Cortege for Rosenbloom is a poem from
Wallace StevensWallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar",...
's first book of poetry,
Harmonium. It was first published in 1921 and is therefore in the public domain in the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
and similar
jurisdictionJurisdiction is the practical authority granted to a formally constituted legal body or to a political leader to deal with and make pronouncements on legal matters and, by implication, to administer justice within a defined area of responsibility...
s.
Cortege for Rosenbloom
Now, the wry Rosenbloom is dead
And his finical carriers tread
On a hundred legs, the tread
Of the dead.
Rosenbloom is dead.
They carry the wizened one
Of the color of horn
To the sullen hill,
Treading a tread
In unison for the dead.
Rosenbloom is dead.
The tread of the carriers does not halt
On the hill, but turns
Up the sky.
They are bearing his body into the sky.
It is the infants of misanthropes
And the infants of nothingness
That tread
The wooden ascents
Of the ascending of the dead.
It is turbans they wear
And boots of fur
As they tread the boards
In a region of frost,
Viewing the frost,
To a chirr of gongs
And a chitter of cries
And the heavy thrum
Of the endless tread
That they tread;
To a jangle of doom
And a jumble of words
Of the intense poem
Of the strictest prose
Of Rosenbloom.
And they bury him there,
Body and soul,
In a place in the sky.
The lamentable tread!
Rosenbloom is dead.
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A letter written by Stevens in 1921 includes a commentary on the poem in which he alludes to one `Miss Fowler' at Tufts College, who wrote a letter to the editor of a collection of poetry that included
Rosenbloom. Her letter left Stevens uncertain whether she was looking for exegesis or an apology for the editor's choice of the poem. He continues:
From time immemorial the philosophers and other scene painters have daubed the sky with dazzle paint. But it all comes down to the proverbial six feet of earth in the end. This is as true of Rosenbloom as of Alcibiades. It cannot be possible that they have never munched this chestnut at Tufts. The ceremonies are amusing. Why not fill the sky with scaffolds and stairs, and go about like genuine realists?
The reader of the poem almost hears the tread of the `finical carriers' of Rosenbloom's body in the slow march of this funeral procession. Although the poem's heavy beats leave no doubt that Stevens's naturalism is being expressed, there is a suggestion of ineffability when the tread of the carriers `turns up the sky'. The label
transcendental naturalism is not ill-suited to characterize the outlook of this and similar poems in Stevens's oeuvre.
The transcendental naturalism of some of
Colin McGinn'sColin McGinn is a British philosopher currently working at the University of Miami. McGinn has also held major teaching positions at Oxford University and Rutgers University. He is best known for his work in the philosophy of mind, though he has written on topics across the breadth of modern...
work, which construes the mind-body connection (the `world knot') as a natural feature of
homo sapiens but `cognitively closed' to our epistemic horizons, is a philosophical analog of this outlook. Stevens comprehends the philosophical impulse to comprehend the transcendent but deems it doomed to fail. We can fill the sky with scaffolds and stairs, but they will not take us where we might want to go. Stevens's so-called `pataphysics' could be viewed as a poetic redirection of the frustrated philosophical desire to know the transcendent nature of things. Compare
Homunculus et la Belle EtoileHomunculus et la Belle Etoile is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1919.The poem pursues a contrast between poeticimagination and philosophical reasoning, the latter understood as...
and
Invective Against Swans"Invective Against Swans" is a poem by Wallace Stevens from his first book of poetry, Harmonium .-Overview:The poem seems to be an insult poem slamming swans, of all things, calling them ganders and...
.
Buttel cites this poem to illustrate the rhythmic effects of Stevens's free verse, comparing and contrasting its effects with
Infanta MarinaInfanta Marina is a poem in Wallace Stevens' Harmonium about a seaside princess. Helen Vendler presents the poem as a "double scherzo" on 'her' in the possessive sense and on 'of' in its partitive and possessive sense....
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