An Interpretation Of Wallace Stevens’ Poem Re-Statement Of Romance

 Re-Statement Of Romance ‬

‪Wallace Stevens ‬

‪The night knows nothing of the chants of night.‬
‪It is what it is as I am what I am:‬
‪And in perceiving this I best perceive myself‬

‪And you. Only we two may interchange‬
‪Each in the other what each has to give.‬
‪Only we two are one, not you and night,‬

‪Nor night and I, but you and I, alone,‬
‪So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,‬
‪So far beyond the casual solitudes,‬

‪That night is only the background of our selves,‬
‪Supremely true each to its separate self,‬
‪In the pale light that each upon the other throws.‬

Me:

‪American legal heavyweights throughout the 20th century reviewed and summarized the law in different areas, Restatement of Contracts, Restatement of Torts, and so on. The idea was to bring the law up to date and in accessible language reformulate the state of it at the time, clarify what the law was.‬

‪Stevens, a practising lawyer, calls his poem a Re-Statement, the dash a variation on the lack of one in the formal titles of the legal Restatements.‬

‪As I understand, his poems’ titles were of the utmost importance to him. The legal Restatements were meant to be clear and seamless, the law in the area restated as a coherent whole. Not so fast this for this Re-Statement: Romance, the mind’s idealization of all things in their harmonious unity, is being re-stated but with seamlessness, clarity and an almost divine unity gone, no longer the single unifying principle which is the divine as immanent. All of this I believe is implicit in the dash separating Re and Statement.‬

‪“Chants of night” suggest more than songs or poems of night. “Chants”suggest something almost mesmeric, something intoned by people who give up individuality to a group chanting or who who give it up individually in reflexively repeating the chant. For Romance, the chant might involve a ritual way an individual gets past himself and perhaps finally transmits himself into the unity of all things. For re-stated Romance, “chants” more suggest mindlessness and the illusion of the loss of self as in Romance before its Re-Statement.‬

‪Night has no cognition. It knows nothing. It just is. “It is what it is.“ And the poet is who he is. But what he is among other things is cognition and perception that mark differences between himself and night. Here are subject and object. In perceiving—his cognition at work, unlike unknowing night—this new Romantic reality, the poet gains his own best self understanding. ‬

‪The enjambment between “myself And you” technically reinforces the idea of the separation between the poet and “you,” the other. But within that separation there seems to exist a kind of spare, severe, limited, dry, prosaic connection between the two, which is between two people, and which is qualitatively different from any relation, such as it may be, between either of them and insensate, inanimate night. “Only” and “interchange” raise my litany of adjectives for the human connection. ‬

‪“Only” and “interchange,” the latter here such a formal unromantic verb, is offset by the preposition “in” in the next line. “In” signifies some ostensible penetration, depth, getting inside the physically separate other, in what each has to give to the other. This seeming exchange while going inside is not illimited: only what each has to give limits what can be given.  The monosyllabic diction in “what each has to give” reinforces the sense of unadorned limit coinciding with the interchange of some innerness:‬

‪“Each in the other what each has to give.”  ‬

‪The sentence ending with “give” also grammatically conveys limit. But against limit, is the seeming paradox of apart but within each other, “Only we two are one.” So here is some Re-Statement of Romance. It seems a spare and singular unity, limited but still within each other, and emphatically negativing any notion of any oneness with night:‬

‪“Only we two are one, not you and night,‬
‪Not night and I, but you and I alone,”‬

‪The repetition of focused singularity in “Only,” “we two,” one,” “alone” makes both the separation and the unity, “we two,” stark and intense. In this Stevens may be thought to intimate Donne’s lovers creating their own world alone together on their bed but without the wit, unrestrained joy and playfulness evident in Donne’s highly clever and imaginative—“metaphysical”—metaphors and images. Here, rather a plain spoken, restrained, even melancholic, intensity predominates. After all, they are,‬

‪“So much alone, so deeply by themselves,‬
‪So far beyond the casual solitudes.”‬

‪It is the depth of this stark, sobering realization of aloneness in the re-stated world of romance that feeds the great emphases, “So much alone,” So far beyond.” It is, one might say, a metaphysical realization of how one is in the world, perhaps ameliorated somewhat only by some getting together within hard limits by two people who find themselves alone with each other. “Casual solitudes” stop short of this realization, don’t have the depth of it.  So, quite literally, these “casual solitudes” are relaxed and unconcerned.  ‬

‪Understanding that night can be no metaphor, symbol, image, objective correlative, or unifying or encompassing ground for the poet and the other—more re-stated romance—it is only “background for our selves.” That is now the supreme truth of its relation to each of them, however each of them with their own individual cognition and perception apprehends it:‬

‪ “Supremely true each to its separate self.” ‬

‪The moon and stars at night may cast a pale light on them but each can do no better than perhaps what the night can palely illumine, which is to say, cast some pale light on the other. Which is a final somber acknowledgment of the limit of what each separate self to the other can provide.‬

‪The final somber acknowledgement is the reason for all my “seems” and “perhaps.”‬

‪That is so because I argue finally that the stark realization of aloneness in the third verse, so far beyond the causal solitudes, comes to prevail over the previous sense of limited oneness, the two getting a little inside the other in their “interchange.” I argue that the final conclusion of the Re-Statement of Romance is but mere pale light, as wan as the night’s, that one self “can upon the other throw.” That’s the best, finally, that two people can do.‬