1Wallace Stevens and Paul Valéry are both meditative poets whose critical reputations involve their very cerebral concerns. At the same time that their poetry treats abstract ideas, they often write about the senses and the necessary relationship between sense and thought. It is, in large part, through the senses that we reach the ideas in these poets’ work. My aim in this chapter is to show that the deepest affinity we find in Stevens and Valéry lies in the way they both explore what Stevens calls in “Owl’s Clover” the domain of “the man below” who “Imagines” and discovers what is “true”; that is, the man who through his senses can think “quick / With a logic of transforming certitudes” (CPP, 167). In Valéry’s formulation, this is someone who has discovered that “At the basis of all knowledge are the ‘parameters’ of sensibility”1 [À la base de toute notre connaissance sont les ‘paramètres’ de la sensibilité].2

2My chapter will comprise two parts: the first will address a few of the ways that Stevens and Valéry discuss the relation between the mind and senses in prose. As Proust is such a monumental figure in our thinking about the senses, and seems to stand behind both Stevens’ and Valéry’s thinking about the senses and memory, I will at times gesture to how Proust understands the relation between sense, memory, and thought. In Part II of the chapter, I will look at two Stevens poems, “A Postcard from the Volcano” and “A Dish of Peaches in Russia,” to show how Stevens thinks through the senses, and how the senses can carry us from Proust’s “beyond image or scent” [au-delà de l’image ou de l’odeur]3 to the kinds of ideas Stevens “discerned / In the beat of the blood” (CPP, 168).

I

3At the heart of Stevens’ and Valéry’s respective poetics is their mutual understanding that poems are born of a union between the abstract and sensual components of language. Both insist that poetry arises from the complex relation between the two dimensions of human experience so that the poet conceives of both as intrinsic to the poem. “Poetry is not the same thing as the imagination taken alone,” Stevens proclaims in Adagia, “Nothing is itself taken alone. Things are because of interrelations or interactions” (CPP, 903). Such comments echo Valéry’s more detailed studies of the precise balance between sound and sense that poets must attain in lyric poetry. In perhaps his best-known essay, “Poésie et pensée abstraite” ( “Poetry and Abstract Thought”), Valéry asks us to imagine lyric poetry as the figure of a pendulum that swings from one pole of language to the other—from the sensuous to the abstract and back again—never resting in a fixed position. Valéry’s pendulum puts into continuous motion the “interrelations or interactions” between reason and imagination of which Stevens writes.

4However much Stevens and Valéry achieve, at times, clarity in their prose in considering the bond between the senses and abstract thought, they nevertheless each acknowledge the difficulty of knowing precisely how the senses and reason interact to create poetic truth and of defining with exactness the nature of poetic knowledge. In his essays, Stevens repeatedly stages a kind of rivalry between the two different ways of knowing—rational and imaginative—as if by returning to the properties of these approaches to knowledge, and measuring them in relation to each other, he might be able to get that much closer to his definitional aim. In “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet,” for example, he probes the difference between philosophy as the “official view of being” and poetry as the “unofficial view” (CPP, 667), and asserts that “We must conceive of poetry as at least the equal of philosophy” (CPP, 668). His repetitions of the words “reason” and imagination” are so insistent that rather than elucidating the differences between them, Stevens demonstrates the futility of a logical resolution:

Since we expect rational ideas to satisfy the reason and imaginative ideas to satisfy the imagination, it follows that if we are sceptical of rational ideas it is because they do not satisfy the reason and if we are sceptical of imaginative ideas it is because they do not satisfy the imagination. If a rational idea does not satisfy the imagination, it may, nevertheless, satisfy the reason. If an imaginative idea does not satisfy the reason, we regard the fact as in the nature of things. If an imaginative idea does not satisfy the imagination, our expectation of it is not fulfilled.
CPP, 668

5If Stevens demonstrates that logically examining the relation between reason and imagination does not yield a precise definition of poetic truth— “the area of definition is almost an area of apologetics,” he concludes (CPP, 668)—the effect of his repetitions does indicate what distinguishes poetic from philosophical knowledge. By repeating the words “reason” and “imagination,” Stevens dislocates our search for a fixed rational meaning, and urges us to use our ears; that is, to listen so that we take pleasure in the sounds of the language at the same time as we continue our search for meaning. “The pleasure,” he writes, “is the pleasure of powers that create a truth that cannot be arrived at by the reason alone, a truth that the poet recognizes by sensation” (CPP, 679).

