NOTE ON WALLACE STEVENS’ POEM, THE FINAL SOLILOQUY OF THE INTERIOR PARAMOUR

 The Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

Wallace Stevens 

Light the first light of evening, as in a room

In which we rest and, for small reason, think

The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous. 

It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,

Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl

Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth, 

A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.

We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole, 

A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.

We say God and the imagination are one... 

How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind, 

We make a dwelling in the evening air, 

In which being there together is enough.

R:

Not a faith many can live with, or even understand.  Lovely though.  

Many of his poems are concerned with the idea that the worlds we create with our imaginations, the ordinary everyday world, which is lovely and ugly, etc.  good and evil, is one, and science just gives us new powers over it and is itself an achievement of our imaginations.  Rather like Blake's view, but the relaxed atheist one, not Blake's passionate marriage of heaven and hell.  

Me:

I’m curious about this poem. 

Some say it’s about the imagination or imaginative creativity. 

I tried briefly online to check out Stevens’ views on religion but seemed to get conflicting answers such as, not religious as such, lapsed religiosity, poetry or the creative imagination as replacing  diminishing religious belief, or he was religious. I  found—it was only the briefest look—no firm answer. 

I read the poem as deeply religious, showing an interrelation between God and the imagination even while the “poet”, ie, the speaker, is non committal as to the existence of God or if God exists merely because we have created Him. 

I read the poem to mean it doesn’t matter. 

Either way, there is a God, and we reach spiritual height either in virtue of Him and our ability to imagine Him or, differently, in virtue of our ability to imagine Him into existence.

When we reach Him, it is a unifying, peace of mind-making, abiding, sheltering, synthesizing, beautiful, fusing physical and spiritual, necessary and sufficient, all resolving, transcending order of Him correlative with our capacity to imagine him. 

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,

We make a dwelling in the evening air, 

In which being there together is enough.

The pathway of the poem is an “epistemological” and spiritual journey from “for small reason” and “the first light” to “the central mind”, “the highest candle lights in the dark” and to “ In which being there together is enough.”

I reject views of this poem as the imagination, read art, read poetry, taking the place of God in our lives.