Poet's Choice

Might well have been German or Spanish,

Yet that things go round and again go round

Has rather a classical sound.

The poem makes both more and less sense than a prose discourse might make on subjects Stevens keeps in the air like a master juggler: the circularity of experience, the absence of transcendent meaning, the arbitrariness of death, the mysterious, primitive power of incantation.

But it is the play that makes the poem: not merely the playful joke about Mrs. Anderson's love life in the last stanza, but also the poem's serious play between high and low, sophisticated and naive, reality and talk about reality -- above all, between the cycles of life and our ancient, deep need to make word music about them.

By writing a profound poem that also resembles a playground rhyme, with a ribald joke in it, Stevens comments on the grandiose or pompous nature of formulation. In a way that is characteristic of poetry, he lets us both feel moved by the language and enjoy it as ridiculous. His lines are as gorgeous and fierce and silly as the feathers of his rooster in

Bantams in Pine-Woods

Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan

Of tan with henna hackles, halt!

Damned universal cock, as if the sun

Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail.

Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal.

Your world is you. I am my world.

You ten-foot poet among inchlings. Fat!

Begone! An inchling bristles in these pines,

Bristles, and points their Appalachian tangs,

And fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos.

This is the language of animal pedigrees, of poetry, and of the chants we enjoy and respond to even before we begin thinking about them.