6Almost in anticipation of Stevens’ use of repetition to make his point about the centrality of the senses in poetry, Valéry turns to metaphor to more closely define the nature of poetic thought. It is hard to imagine a more vivid formulation of the bond between the abstract and sensual components of knowledge than Valéry’s poetic pendulum. So continuous is the movement from one dimension of language to the other that as soon as we begin to apprehend the idea or meaning we must turn again to sounds of the words, and listen to their sensuous voicing in order to perceive it. In another remarkable poetic image, Valéry conceives of the poem as a phoenix. So tied are sound and sense in the poem, he writes, that, like a phoenix, “the poem does not die for having lived: it is made expressly for rebirth from its own ashes and to become indefinitely what it has just been” [le poème ne meurt pas pour avoir vécu: il est fait expressément pour renaître de ses cendres et redevenir indéfiniment ce qu’il vient d’être].4

7Valéry’s poetic images in essays—pendulum and phoenix—help us to imagine more fully the workings of poetic thought, and his discussion of the reiterative motion of lyric poetry dovetails with Stevens’ stylistic use of repetition to demonstrate the primacy of the senses in poetry. While Stevens finds himself at an impasse when it comes to defining “poetic knowing” ( “the area of definition is almost an area of apologetics”), and tends to proclaim the senses as paramount in poetry, Valéry presses harder—at least in prose—to account for why such definition is elusive. In large part, he claims, what is so difficult lies in the limitations of reason itself. “Reason,” Valéry writes, “ignores or assimilates the whole person […]. It is only busy with types and systematic comparisons, ideal hierarchies of value, the enumeration of symmetrical hypotheses, and all that which defines it is accomplished in the realm of thought and nowhere else” [La raison ignore ou assimile les personnes […]. Elle est seulement occupée de types et de comparaisons systématiques, de hiérarchies idéales des valeurs, d’énumération d’hypothèses symétriques, et tout ceci, dont la formation la définit, s’accomplit dans la pensée, et non ailleurs].5 “This august Reason” [Cette auguste Raison],6 Valéry would agree with Stevens, satisfies only the reason, which accounts for a partial sense of who we are. Because much of what transpires in the poem includes the material aspects of our experience— “matter, means, the moment itself, and numerous accidents” [la matière, les moyens, le moment même, et une foule d’accidents]7—it is “rationally inconceivable, because all the elements engage in the realm of things, and the poem itself becomes a thing; and what was previously in the realm of thinking becomes sensory or sensible” [rationnellement inconcevable, car elles l’engagent dans le domaine des choses, où il se fait chose; et de pensable, devient sensible].8 The kind of knowledge that poetry comprises, Valéry concludes, is by its very nature indeterminate or, better, enigmatic.

8What is most arresting when we consider Stevens’ and Valéry’s poetics side by side, however, is the way in which Stevens’ brief statements about the relationship between sense and thought, especially in Adagia, touch on and resonate with Valéry’s more elaborate notebook entries, in which he studies very closely the ways in which sensibility, the intellect, and memory interact to produce the transformations that we associate with enigmatic poetic knowledge. In many of his adages, Stevens ponders whether there is a hierarchy or order to our poetic perception. “Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind,” he claims in one, “It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential” (CPP, 904). Though he leaves the “something” undefined, he suggests that it is in the realm of sense where our perceptions become essential. “The feeling or the insight is that which quickens the words,” he writes in another, “not the other way round” (CPP, 910), inviting us to consider that it is the feeling or sense that spurs our thought in poetry. If Stevens tantalizes us to imagine how the poet achieves poetic order or thought, Valéry plunges into methodical study in his notebooks, examining exactly those questions that Stevens raises. There are essentially three ways that his notebook studies might serve as introduction to the Stevens poems we will look at shortly.

