[373] The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad

The time of year has grown indifferent.
Mildew of summer and the deepening snow
Are both alike in the routine I know:
I am too dumbly in my being pent.

The wind attendant on the solstices
Blows on the shutters of the metropoles,
Stirring no poet in his sleep, and tolls
The grand ideas of the villages.

The malady of the quotidian . . .
Perhaps if summer ever came to rest
And lengthened, deepened, comforted, caressed
Through days like oceans in obsidian

Horizons, full of night's midsummer blaze;
Perhaps, if winter once could penetrate
Through all its purples to the final slate,
Persisting bleakly in an icy haze;

One might in turn become less diffident,
Out of such mildew plucking neater mould
And spouting new orations of the cold.
One might. One might. But time will not relent.

     -- Wallace Stevens

       (from Harmonium, 1923)

An unusually 'hard' poem - I had to read it thrice just to see what it was
talking about. However, it's a rewarding effort, if only to see the
seemingly unrelated fragments and the roundabout construction finally
crystallise into a coherent whole. Of course, there are other rewards -
images like 'days like oceans in obsidian' and 'night's midsummer blaze',
phrases like 'the malady of the quotidian' spring to eye, and on the whole
the piece has a nice flow to it.

However, none of the above are the reason I ran the poem. Why did I? Well,
how could I *not* run a poem titled 'The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad?' <g>
Truly, one of the nicest titles I've seen, especially given the lack of
connection to the poem.

Glossary:

  pharynx: The cavity, with its enclosing muscles and mucous membrane,
  situated behind and communicating with the nose, mouth, and larynx, and
  continuous below with the oesophagus; forming a passage from the mouth for
  the food and drink, and from the nasal passages for the breath. --OED

So now you know.

Links:

For a biography, see the previous Stevens poem we've run, poem #154

m.