O sceptre of the sun, crown of the moon,
3. There is not nothing, no, no, never nothing,
4. Like the clashed edges of two words that kill."
5. And so I mocked her in magnificent measure.
6. Or was it that I mocked myself alone?
7. I wish that I might be a thinking stone.
8. The sea of spuming thought foists up again
9. The radiant bubble that she was. And then
10. A deep up-pouring from some saltier well
11. Within me, bursts its watery syllable.

II.

1. A red bird flies across the golden floor.
2. It is a red bird that seeks out his choir
3. Among the choirs of wind and wet and wing.
4. A torrent will fall from him when he finds.
5. Shall I uncrumple this much-crumpled thing?
6. I am a man of fortune greeting heirs;
7. For it has come that thus I greet the spring.
8. These choirs of welcome choir for me farewell.
9. No spring can follow past meridian.
10. Yet you persist with anecdotal bliss
11. To make believe a starry connaissance.

III.

1. Is it for nothing, then, that old Chinese
2. Sat tittivating by their mountain pools
3. Or in the Yangtse studied out their beards?
4. I shall not play the flat historic scale.
5. You know how Utamaro's beauties sought
6. The end of love in their all-speaking braids.
7. You know the mountainous coiffures of Bath.
8. Alas! Have all the barbers lived in vain
9. That not one curl in nature has survived?
10. Why, without pity on these studious ghosts,
11. Do you come dripping in your hair from sleep.

IV.

1. This luscious and impeccable fruit of life
2. Falls, it appears, of its own weight to earth.
3. When you were Eve, its acrid juice was sweet,
4. Untasted, in its heavenly, orchard air.
5. An apple serves as well as any skull
6. To be the book in which to read a round,
7. And is as excellent, in that it is composed
8. Of what, like skulls, comes rotting back to ground.
9. But it excels in this, that as the fruit
10. Of love, it is a book too mad to read
11. Before one merely reads to pass the time.

V.

1. In the high west there burns a furious star.
2. It is for fiery boys that star was set
3. And for sweet-smelling virgins close to them.
4. The measure of the intensity of love
5. Is measure, also, of the verve of earth.
6. For me, the firefly's quick, electric stroke
7. Ticks tediously the time of one more year.
8. And you? Remember how the crickets came
9. Out of their mother grass, like little kin,
10. In the pale nights, when your first imagery
11. Found inklings of your bond to all that dust.

VI.

1. If men at forty will be painting lakes
2. The ephemeral blues must merge for them in one,
3. The basic slate, the universal hue.
4. There is a substance in us that prevails.
5. But in our amours amorists discern
6. Such fluctuations that their scrivening
7. Is breathless to attend each quirky turn.
8. When amorists grow bald, then amours shrink
9. Into the compass and curriculum
10. Of introspective exiles, lecturing.
11. It is a theme for Hyacinth alone.

VII.

1. The mules that angels ride come slowly down
2. The blazing passes, from beyond the sun.
3. Descensions of their tinkling bells arrive.
4. These muleteers are dainty of their way.
5. Meantime, centurions guffaw and beat
6. Their shrilling tankards on the table-boards.
7. This parable, in sense, amounts to this:
8. The honey of heaven may or may not come,
9. But that of earth both comes and goes at once.
10. Suppose these couriers brought amid their train
11. A damsel heightened by eternal bloom.

VIII.

1. Like a dull scholar, I behold, in love,
2. An ancient aspect touching a new mind.
3. It comes, it blooms, it bears its fruit and dies.
4. This trivial trope reveals a way of truth.
5. Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.
6. Two golden gourds distended on our vines,
7. Into the autumn weather, splashed with frost,
8. Distorted by hale fatness, turned grotesque.
9. We hang like warty squashes, streaked and rayed,
10. The laughing sky will see the two of us
11. Washed into rinds by rotting winter winds.

IX.

1. In verses wild with motion, full of din,
2. Loudened by cries, by clashes, quick and sure
3. As the deadly thought of men accomplishing
4. Their curious fates in war, come, celebrate
5. The faith of forty, ward of Cupido.
6. Most venerable heart, the lustiest conceit
7. Is not too lusty for your broadening.
8. I quiz all sounds, all thoughts, all everything
9. For the music and manner of the paladins
10. To make oblation fit. Where shall I find
11. Bravura adequate to this great hymn?

X.

1. The fops of fancy in their poems leave
2. Memorabilia of the mystic spouts,
3. Spontaneously watering their gritty soils.
4. I am a yeoman, as such fellows go.
5. I know no magic trees, no balmy boughs,
6. No silver-ruddy, gold-vermilion fruits.
7. But, after all, I know a tree that bears
8. A semblance to the thing I have in mind.
9. It stands gigantic, with a certain tip
10. To which all birds come sometime in their time.
11. But when they go that tip still tips the tree.

XI.

