Hello and welcome to the Discourse. The Man with The Blue Guitar is a long abstract poem by Wallace Stevens that was published in the year 1937. The poem is divided into 33 sections and while each section can be read as a separate poem, Wallace maintains a consistent theme in all these sections and thus, these sections appear to be parts of a larger plot or greater picture of thoughts. Wallace used Parataxis throughout the poem to juxtapose a guitarist, or a musician, and the poet. The main theme of the poem is the difference between reality and imagination and how reality is dependent on perception. The poem suggests that each perception or experience of reality is unique and insightful. The guitar is used as a metaphor for an instrument of perception used by the musician who does not present the reality as it is but creates a new reality as a perception. The poet stresses that reality is an abstraction with many perspective possibilities.
Structure of The Man With The Blue Guitar:
The poem is divided into 33 short parts of cantos written in couplets. Each canto contains a varied number of couplets, some have five, and some have six or eight. There is no consistent rhyming pattern in the couplets though most of the lines are written in iambic tetrameter with specific use of enjambment. The poem follows Free verse with a few rhyming couplets. Wallace has used Onomatopoeia and Topopoeia to offer a sense of the four beats of a guitar. The poem appears as an improvisation of a musical composition and in each of the 33 cantos, Wallace has used a series of improvisation that offers a sense of jointness to the overall poem as one in which the poet offers different metaphors to explain the metamorphosis of the whole poem in parts. Wallace also used Anaphora, Assonance, Alliteration, Apostrophe, Irony, and Repetition. The poem is written as a dialogue between the man with the blue guitar and his audience, and thus, it continually shifts from third person to first person narrative. The poet is not only compared with a guitarist, but also with a painter or an actor, or any fine artist. He offers a similarity between poetry and painting and suggests that both present many perceptions of reality in place of reality itself.
Summary of The Man With The Blue Guitar:
“The man bent over his guitar, / A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.”
The poem begins with a man starts playing his guitar. It is a green day, which is a metaphor for reality while the guitar is his instrument to express reality with different perceptions, it creates a new reality out of the imagination of the audience. The man is described as a shearsman, that is a person whose occupation is to alter things, change them, or not present them as they are. His audience questions him “You have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they are."
The blue guitar is a metaphor for the instrument that can alter things or present real facts in a multitude of perceptions. The man accepts that his ‘Blue Guitar’ does alter things as they are “changed upon the blue guitar.”
The poet is suggesting that when a musician performs, he doesn’t express reality as it is, rather the reality changes a bit or more and is presented in the perception of the musician. Furthermore, when the audience listens to the music, they perceive the performance according to their own perception or imagination. Despite this difference between the reality and the imagination of the performer and audience, The ‘imagination’ does contain a vital portion of reality and thus, there is a strong similarity between reality and the perception or performance of an artist ( poet, musician, painter, etc.).
Nevertheless, the audience is adamant and insists that the man must play a tune “of things exactly as they are.” Yet, the audience acknowledges that such a tune, which is exactly like reality, is beyond their comprehension because whatever they will listen to, they will perceive it with their own perception, which again will be an amalgamation of reality and imagination. Thus, while the audience demands the guitarist to present reality as it is, they demand “A tune beyond us, yet ourselves”, and “things exactly as they are”. Here is the irony, the audience or the critics realize that they cannot perceive reality sans any bias or perception yet, demand the performer to present his art exactly similar to reality. Thus, the poet exposes the demands of realism on the musician or poet.
In the 2nd canto, the poet says that he cannot present his poem exactly as real as he can't draw a perfect circle. “I cannot bring a world quite round,/Although I patch him as I can./I sing a hero’s head, large eye/And bearded bronze, but not a man”. The poet says that reproducing reality is impossible though he tries his best but falters every time. Every time he performs, the reality is amalgamated with his own perception of it. He says that he can only describe the man with the blue guitar just like he performs a serenade of his music which is almost like the reality but still, is just a serenade, a creation of the guitarist, just like the poem is the creation of the poet. It can be very similar to reality, still, it is imagination but not reality. In the first canto, the audience were examining the guitarist, while in the 2nd canto, the poet himself explains the guitarist in the first person.
