My reading of Wallace Stevens’ poem:
989. Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit - Wallace Stevens
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If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the rooms and on the stair,
Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato’s ghost
Or Aristotle’s skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.
He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;
As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.
It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.
It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.
If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness,
A vermilioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.
I’m in the midst of trying on a counter reading of it.
My tentative thought is that it is our inextinguishable insistence on there being a god that is the savage spirit, one that in its insistence makes us less and less human, and that to be more human is to be alien, alienated, removed, distant, from that, or any, god, as we locate in ourselves as ourselves in the “mass.”
“god” is “Plato’s ghost,” not Plato, and is “Aristotle’s skeleton,” not Aristotle.
All the imperative language, principally all the “musts” may be thought to speak to this savage insistence.
After all, isn’t the imperfect our paradise, lies in hot words and stubborn sounds? (These lines come from Stevens’ poem, The Poems Of Our Climate, https://genius.com/Wallace-stevens-the-poems-of-our-climate-annotated)