1. If sex were all, then every trembling hand
2. Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.
3. But note the unconscionable treachery of fate,
4. That makes us weep, laugh, grunt and groan, and shout
5. Doleful heroics, pinching gestures forth
6. From madness or delight, without regard
7. To that first, foremost law. Anguishing hour!
8. Last night, we sat beside a pool of pink,
9. Clippered with lilies scudding the bright chromes,
10. Keen to the point of starlight, while a frog
11. Boomed from his very belly odious chords.

XII.

1. A blue pigeon it is, that circles the blue sky,
2. On sidelong wing, around and round and round.
3. A white pigeon it is, that flutters to the ground,
4. Grown tired of flight. Like a dark rabbi, I
5. Observed, when young, the nature of mankind,
6. In lordly study. Every day, I found
7. Man proved a gobbet in my mincing world.
8. Like a rose rabbi, later, I pursued,
9. And still pursue, the origin and course
10. Of love, but until now I never knew
11. That fluttering things have so distinct a shade.

Scholarly Interpretations

Scholars who have studied the poem “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” seem to have mixed interpretations. Isabel MacCaffrey, in an essay referring to "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle, once said, "One of Stevens's famous adages can take us close to the heart of this great obscure work." "Every poem is a poem within a poem: the poem of the idea within the poem of the words."

The quotations cited below are a few examples from scholars supporting the idea that "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle" is a poem about aging and love.

William Burney writes in his 1968 study Wallace Stevens:

“The conflict between youth and age, in the predicament of middle-aged would-be lovers, has a built in vulgarity about it. The entire situation is, as it were, a reflection in the monocle of a French uncle, unmarried, cynical, and self-consciously a Fool” (54-55).

Wallace Stevens’, “efforts throughout the poem have been to find an image of man heroic enough to include both young and middle-aged love. Now, admitting that no such image is possible, not even a brutally cynical one, he opens himself to a perception of fluttering things: and he finds that, even regarded as fluttering things, the blue pigeon of young love and the white pigeon of middle-aged love have more distinct shades than he had known them to have” (55).

“When vulgar is allowed to let itself go to such an extreme that it becomes its opposite, the burgherly self does likewise. The self-mocking, self-nullifying monocle of "Mon Oncle” breaks in his own piercing hands. The Fool reveals his inherently tragic character” (61).

John J. Enck in his book Wallace Stevens Images and Judgments, gives his interpretations of “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” by writing:

“Through the stirrings of age, it shows that a futile regret may be worn comfortably; as such, it need not apologize for itself. Stevens probably, however, never quite trusted himself on the subject love” (83).

“The assumption that all matters in the major poems of Harmonium must end fervently – as has been shown – causes unnecessary apologies and leads to misunderstanding its principal adornment disastrously” (84).

Ronald Sukenick's book Wallace Stevens: Musing the Obscure, gives his insight on the poem while quoting from some of Stevens' personal correspondence. Some important quotes include:

“ Like 'The Comedian as the Letter C,' this poem proceeds from speculation to speculation on the topic at hand, here love at middle age, but the didactic content, rather than being couched in narrative, occurs in the meditative mode that came to be dominant in Stevens’ longer poems” (38).

“The poem has created an imaginative relation – in Stevens’ term, a “fiction” – between the fact of aging and the psychological necessity of affirming love, that reconciles the two or, again in Stevens’ terms, brings us into "an agreement with reality"” (45).

There are also those who speculate whether the poem is about Stevens’ failed marriage. While he and his wife never separated, there was much stress in their relationship. Here is a link to view two critics who share opposing views on the meaning of Wallace Stevens' poem "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle." [1] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Monocle_de_Mon_Oncle)

References

Bates, Milton J. "Stevens in Love: The Woman Won, the Woman Lost." ELH, 48.1 (Spring 1981): 231-255.

Bloom, Harold. Introduction. “Wallace Stevens: Modern Critical Views." Ed. Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1985. 1-15.

Burney, William. Wallace Stevens. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1968.

Carroll, Joseph. "Wallace Stevens' Supreme Fiction." Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987.

Enck, John J. Wallace Stevens Images and Judgments. USA: Southern Illinois Univeristy Press, 1964.

Goldman, Leila. “Stevens’ ‘Le Monocle de mon oncle”. Explicator 37.1 (1978) : 26-28.

MacCaffrey, Isabel. The Ways of Truth in "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle." New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980.

Rawson, C.J. "Wallace Stevens's 'Le Monocle de mon Oncle'." Studi americani Vol. 13. 1967. All.

Riddel, Joseph N. The Clairvoyant Eye: The Poetry and Poetics of Wallace Stevens. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965.

Stevens, Holly. Letters of Wallace Stevens. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966.

Sukenick, Ronald. Wallace Stevens: Musing the Obscure. New York: New York University Press, 1967.

Vendler, Helen Hennessy. On Extended Wings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969.