From canto 1 to canto 6, Stevens continues to offer similarities between the musician and poets and how the imagination of a poet or musician ‘slightly’ differs from reality, the green world, “things exactly as they are.” The poet or musician offers their own imagination, their own created world, and no matter how diligently they try to paint reality as it is, they are never able to remake the reality perfectly. In the 6th Canto, Stevens introduces Topopoeia and tries to construct an image large enough to enclose its own image. The audience is mingled up with the tune and finds themselves as if they are a part of the tune themselves. “Ourselves in the tune as if in space,
Yet nothing changed, except the place.” However, they find no difference except that they are not in the real world now but in the imaginative world of the guitarist. While contemplating on the guitarist’s imagination, the audience comes to see all the possible perceptions of the performance, yet, they fail to realize the reality which is still “A tune beyond us as we are” because though the critic may dive in the imagination of the performer to see his perceptions, he can merely observe the perceptions, but not the reality.
In the 7th canto, the poet expresses the concerns of the performers (musicians, poets, painters, actors, and others). He says that the performers are like the sun who shares their works.
“It is the sun that shares our works. / The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.”
The sun offers light and heat while the moon produces nothing and hence, offers nothing, just like the sea which offers no warmth. It is a cold winter day during which, even the warmth of the sun is absent and thus, the poet says “The sun no longer shares our works.” Thus, the imagination of the performer is the warmth that keeps mankind moving. However, the moon is good, detached from creation or imagination, it offers no imagination and presents things as they are. The poet says that despite all the demands of realism, the imagination of the poet, musician, painter, or actor is the warmth that keeps the world alive. In absence of the warmth of the sun and the creative, imaginative performers, the earth would be a place of “creeping men.”
The title of the poem suggests that it was inspired by a famous painting by Pablo Picasso titled “The Old Guitarist” which he made in 1903-04. Stevens mentions Picasso in canto 15 which begins as
“Is this picture of Picasso's, this "hoard / Of destructions", a picture of ourselves.” In this canto, Stevens offers similarities between the imaginations of a poet, musician, and painter. Stevens again suggests that though the performer creates an imaginative equivalent of reality, yet, the reader or audience further amalgamates it with his own perception. He asks, “Is my thought a memory, not alive?” Obviously, his poem is perceived by the reader according to their own perceptions. The reader brings life to the poem as they read it.
The poet again says that though the performer tries his best to express reality, it is just a patchwork and can never be “exactly the things they are”. He mentions the case of “Humpty” who sat on the wall and had a great fall, and once fallen, no matter how much patchwork is done, the broken naked egg cannot be the real egg. “Now, an image of our society? /Do I sit, deformed, a naked egg.”
In canto 18, Stevens describes poetry as a dream in which the poet can describe reality according to his own perception and wishes. In this dream, the poet allows “sun’s green”, “cloud’s red”, “earth feeling”, and a “sky that thinks.” However, while the poem is the subject of poetry which is used to describe reality, the process makes the poem alienated from reality. Poems take reality and form it into a sensual reproduction, and then give the representation to readers of the poem.
In canto 26, the poet says that a performer imagines and offers the best of his imagination and that is Utopia. “Sand heaped in the clouds, giant that fought/Against the murderous alphabet:/The swarm of thoughts, the swarm of dreams/Of inaccessible Utopia.” The poet says that to create such a world, the poet must fight against the “murderous alphabet” to create words and this fight is no less gruesome that the fight of Ullysses against the One-eyed giant. The poet says that similar is the task of a musician “A mountainous music always seemed/To be falling and to be passing away”. Despite the strength required to produce such a creative poem or music, it always seems to falter as it fails to express reality in its entirety.
In canto 33, Stevens further explains the faltering nature of creative arts and says that an art form of the past is nothing but the best, finest dream of a generation that has gone by. Each such piece of art, be it a painting, music, or poem, fades away with time because the generation that produces it and that appreciates it also fades away and the new generation demands newer tastes in arts. The fine piece of art is nothing but the perception of the past.
“That’s it, the only dream they knew,/Time in its final block, not time/To come, a wrangling of two dreams”.
However, a poet can dream and express his dream in his poem according to what he sees, observes, and knows. He is not omniscient and cannot have all the possible perceptions. Yet, his piece of art is timeless because the reader analyses his dream according to his own perception and knowledge of his time in the future that the writer himself was unable to perceive. Thus, his performance is “a wrangling of two dreams” because the reader also perceives the piece of art as per his finite perception. The poet has his dream and the reader interprets the dream, but the interpretation will be the reader’s own dream, not the poet’s dream, or even a duplication of reality.
So this is it for today. We will continue to discuss the history of American English literature. Please stay connected with the Discourse. Thanks and Regards!
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