‘After the final no comes a yes’: An English major-y romp through Wallace Stevens and the empty tomb in Mark 16:1-8 (1 of 2)

1st of 2 posts — click HERE to see second post

The Empty Tomb, St. Elizabeth‘s Catholic Church, Columbus, Ohio (Wikimedia Commons).

My inner child was an English major, so I was intrigued to find Wallace Stevens quoted in an book by biblical scholar Elaine Pagels, who is more likely to quote obscure third- and fourth-century Christian mystics than 20th-century poets. What’s more! The quote made sense to me, which isn’t always the case with modernist poetry of the last century. It’s from a 1942 poem titled “The Well Dressed Man With a Beard,” and the lines Pagels quoted are:

After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.

Author of several works on the Gnostic gospels of early Christianity and a history of Satan in the Hebrew bible and early Christianity, Pagels quoted Stevens in a book titled Why Religion?: A Personal Story. It’s kind of a hybrid, a complex mixture of autobiography, exegesis and reflection on her scholarly work. I found it fascinating, and my reaction to it was, I think appropriately, complicated.

Much of Pagels’ book centers on the death of her first husband in a hiking accident. Her quotation from Wallace Stevens comes up in the context of a homily she delivered on the anniversary of her husband’s death, as she was just beginning to resume her scholarly work. In the middle of a discussion of the passage in Mark’s gospel in which the three Marys discover the empty tomb on the first Easter Sunday, Pagels says:

[…] For those who find suffering inevitable — in other words, for any of us who can’t dodge and pretend it’s not there — acknowledging what actually happens is necessary, even if it takes decades, as it has for me. How, then, to go on living, without giving in to despair? I recalled lines from Wallace Stevens: “After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends. / No was the night. Yes is this present sun.” Only when I began to awaken in the morning and see the sunlight, grateful for its warmth, could I dive into the secret gospels again. [The italics are Pagels’.]

Her point is that, like Wallace Stevens, “Mark suggests that what looks like total defeat may end in hope.” Let’s say it reached out and grabbed me.

Without going into too much medical detail, I think I know exactly what that feels like when no gives way to yes. In my case, the “final no” came in the form of a cancer diagnosis, chemotherapy and some troubling CT scans; the yes on which “the future world depends” is an encouraging CT scan in February. What comes next, I don’t know, but it gives me hope.

Umpteen ways of looking at a poem

Wallace Stevens is best known for “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” a poem that gives 13 different haiku-like word pictures of the bird without elaboration, leaving the reader to infer what it all might mean. I kinda liked his stuff in grad school, although my interests ran more to Anglo-Saxon poetry and Renaissance drama at the time. At the University of Tennessee Knoxville, we especially liked his “Anecdote of the Jar,” which begins:

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
 And round it was, upon a hill.
 It made the slovenly wilderness
 Surround that hill.

How could we not like that? Even the poem’s conclusion gave bookish English majors at UT-Knoxville something think about:

The jar was gray and bare.
 It did not give of bird or bush,
 Like nothing else in Tennessee.

A jar? In Tennessee? Maybe it’s a comment on art for art’s sake? At least that’s what I made of it at the time. There’s a famous bit of dialog between Stevens and fellow poet Robert Frost:

STEVENS. The trouble with you Robert, is that you write about subjects.

FROST. The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you write about bric-a-brac.

Luckily, I still have my old textboo, A College Book of Modern Verse, edited by James K. Robinson and Walter B. Rideout. In the margin next to “Anecdote of the Jar,” I wrote, “Gives order to slovenly chaos.” Well, duh! It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out. In the margin by “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” I scrawled, “Cf. ‘Anecdote of the Jar’ — metaphor as a way of imposing order.” And, “each is a statement about the way the imagination works.” Bric-a-brac.

(Going back to it after 55 years, I wonder how I missed the implications of a “gray and bare” jar that “did not give of bird or bush, / Like nothing else in Tennessee.” Did he know he was writing bric-a-brac? Is that where art for art’s sake leads you? But that’s another subject for another day.)

I offer these gems, by the way, not as a way of engaging with the poetry but as examples of my initial reaction to Wallace Stevens. When I looked up “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard,” I was pleasantly surprised.

The first thing I noticed on reading it, there was no reference whatsoever to well-dressed men or to beards, either one. Stevens was careful with his choice of words and images, so this couldn’t have been an oversight. But what did he mean by leaving it out?

The part that jumped off the page at me when I was reading Elaine Pagels — “after the final no comes a yes” — was clear enough, at least to me. But what did it mean to Wallace Stevens? I read on, and I came up with further questions.

If the rejected things, the things denied,
Slid over the western cataract, yet one,
One only, one thing that was firm, even
No greater than a cricket’s horn […]

One thing remaining, infallible, would be
Enough. 

What’s going on here? What’s this business about a “western cataract?” Is it blurred vision? A waterfall? A sunset? Or a clever play on words that invokes both images? Me, I’m going with both. Or all three. And what’s this one rejected thing, this thing that didn’t go over the cataract? It’s important. I can see that. But what is it? Stevens goes on:

[…] Ah! douce campagna of that thing!
Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart,
Green in the body, out of a petty phrase,
Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed

So, whatever the one thing is that didn’t go over the cataract, it’s got to be about faith and affirmation. The poem ends on a cryptic note — “It can never be satisfied, the mind, never” — but I’m still back with my affirmations in the “douce campagna.” That phrase is another ringer, by the way. It means gentle country, or sweet country, but it’s not quite French and it’s not quite Italian. It doesn’t quite fit anywhere, but there it is! And the image is comforting. Something else to think about.

