The Motive for Metaphor

by Wallace Stevens

You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.

In the same way, you were happy in spring,
With the half colors of quarter-things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon--

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed,
Where you yourself were not quite yourself,
And did not want nor have to be,

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,

The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound--
Steel against intimation--the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.

     A week ago I was in the library working on homework for another class and finding myself unfocused and restless I decided that I could at least do something semi productive with my time. I looked up a book on Stevens. I was then overwhelmed by the large amount of titles and texts dedicated to Stevens' work. I wandered over to the PS35 section of shelves and started sifting through the books. The one I landed on was Wallace Stevens Supreme Fiction: New Romanticism by Joseph Carroll. Until this morning I had not looked at it since checking it out. But I should have know that it would address what we talked about on Friday, because Sexson has magical powers.

    After a lovely introduction that seems to cover all of Stevens in as straightforward of a way as is possible; chapter one is titled "The Imagination as Metaphysics":

        "The referent of a supreme fiction is an object

that is no object; it is an illimitable presence that contains

all other objects, including poetic

 representations of it."- Pg 13.

     We are all the fly and the fly is all of us, we are J.Bieber vomit. There is no way to limit where we start and stop, begin and end it all leaks together. How can an object be not an object and still an object? I feel that poetry is one way of defining objects, at least it serves as one way of lending a definition to things. Then in The Motive for Metaphor the third stanza made a little more sense to me. In this circle of trying to define the undefinable, "of things that would never be quite expressed, Where you yourself were not quite yourself, and did not want nor have to be". What makes us ourselves? What makes us different from the fly? I think Stevens is trying to comfort us by saying that its fine because we do "not want nor have to be" anything more than what we are or are trying to be. I feel as though it is starting to make sense in my own head but I don't think I can yet articulate it in a way clear enough for someone else to get it.

    A few weeks ago we head the Earth's song. Yesterday a man jumped from 24miles above the earth, broke the sound barrier and survived.

Wikipedia says this about Metaphysics.....

Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world,^[1] although the term is not easily defined.^[2] Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:

1. What is there?
2. What is it like?

I feel as though we are constantly changing and adding to what there is and what it is like.