Pots and Pans: The Poem of Life
We’re talking about pots and pans here, people. And being attentive to these mundane things might help us take part in the poem of life.
That’s the crux of what Wallace Stevens was getting at in his poem “Large Red Man Reading.”
Wallace Stevens was a modernist poet who wrote mainly about abstract expressions of the self with great feeling in the romantic tradition. He left us one of the 20th century’s most celebrated collections of poems. The poem below was included in his 1950 book of poetry The Auroras of Autumn and is a great introduction to his genius. Although Stevens can come across as inscrutable and aloof with his strange vocabulary and third-person, omniscient narration for much of his poetry, “Large Red Man Reading” is maybe the best way to say hello before things get even more dense and complex. In this poem, ghosts return to Earth to listen to a large red man read aloud. Why red? We can only imagine. The ghosts expect the poem to affect them, yet something gets in the way.
Large Red Man Reading
Wallace Stevens
There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases,
As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae.
They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expected more.
There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of life,
Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips among them.
They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality,
That would have wept and been happy, have shivered in the frost
And cried out to feel it again, have run fingers over leaves
And against the most coiled thorn, have seized on what was ugly
And laughed, as he sat there reading, from out of the purple tabulae,
The outlines of being and its expressings, the syllables of its law:
Poesis, poesis, the literal characters, the vatic lines,
Which in those ears and in those thin, those spended hearts,
Took on color, took on shape and the size of things as they are
And spoke the feeling for them, which was what they had lacked.
Dang! The ghosts “would have wept to step barefoot into reality.” Dang, that assonance! It amazes me how Stevens connects tangible things to abstractions with a rhythmic grace that never seems too calculated.
Anyway, there are lots of great things going on in this poem: the long rhythmically interesting lines, the strange mixture of a formal register and a casual register in his voice, the clash of phantoms wishing to experience something tangible and real.
Stevens isn’t describing fantastic vistas like windswept fjords. He isn’t urging you to become inspired by the beauty in nature. Nope. He’s writing about pots and pans. Tulips, even. And he elevates those mundane objects and turns them into something sublime. Into something so real the ghosts would have wept to hear him read it. Yet something steps in the way of their expectations and denies them a world solidly defined with warmth and color.
This poem solidifies the experience of reading (or listening to someone read) as an authentic experience that can give you a greater feeling for things. That can make you more sensitive to the reality conjured by reading aloud. Because, as cheesy as it sounds, listening to someone read aloud–like the large red man–can be magical. You’re offered another world when you read imaginative literature, and–oh my goodness–this poem blows my hair back.
Let’s go back to some key lines: “They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality.” They “would have wept and been happy.” The key word here is would. The ghosts did not do those things. Why does Stevens describe the ghosts’ inability to appreciate poetry being read aloud? Is he saying something about our own ability to appreciate the way poetry moves us?
One reason we read poems is to be granted a reflection of reality that tells us something true about life, something we can’t get perhaps anywhere else. These are high expectations for poetry and art in general: to be nourished by the truth and to hopefully become inspired by it. How would your expectations for a poem change once you found out that it’s about pots and pans? Maybe you’d find it boring.
On the other hand, do you think the ghosts have expectations for poetry similarly to how we have expectations for poetry? You wanna relate to a ghost?
Stevens seems to be saying that the “poem of life” isn’t a poem but our everyday experiences full of mundane objects like pots and pans. These are things we can appreciate once we’re fully conscious of them. (Something the ghosts without senses are not able to do.)
Was Wallace Stevens really talking about pots and pans? Or do you think more of the poem’s meaning lies mainly on the ghosts and the expectations people bring to reading? Let me know what you think of this jewel of a poem by commenting below.
