I just finished the most nonsense paper of my academic career (I've pasted it below for Keith's benefit) and the whole process made appreciate how much more I enjoy making fun of Alan Keyes than writing papers. Here's the paper, to be followed by another Obscure Object of Derision very shortly.
Into One Thing: Fusion of Self and Imagination in “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”
Throughout the quarter, we've encountered poems about poems, or poems about writing poems (“Blanch McCarthy”, etc.), or poems about how poems should be written (“Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”, etc.), but “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” presents something new and different to all of these-a poem in which its speaker, subject, and reader become poetry. “Final Soliloquy” offers us a very real possibility of escaping to the “world imagined”. We are seduced inward, into our own minds and thoughts, and urged to find a place in the vastly richer universe of poetry.
The word “Paramour” immediately gives the poem an erotic quality, one that is carried through course of the entire poem. After the opening imperative, “Light the first light of evening” the interior paramour beckons us closer. The scene is set in a series of increasingly smaller and more intimate spheres, like this:
The Physical World> The Physical Room> Our minds> A Thought.
First, the world is narrowed down to the physical room occupied by the speaker and her audience, the room “In which we rest”. The scene constricts again to minds of the parties involved, and specifically the shared thought that “The world imagined is the ultimate good.” We are told “in that thought we collect ourselves.” The words “intensest” and “indifferences” complement the poem's “Interior” This inward progression suggests the seductive nature of the paramour, beckoning both the reader and specific audience (if indeed the two are separate things-more on this later) in to her room, and later, her shawl. Here, we are promised “the intensest rendezvous.” Paramour indeed.
However, this is Stevens, so we must be mindful of exactly what we are being seduced into. This “intensest rendezvous” is a thought, which is, strangely, thought by the poem's “we.” Here, “we collect ourselves”-we collect ourselves in a collective thought that the world imagined is the ultimate good. This thought is isolated from its thinkers, who are in turn subsumed by it, and located within it:
Our minds >A Thought > Ourselves
So, in the same sense as we can be drawn into our paramour's boudoir, we can also be lured into a thought. This aspect of the seduction urges a kind of self-erasure, where we “forget each other and ourselves.” First, two must be joined as one.
Our Minds >A Thought > Ourselves> “Ourself”
This occurs both in the literal, physical world as a union of two lovers “Within a single thing, a single shawl/ Wrapped tightly round us” and, within the shared thought “in this thought we collect ourselves…into one thing.”
Then, this unified whole, itself an abstraction of two into one, is further abstracted into one tiny part of a larger imagined world. The we is wrapped not only in the shawl, but also “a warmth,/ A light, a power, the miraculous influenced” and feels “the obscurity of an order, a whole” and above all, “A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.”
Here, the collective self is deemphasized. It is contained “Within its vital boundary, in the mind;” knowledge has arranged this rendezvous, not the poor individuals, who are subject to the mind's will.
A Whole…The Mind > “Ourself”
This “order” or “whole” is the world imagined. As in “Auroras of Autumn,” we become ethereal and diaphanous and abstract, as we “make a dwelling in the evening air.” This is a characterization of how we exist in the world imagined.
The World Imagined > ”Ourself”
This recalls “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm,” in which “The reader became the book.” In both poems, the imaginer becomes part of the imagined world, himself a part of his own imaginative creation (the vital boundary).
What Stevens provides here that he is doesn't in “Quiet” is the possibilities that existing within this imagined world provides: “God and the imagined are one…” In imagining, we are like God, because we create, and we likewise create God by imagining Him. Stevens leaves this line, the only one in the poem terminated with in ellipse, open-ended. The imaginer, say a poet, seems to belong somewhere in this discussion of God and imagination. He is subordinate to God, as he is to imagination, if he does indeed reside in the world imagined, the vital boundary. However, he also has domain over his imagination. He has after all, created this entire scene-the room and seductress don't really exist (at least not physically). The scene is constructed “as in a room,” and the paramour, whoever he or she is, or if he or she is, is never given any sort of identity, and thus might as well be some imaginary interlocutor. Similarly, he dictates the image of God in his own mind.
But it's probably best to think of this poet as neither God nor suppliant, but instead place him within the poem's convergence to “one.” If God and imagination are one, and both exist in and around the poet's mind, we can rewrite the line as something like: “God and imagination are one...so too are the poet and everything he imagines.” If this is the case the mind, the “vital boundary” isn't a boundary at all, but an invitation to a limitless expanse of possibilities, of which the poet is both creator and member. So,
The Poet > The Poet's Mind > EVERYTHING > The Poet
What, then, of all this seduction? Who's seducing whom? It's clear that some “we” has a mind, and its being urged inward toward the world imagined, but who is “we?” It's beautifully ambiguous. It is certain, though, that “we collect ourselves...into one thing.” I'd argue that “we” extends beyond Stevens and his own mind. This is a soliloquy after all, not just a conversation, which suggests a broader audience. And, since God, imagination, and the poet are one thing, can't an imaginative audience also be included? We is and are everyone that partakes in the world imagined.
There are only two seemingly physical objects in the poem: a/the/some light/ candle and a shawl. The light seems to be the same light of inspiration Stevens employs frequently, and the shawl might (or might not) be a piece of paper. We-you, me, Stevens, God, everybody-are driven, seduced to light this light and turn our minds inward. The results are incredible: “How high that highest candle lights the dark.”
We are urged to make a dwelling “Out of this same light, out of the central mind,” where the self and the imagination converge, and we become poetry, simultaneously poet, subject, and audience. “Being there together,” all of us in the world imagined, “is enough” for the paramour, as well as Stevens. If this dwelling in the world imagined is found, there will be no need for more soliloquies from our paramour. This one's final because, for Stevens, it's the best thing there is.