9First, in entry after entry, Valéry works toward his understanding—one that Stevens comes to share—that sense precedes and quickens the reason in poetry. It is through our senses, he maintains, that we initially encounter the unknown: “Each sense is a mechanism for the interpretation of unknown matters” [Chaque sens est un appareil d’interprétation de choses inconnues].9 As the senses are the locus of our initial meeting with the unknown, he is also careful to remind us always that they constitute the starting point or beginning of all knowledge. Valéry writes, “All sensations, when they happen in isolation, create a certain disequilibrium—or beginning” [Toute sensation crée, quand elle se produit isolée, un certain déséquilibre – ou commencement].10 Once the senses provoke “disequilibrium,” the intellect steps in: “The first step of the intellect is to re-do as fast as possible what sensibility has just painted or sounded” [La première démarche de l’intellect est de refaire au plus vite ce que la sensibilité vient de peindre, de sonner].11 Valéry suggests, however, that while we use reason in a way that replaces and often nullifies our sense perception (by explaining it), in poetry the process works differently. In the poem, the senses (sound, images, the physical components of poetry) provoke the intelligence (reason or the pursuit of meaning), but rather than settling in the knowledge or explanation that the reason might propose, the process is ongoing; that is, the poem holds the sense and the reason in continuous tension to produce a kind of nascent knowledge. The poem produces a constant back-and-forth movement (as in the poetic pendulum) that carries us to a new threshold of meaning, one that is incipient rather than accomplished: “that which is in the process of being born, though not already born” [ce qui est naissant et non né].12

10Secondly, because Valéry sees the senses as the wellspring of all knowledge—and of every effort towards understanding—he delves into their unique properties and even wishes to discover additional senses so as to grasp the unknown and push the boundaries of what it might be possible for us to know. “Sensibility,” he writes, “is the most important fact of all—it encompasses them all, is omnipresent and all-constitutive. What one calls knowledge is only a complication of this fact” [La sensibilité est le fait le plus important de tous – il les englobe tous, est omniprésent et omni-constituant. Ce qu’on appelle connaissance n’est qu’une complication de ce fait].13 Valéry works methodically in his notebooks to measure one sense in relation to another, as in this entry, in which he compares sound and sight. Such comparative analyses, at times, seem like studies for potential poems:

If I hear a noise, the mind flies to the cause of this noise. But if I see an object—I do not have the same impulse because the sight of an object does not, in general, produce the impression of an energetic transformation, of an event, an incident, an active or acting presence—that hearing imposes.

[Si j’entends un bruit, l’esprit vole à une cause de ce bruit. Mais si je vois un objet – je n’ai pas la même impulsion car la vue d’un objet ne produit pas, en général, l’impression de transformation d’énergie, d’évènement, incident, présence active ou agissante – que l’ouïe impose.]14

11Of all the senses, however, Valéry frequently asserts the power of smell and taste, both of which Stevens and Proust explore for their special evocative qualities. “Odor,” Valéry writes, “is an all-powerful spur to revelation” [L’odeur est un révélateur tout-puissant],15 as if he were commenting in advance upon the power of Proust’s hawthorns and Stevens’ lavender. Although Valéry himself pens many poems with sharp visual images, he nevertheless subordinates sight to smell and taste, celebrating the latter two for their suggestiveness. So intent on awakening the intellectual potential of the senses, Valéry cannot help but frequently record his desire for additional senses: “With one more sense, what more would you know—?” [Avec un sens de plus, que saurais-tu de plus –?],16 he writes in one entry, again linking senses with our capacity for knowledge. In another, he wishes for an infinite number, as if he were anticipating the proliferation of the senses in Stevens’ poems and the knowledge that could result: “It seems as if we have 5 senses. Others count 6 or 7. Let it be N/ infinite” [Il paraît que n [ou] s avons 5 sens. D’autres comptent 6 ou 7. Soit N].17

