A ' Jar

       Anecdote of the Jar 

 
I placed a jar in Tennessee, 
And round it was, upon a hill. 
It made the slovenly wilderness 
Surround that hill.

 
The wilderness rose up to it, 
And sprawled around, no longer wild. 
The jar was round upon the ground 
And tall and of a port in air.

 
It took dominion every where. 
The jar was gray and bare. 
It did not give of bird or bush, 
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

 

 
This poem by Wallace Stevens has always intrigued me. It's one of his most popular, most quoted, and most discussed poems as well. It's in dozens of high school and college literature anthologies, because of its apparent simplicity, its efficient brevity of assertion.  To begin with, it isn't merely the record of a thing simply found, but an object which the speaker, the poet, has placed into an environment. Every landscape in the history of poetry is--at least to some degree--the classical landscape of the garden, not just any garden, but a man-made garden, and even the original Garden of Eden. 

 
What is so intriguing about this very simple, and seemingly unambitious poem?

 
Well, to begin with, Stevens was a New Englander, who very much enjoyed visiting Florida. Stevens's poetry is filled with a lushness, an ornateness of phrase and image which is like the imaginative plumage of some exotic species of epicurean dandy. Much of his meditative verse is occupied with the opposition between intellectual refinement and sensual indulgence. Nature is a beautiful, but untamed, context, within which the mind--assaulted by sensation, virtually drunk on sights, smells, touches, colors, sounds, sensory perturbations of various kinds--twists and stretches, moans and hums with pleasure, delight, revulsion, in a sort of grand inebriation.
 

But Stevens was a businessman, an executive in a large insurance company, and he had a duty and a role to play in the world. He was no bohemian in his outward existence, so his poetry--and his thinking about art--got compartmentalized into the larger respectable identity he created for himself and his family. Rather like Charles Ives--another cultured New Englander--Stevens harbored a dazzling creative imagination behind his dour upper-middle class exterior. That "slovenly wilderness" is classic Stevens. Who would call the wilderness "slovenly" except a lapsed moralist, who saw in Nature (with a capital N) the wild, untamed, dangerous, seductive sensuality of sin! Or, at least, in aesthetic terms, a place of disorganization, chaos, disorder, confusion, unformed or undisciplined by the hand of man or god. (Science, of course, reveals to us more and more, as time goes by, the inherent, implacable and ruthless efficient order of nature, rather than its randomness, its accidental dissimilarities and inequities. And Stevens is very much concerned with weighing and testing these dichotomies.) 

 

The poem sets up the classical Metaphysical dichotomy between Nature and Man-made Form, and asks us to imagine what the effect the existence of a man-made object might imply within the context of a "wild" landscape. The jar "civilizes" the nature in which it rests. Simply by existing, by maintaining its structural integrity, the jar influences the rest of the universe. The existence of a single created, molded, formed object (which didn't exist before it was made) affects the totality of structure, the philosophical vacuum of the universe--the "natural" non-human set of laws and material of which the "universe" is composed. So the poem is a philosophical proposition in which the introduction of a plain, aesthetically neutral object--"gray and bare"--whose roundness, plain formality of shape, which derives from nothing "in" nature--"giving nothing of bird or bush"--establishes an aesthetic-ethical superiority--a "dominion" taken from nature, separate from it, superior to it, and resistant to incorporation, inclusion, decay, and wildness. Not the physical jar--which, in due course, will crumble and disappear as form--but the idea, the blueprint of its form, the hand of the maker, the mind of the creator. 

 

This notion of an aesthetic purity, an inviolable ideal formality was very much on my mind in my early days as a writer. An early poem of mine from the 1970's, here, sets out an idealized formality which I quite liked at the time:

                     Descartes

The tulips are sublime mechanisms

Pink and yellow wafers on hinges--

 
Nothing that can be thought

Matches the simplicity of their essences

 
Which reproduce themselves

With the subtlest variations

  
Upon an ideal conception

That does not exist

  
Except in

Bluprint.            
 
 
Descartes is considered the "Father of Geometry" (a subject in which I excelled, at least until things got too complex in first year Calculus), and famously coined the phrase "I think; therefore I am." The "Cartesian" notion of an idealized universal structural paradigm has had untold influence on the course of philosophical thinking over the three and a half centuries since Descartes' time, and is still attractive. The implication of his line of thinking, that self-consciousness--accurately described and reflexively confirming--can comprehend the universe, is in large part responsible for freeing human thought from much superstition, and liberating scientific inquiry from confining religious doctrine(s). 

 

This kind of rationalism is very tempting, but it has been brought into serious question by post-Einsteinian physics and cosmology. 

 

So my attempt in the poem was to caricature Cartesian rationality whilst making a beautiful object, whose fragility and uncertain fixity were merely passing indulgences. "Blueprint" was both the colorful "beautiful" object and the metaphor for the rational "plan" from which all living things (or all corporeal existence) derive. A-"religious", but not denying the possibility of an intelligent design, i.e., the poet's!