A Reading of Wallace Stevens’ Poem A Postcard From the Volcano

 A Postcard from the Volcano

WALLACE STEVENS

Children picking up our bones

Will never know that these were once   

As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes   

Made sharp air sharper by their smell   

These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones   

We left much more, left what still is   

The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow   

Above the shuttered mansion-house,   

Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.

We knew for long the mansion's look   

And what we said of it became

A part of what it is ... Children,   

Still weaving budded aureoles,

Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems   

As if he that lived there left behind   

A spirit storming in blank walls,

A dirty house in a gutted world,

A tatter of shadows peaked to white,   

Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

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The speaker starts by talking about how, by saying, we’re but impermanent, leaving little behind. He sees future children, unaware of the fullness of our lives, will come across only bits of us in our remaining "bones" and "look of things". 

He notes the sad tension between how we actively and fully we once lived—"quick as foxes on the hill," sensitive to the sharp smells of autumn—and the skeletal remaining bits of us.

Seen from another angle, there’s a sad tension between the children getting the world we shaped but being unaware of the fullness and depth of our lives.

After “At what we saw”, the speaker shifts from his sad contemplation of the future and turns his attention to what’s immediately around him, and which grounds his contemplation. 

Doesn’t the imagery of spring clouds blowing over a “shuttered mansion-house”—a complex image of what once grandly domestically was and is now an apparent, cordoned off, useless relic —-replicate these tensions such that what he perceives in what he sees surrounding him is the “windy sky” crying “out a literate despair”? 

The speaker’s taking in of the surroundings becomes his expressed perception of them infused with, informed by, his expressed interpretation or them, namely the poem.

The speaker still in the present begins to iterate, not reiterate, his central theme by dealing with the continuing image of the shuttered  mansion. That it is, in the present, “shuttered” suggests that the speaker’s contemplation of how future children will see remnants of the past has roots in what he and his generation, “we, think of remnants they themselves have encountered. 

So, in some positive contrast to the discontinuity between past and present, there are in fact some continuities. The mansion has become part of “what *we* said of it”. And children to come “Will speak our speech and never know…” Unbeknownst to them, the children will be perpetuating a generation’s long idea or narrative of what the mansion is.

In that continuity within what is discontinuous is the poetic redemption of “A dirty house in a gutted world…” For the “tatter of shadows” are “peaked to white” and “are smeared with  the gold of the opulent sun.” 

The mix of ugliness, “smeared”, with the poetically beautiful, “gold of the opulent sun”, suggests how the creative imagination is part of that continuity, and how the shabby real and opulence of creative imagination are inextricable. 

The mansion is more than just dirtily and shabbily useless even as it is and is shuttered in a “gutted world”. By such imagination it is inspirited, in unknown continuation of what the speaker and his friends, “we, had imagined of it:

“Will say of the mansion that it seems   

As if he that lived there left behind   

A spirit storming in blank walls,”

From literate despair to the opulent sun’s gold is a thematic movement from literate despair to poetic possibility.