12 When Valéry imagines additional senses, what is most striking—and this is the third way that his notebooks serve as prelude to Stevens’ “APostcard from the Volcano” and “ADish of Peaches in Russia”—is his treatment of memory as an additional sense—one that brings us to poetic insight. “Sensory events or events pertaining to sensibility,” Valéry writes in one entry, “are comparable to the passage of a wave. / Memory?” [Les évènements sensoriels ou de la sensibilité sont comparables au passage d’une onde. / La mémoire?].18 As waves swell, fall, and mount again, so pass the sensory moments we experience as they rise toward a kind of knowledge, recede, and mount again. To make knowledge—and here we are speaking of poetic knowledge, an enigmatic, inner, or emotional knowledge—we rely on memory, which Valéry describes in a stunning metaphor: “It is like the blood of thought in which sensation is the nourishment” [Elle est comme le sang de la pensée dont la sensation est la nourriture].19 Valéry explains further, like Proust, that “Memory awaits the intervention of the present” [La mémoire attend l’intervention du présent]20 to ignite such knowledge, and records one such moment when the sound of hammering transports him to another time of his life and to the city of his birth:

I hear the sounds of the hammer, this August 3, 1920, that are, for one n^th fraction of a second, the sounds of the hammer which in Sète, about 1880, built the boats for the fair that took place around the 15^th of August.
The shock today strikes on the wood of 40 years ago. This simple restitution seems to tell me that the indiscernible has no date. The clear and pure sensation of alloys is without age. […] The shock has awakened the boats of Sète: the rhythm has acted.

[J’entends des coups de marteau, ce 3 août 1920, qui sont, pendant^un/_n de seconde, les coups de marteau qui à Cette [Sète], vers 1880, bâtissaient les baraques de la foire vers le 15 août.
Le choc d’aujourd’hui frappe sur le bois de 40 ans. Cette restitution naïve semble me dire que l’indiscernable n’a pas de date. La sensation nette et pure d’alliages est sans âge. […] Le choc a éveillé ces baraques de Cette : le rythme a agi.]21

13Valéry’s description of this Proustian moment reads like a prose poem, which typically happens in his notebooks at his most meditative moments. His language is rich in detail with the date and time that the familiar sounds intrude on the present, with the quality of the sounds and the sensory remembrances it awakens. For Valéry, in concert with Proust—and we shall see with Stevens—a pure sensory experience ( “La sensation nette et pure”) in the present inhabits his consciousness in “an n^th fraction of a second” [^un/_n de seconde]; the sound at once ignites memory and lifts him (and us) to a kind of boundless and timeless knowledge.

II

14One of Stevens’ quietest and most moving poems, “A Postcard from the Volcano” addresses time and memory and the question of what lasts, a characteristic Stevensian question, in an unusual way. Stevens voices the poem with a speaker, as Helen Vendler writes, in a “voix d’outre-tombe”22 (or a “voice from beyond the grave”). As if he could speak for the dead as they look upon the living, the speaker meditates on what endures.

15Stevens writes the poem in the first-person plural, as if his speaker were a communal voice for all those who have passed. In the first three stanzas, the speaker ponders what is lost to the children as they unconsciously meet the remains of those who have preceded them. From the poem’s first words, the speaker cuts off any possibility that those who come after us can ever know the life that came before them. The poem unfolds in the calm tones of a speaker who quietly acknowledges the fact of what is unknowable, and these quiet tones persist throughout the poem as the speaker goes on to remember the life “we” lived.