In an effort to satisfy my mind about these questions, I got on Google and did a couple of keyword searches. A resource we didn’t have back at UT-Knoxville in the fall quarter of 1969. Amid all the clutter that inevitably turns up on a Google search, two articles were helpful.

One that really spoke to me was by Haj Ross, a linguist of North Texas State University. It’s titled “What doesn’t slide over Wallace Stevens’ western cataract – the shape of meaning,” and I’d describe it as an imaginative effort to derive meaning from the shape of words on a page. Well, sure. If that’s what you want to do, why not? Whatever. But Ross says a couple of things about the meaning of poems in general — and this poem in particular — that resonate with me. One follows right after what I take to be a statement of his hypothesis:

There may be a connection between this ovoid shape [that Ross finds in the poem] and some other part of the poem’s experience. I speak here of “experience,” preferring to leave unmentioned what the poem may be meaning (which is not to say that meaning is not a part of experience). But if we were to ask a child what the meaning of going to the beach was for her, or what the rollercoaster had “meant,” we would get a strange look. Rightly so – poems, and the poets who write them, are aiming for the same category of life that we “have” (a word as flabby as “mean”) when we are in love, or when our friend dies, or we become a parent for the first time.

True to my experience of poetry. And of life and literature in general. Ross spells it out:

There has been entirely too much emphasis on the meaning of literature. Yes, words do mean, but they also sound, and they also bring images sometimes, and associations, and the work of verbal art has the enviable task of getting into the air all of these balls at once, not just the first one. Let us resee meaning as but one of the team of four mustangs pulling swiftly our poetic chariot (Sorry)

To all of this, I say amen. Preach, brother! (I’ll even accept Ross’ apology for the lame metaphor.) This is the way I experience poetry. Not to mention Scots ballads and country music. In fact, it’s the way I experience literature. It’s pretty close, for that matter, to the way I experience scripture.

In all my years of teaching an “intro to lit” module in freshman English, I kept telling the kids to just read the darn poem, stop looking for “The Hidden Meaning” with a capital “T” and a capital “M.” Just enjoy it and then ask yourself, what is it saying to me? What do I get out of it? Don’t try to second-guess your teacher. I know what I think. What do you think about it?

The second article that spoke to me was in the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities. It’s by Margaret Jane Radin, who taught a required first-year law school course in Law, Language and Ethics (LL&E for short) at the University of Southern California. (Just before I started grad school at UT, I had a brief run-in with a law school in the Midwest. If we’d had LL&E in addition to torts and contracts, I might not have dropped out after one month.) Says Radin:

In “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard” we are reminded that the world depends upon our affirmation, our will to believe. Yet we are reminded that the skeptical impulse will always recur. The poem ends, “It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.” Like Descartes, we can deny everything, but like him, we must find something to affirm if we are to continue.” We can remake our world but we must start somewhere; we must take something as infallible, as given.

To oversimplify her argument, Rader sees the poem — and legal ethics — as embodying a tension between skepticism and affirmation. Between the day-to-day of concrete reality in the world as we know it and principles, both legal and ethical. She likes Stevens so much, she quoted him in her last LL&E class of the semester:

I see the beginning and ending of this poem as cyclical: we are pulled toward skepticism, and back again to affirmation. So I choose to use its beginning as my ending, and in my last lecture leave my students with Stevens’s words: “After the final no there comes a yes/And on that yes the future world depends.”

So where does that leave me? I like Margaret Jane Radin’s gloss on the poem, and I like her emphasis on ethics. As an old courthouse beat and legislative reporter, I’ve run into a lot of lawyers who might have benefited from her LL&E classes. And more than a few, it must be added, who could have taught them.

But, like the kids in my own freshman English classes, I have to create my own meaning from my engagement with the text. And that leads me back to my beginning here, to the empty tomb on the first Easter Sunday, to Elaine Pagels and the gospel of Mark.

Next (link HERE): A closer look at the wisdom Elaine Pagels got from the resurrection story in the gospel of Mark, and how Mark — and Wallace Stevens — helped her deal with the grief she experienced after the death of her husband. What do literature — and scripture —have to offer us anyway?

Links and Citations

Elaine Pagels, Why Religion?: A Personal Story (New York: Ecco/HarperCollins, 2018): 175.

Margaret Jane Radin, “‘After The Final No There Comes A Yes’: A Law Teacher’s Report,” Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, 2 (1990), Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository https://openyls.law.yale.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.13051/7420/24_2YaleJL_Human253_1990_.pdf. [2 YJLH 253, 264-65]

Haj Ross, “What doesn’t slide over Wallace Stevens’ western cataract – the shape of meaning,” Haj Ross’s papers on syntax, poetics, and selected short subjects, ed. John M. Lawler, University of Michigan https://public.websites.umich.edu/~jlawler/noslidecorridors.pdf.

Philip Ruge-Jones, “Commentary on Mark 16:1-8,” Working Preacher, Luther Seminary, St. Paul, April 1, 2018 https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/resurrection-of-our-lord-2/commentary-on-mark-161-8-6.

Wallace Stevens, “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard,” rpt. Writer’s Almanac, with Garrison Keillor, Minnesota Public Radio, Dec. 1, 2002 https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2002%252F12%252F01.html.

Header art: Photo by Wikimedia Commons user Nheyob of stained-glass window at St. Elizabeth’s Catholic Church (now part of St. Josephine Bakhita parish) in Columbus, Ohio. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Saint_Elizabeth_Catholic_Church_(Columbus,_Ohio)_-_stained_glass,_The_Empty_Tomb.jpg.

[Uplinked May 12, 2024]