I must admit that my initial reading of Wallace Stevens’s “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman” left me completely baffled. The whole about peristyles and masques beyond the planets…strange. Bawdiness “converted into palms, / Squiggling like saxophones”? Even less sense. It was only after reading a few paragraphs of notes about the poem by Daniel Schwarz (critic and professor at Cornell) that things started to fall into place.
In the poem, Schwarz says, Stevens “proposes that religious fictions have no greater status than fictions of the imagination that include sensuality and play.” Schwarz makes further comments, but even that little bit allowed me to see the poem in an entirely new light (or rather, in any light at all instead of my previous dark).
With this new lens of understanding, the first thing I noticed was what must be a play on words: where he “make[s] a nave” of moral law (l. 2). I can’t imagine that this is anything other than a pun on the old word knave, which the Oxford English dictionary variously defines as a boy of “low condition” or even as “an unprincipled man, given to dishonourable and deceitful practices.” Thus, Stevens (or at least the speaker) takes a shot at religion by identifying the nave—the central approach to the altar of a church—with a contemptible and unprincipled person.
The speaker then equates the conscience with palms (an allusion to Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem) or guitars “hankering for hymns.” In other words, it merely does what it is supposed to and isn’t a dynamic entity; it’s merely a part of humanity.
The next section is difficult, and the best I can make of it (and Schwarz’s hints) is that this projected “masque” is a fantasy realm where “our bawdiness” may be “indulged at last”(ll. 8-10). In this realm, morality is not absolute but is what we make it (for lewdness has been “converted into palms,” earlier equated with the conscience)(l. 11). Here, Christians (presumably identified by the “disaffected flagellants,” probably a reference to the monk-ish or Dimmesdale-ish practice of self-flagellation) may as well give way to the “jovial hullabaloo”(ll. 15,20). This succumbing is, according to Schwarz, “a kind of carnival, a release, a pleasure principle.”
Naturally, the widow and Christians like her will cringe at any such proposal as the one the speaker suggests. But that doesn’t matter, because this fantasy universe of hullabaloo cannot be controlled: “fictive things / wink as they will”(l. 21-22). By the very last sentence, it seems that this fictional kingdom will make itself most known when it is most jarring to the widow or Christian. “The more we would deny that aspect of life,” Schwarz interprets, “the more it asserts itself.” Taken in sum, then, “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman” seems to be a sort of frustrated rant toward legalistic Christianity, and sacrilegious seems the most appropriate word for describing its shock value.
Even given this interpretation, it is difficult to know whether or not Stevens means it. He may genuinely hold these opinions, that humanity is slave to their consciences and that other aspects of our being (sensuality, humor, etc.) should be given equal reign to religion. Or, as just mentioned, he may simply find certain Christians or certain aspects of Christianity frustrating, and could be offering the poem as his own type of release by taking one counter-argument to its extreme, simply to get a rise out of the widow, as it were. Either way, it’s certainly a dense piece worthy of careful study.
As a side note, once I figured it out, I liked it.
Reference:
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/stevens/christian.htm
I too was confused when I read this poem. I re-read it several times, each time hoping I would glean some insight from it, but alas, every time I read it, I was no more aware of what Williams was saying than the last. I appreciate your post in that you did some research behind this poem in order to gain a better understanding of it. This helped me to see a little bit more of what Williams was conveying in this poem.
ReplyDeleteI like your careful attention to each line in here, but you skip real reference to the very first line that announces poetry is the "supreme fiction." Stevens's own poem does the imaginative work of undermining the absolutist claims of religion, but it isn't also asserting that fictions are "bad," exactly. Can poetry save religion from itself?
ReplyDeleteI found this poem very confusing, and your post made it a bit clearer. However, lines 19-20:
ReplyDelete"May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres,"
seem like they could be interpreted either in the way you mentioned, or as an attempt on the part of the "disaffected flagellants" to withhold themselves from hullaballoo by beating that desire out of themselves.
But, as I said, I am confused by this poem, and could be totally wrong.
I'm glad to see I wasn't the only one confused by this poem. I thought it was hard to pick up a central theme throughout, while it is also hard to interpret Stevens' intent and characteristics laid out in it. I like how you added at the end that it is hard to know whether or not he means it. This was the question left in my mind as well.
ReplyDelete