16The speaker reflects on time and the passage from one generation to the next in these stanzas, yet “A Postcard from the Volcano” is not a poem that drifts into an abstract language—and that is what is the most remarkable about it. To meditate on time, Stevens marshals in each of its stanzas the language of the senses, and writes an intensely physical and sensory poem. He considers time first through the language of touch, as the speaker imagines “Children picking up our bones.” As soon as his speaker admits what the children cannot and “Will never know,” he expresses what is lost to them in rich visual language: the speaker recalls the easy motion of the once lively bodies of those who have died “As quick as foxes on the hill.” To the visual image of grapes he adds their seasonal smell (again, the sense Valéry and Proust deem the most powerful), and in his repetitions of “sharp” and “sharper” (both of which appear in the same line) together with the accumulating sibilants in the line— “when the grapes / Made sharp air sharper by their smell”—Stevens heightens that sense of smell, so that we can feel the “being, breathing frost” of those who have come before (CPP, 128).

17Lest we think, however, that with the strong sensory language, the speaker brings back lost time, he reminds us in stanza three, in the same sober tones, that the children will not only be ignorant of previous lives but will also be unable to discern in any way what remains—the “look” or “feel” of the past in the present. If Stevens’ sensory language provides a hope of knowing what is unknowable, his speaker’s statement that they “least will guess that with our bones / We left much more” dispels any such hope. With each repetition of “left” (three times in two lines)— “left much more, left what still is”; “left what we felt // At what we saw” (CPP, 128)—Stevens accentuates the chasm between the dead and the living.

18The speaker pauses from his reflection on the future and past midway through the poem, and Stevens modulates to the present tense to offer a picture of the present (stanzas 3-5). Stevens sets forth a world emptied of its human actors—figures from the past and future—and lays bare a desolate landscape in the next few stanzas. In one sentence (the second of three), at almost exactly the mid-point of the poem, he highlights the bleak physical space with sensory images that differ sharply from those of the speaker’s memory. In contrast to the figures running on the hill, the grapes, and fragrant air, the only images that move are the wind-filled clouds that “blow / Above the shuttered mansion-house” (CPP, 128).

19At the same time, however, that Stevens offers us an abandoned scene to depict the present, it is not altogether void of promise. Although the wind blows through a seemingly deserted world (the “mansion-house” is both a house and our earthly habitation), it is a wind that “Cries out a literate despair” (CPP, 129). Stevens highlights the piercing sound of the wind at the poem’s mid-point, urging us to listen. That the wind expresses a “literate despair” is striking for our study of the relationship between senses, memory, and knowledge. While the speaker makes clear that there is no one to read the wailing of the wind, Stevens indicates that the sound is readable—if only there were someone with a memory to kindle its meaning. We might remember here Valéry’s point that “Memory is something that awaits. […] Memory awaits the intervention of the present” [La mémoire est quelque chose qui attend. […] La mémoire attend l’intervention du présent]23. Stevens’ wind awaits a figure like Proust’s protagonist who detects in the physical world—in “a reflection of the sun on a stone, the scent of a pathway” [un reflet de soleil sur une pierre, l’odeur d’un chemin]24—something to be known. Stevens’ speaker suggests again the hidden promise when he says of the “mansion’s look” that “what we said of it became // A part of what it is...” (CPP, 129, ellipsis in original). We find in the very center of “APostcard from the Volcano,” then, a physical world that beckons us with its possibility though we are keenly aware that it remains hidden in the poem. (Ironically, of course, it is the speaker of the poem—who speaks for the dead—who has ignited the memory in the poem itself.)

20In his final three stanzas, Stevens frames the poem with the same bleak tones with which he begins it. He stunningly blends the desolation of the present with a subtle suggestion of what lies hidden there. The language is marked by despair—those who were “As quick as foxes on the hill” seem to the living like “A spirit storming”; the “mansion-house” is now “A dirty house in a gutted world”—and we find all that was diminished. Yet, at the same time that Stevens’ speaker repeats the basic premise of the poem— “Children” will “never know”—he also suggests the persistence of the past (the “we”) in the present. The speaker sees the children “Still weaving budded aureoles,” with the resonant word “still” providing a sense of the continuity of the speaker’s world into the activity of those he leaves behind. Although the children “never know” that they do, they “Will speak our speech.” Stevens’ rational judgment is unwavering and absolute in the poem from beginning to end— “Children” will “never know”—yet what they say nevertheless bespeaks the promise of discovery. The visual images that mark their speech and with which Stevens closes the poem— “shadows peaked to white,” “the gold of the opulent sun”—indicate that the world the speaker has left—the language that he speaks and all the knowledge that he has—still lies shimmering in the physical world (CPP, 128-129).

21Stevens returns to questions of displacement and remembrance in a poem he writes just a few years later— “A Dish of Peaches in Russia”—and explores how the sensuous world awakens memory, sharply recalling Proust’s Recherche, as Eleanor Cook points out,25 especially the novelist’s treatment of the sense of taste in the famous madeleine scene. The poem also brings to mind Valéry’s theoretical understanding of the relationship among sense, memory, and knowledge. It is as if Stevens were giving poetic life to Valéry’s discussion of how poetry allows us to think with our bodies and physical lives—remember Valéry’s reference to “matter, means, the moment itself, and numerous accidents”—making of the poem a means of self-discovery, for it is the speaker’s tasting the fruit in “A Dish of Peaches” with his “whole body” (CPP, 206) that unleashes a quest for a very particular kind of poetic—or Proustian—knowledge. It is important to note that Stevens calls Proust “a poet” in a letter to José Rodríguez Feo: “It seems like a revelation,” Stevens writes, “but it is quite possible to say that that is exactly what he was and perhaps all that he was” (Letters, 575). His awareness of Proust seems ever-present in the theme and detail of the poem. It is also striking (if less well known) to hear echoes of Valéry’s speculations on sense and knowledge in these verses. Indeed, there is hardly a more fitting preface to “A Dish of Peaches in Russia” than Valéry’s statement that sensibility is “the most important fact of all—it encompasses them all, is omnipresent and omni-constitutive.”

22Stevens opens “ADish of Peaches in Russia” in the voice of a speaker who experiences what Valéry calls a déséquilibre, a feeling of disequilibrium, when he tastes peaches that create a startling effect. In the first stanza, the speaker communicates a sense of the confusion that the taste of the peaches spurs. To convey the speaker’s sense of displacement, Stevens begins the poem in medias res as he tastes the peaches. He starts with a preposition and in the first person— “With my whole body I taste these peaches,” and then we follow how he uses his senses to grasp the power and significance of this simple act. Right from the outset of the poem—with the very taste of the peaches—Stevens immediately draws an equation between the sense of taste and the speaker’s disorientation and need for knowledge. The taste, and then touch and smell, of the fruit is enough to rob the speaker of his identity, and the first couplet ends with a question— “Who speaks?”—that spurs the speaker to probe its effect on him and to look inside himself for the answer (CPP, 206).

23Stevens’ use of the first person, so unusual in his lyrics, and his successive present-tense verbs— “I taste,” “I touch them and smell them,” “I absorb them,” “I see them”—situates the speaker’s sensory experience firmly in time and reinforces the urgency of his search for explanation, so that we follow in sequence the speaker’s experience. So strong is the taste of the peaches, and the bafflement and dislocation that it brings, that it almost seems as if the speaker must repeat “I” to keep his bearings, for in the four stanzas, Stevens repeats “I” four times in rapid succession. In the first four stanzas alone, too, the poet uses every one of the five senses—taste ( “I taste”), touch and smell ( “I touch them and smell them”), sight ( “as a lover sees”), and sound ( “as the black Spaniard plays his guitar”)—to show us the urgency of the speaker’s search and his need for explanation (CPP, 206).

24Importantly, the speaker’s search for his identity does not rest on the surface; rather, Stevens makes clear that his quest for an answer becomes an interior one as the speaker does not simply taste, smell, and touch, but also “absorb [s]” the peaches. Once Stevens poses the question of identity— “Who speaks?”—he moves to the realm of simile. That this poem grows out of his longstanding concern with questions of time, displacement, and memory is clear from his allusion to Joachim Du Bellay’s poem and to his own 1909 translation from the Book of Regrets, for his speaker absorbs the peaches “as the Angevine / Absorbs Anjou” (CPP, 206). Similes of the lover and guitarist, too, hearken back to earlier poems (and presage later ones) in which Stevens longs for the kind of unity that would bring his speaker “home” as the lover in spring, or Spanish guitarist to his native realm. What begins, then, as a simple “taste” provokes a Valéryan disequilibrium that prompts the deepest abstract Stevensian questions of selfhood and place, time and memory.

25As if he were tracing the speaker’s emotional path step by step, Stevens presents the next few stanzas in halting language that is by turns questioning and reflective, exclamatory and quiet. To reinforce both the power of the speaker’s sensory experience and the essential question of identity at the heart of the poem, Stevens repeats the question “Who speaks?” at the start of the fourth stanza. The speaker then tries to use his reason to find an answer that might explain the disorientation he feels. In the way he presents the movement of the speaker’s mind, Stevens shows us exactly the relationship between sense and intelligence that Valéry describes in his notebooks: “The task of our intelligence, of its skeptical purity,” Valéry writes, “is to render relative what the senses and the body present as absolute” [La tâche de l’intelligence, et de sa pureté sceptique, est de rendre relatif ce que le sens et le corps présentent comme absolu].26 So disarming is the taste of the peaches and the displacement it provokes that the speaker struggles to explain it as if he could annul the feeling in the explanation. Approximating in the form of the poem the speaker’s elevated emotional state, Stevens’ lines progress joltingly, and stanza four elides into the next as the speaker strains to identify which of his many selves speaks.

26Stevens reveals, as the poem progresses, that the question the speaker asks— “Who speaks?”—and the answer he seeks are not simple ones. The speaker’s identity is multiform, and in the halting lines, he approximates both the speaker’s heightened emotional state and the various versions of the speaker that might be speaking: “I, / That animal, that Russian, that exile […].” To underline the urgency the speaker feels to explain and to find within himself the authentic self (who speaks!), Stevens uses a correspondingly urgent language— “But it must be […]” (my emphasis). The search, however, is not a linear one and the answer is not easily found. As one sense brings on another and one memory ignites the next, the speaker then hears “The bells of the chapel,” perhaps sounds from the distant past, that “pullulate sounds at / Heart” (CPP, 206). Stevens suggests, then, that the senses proliferate memories: they are multifarious and generative.

27Aware as his speaker becomes of the depth of his own emotional response, Stevens does not turn the poem in an entirely interior or abstract direction. Rather, he keeps the equation between sense and reason in delicate balance, and juxtaposes the speaker’s memories of the world that his senses awaken with the look and feel of the peaches. As if he were charting the speaker’s sudden discovery of the link between past and present in the fruit itself, in line 11 Stevens employs an exclamatory language when the speaker cries out in recognition, “Ah! and red; and they have peach fuzz, ah!” Once his speaker uncovers the memory that the taste of peaches stimulates, Stevens modulates the tone and he voices the lines that follow quietly. The speaker then sets forth the scene that he remembers with calm certitude: “They are full of juice and the skin is soft. // They are full of the colors of my village / And of fair weather, summer, dew, peace.” Stevens’ repetition of “They are full” at the beginning of two successive lines creates a kind of stasis in the poem, as if the speaker may now rest momentarily in the substance of his memory. Even the pauses that punctuate line 14, which one might expect to interrupt the flow of his recollection— “And of fair weather, summer, dew, peace”—serve rather to keep the speaker in the very moment and place that he sees in his mind’s eye (CPP, 206).

28The same quiet tone persists in the final stanzas of the poem and, as the speaker describes “The room” where the peaches are, it is unclear whether the space that he depicts is in the present or past. Stevens voices these stanzas as if the speaker wished simultaneously to maintain himself in two places and in two periods of time. The stanzas elide one into the next as Stevens underscores the timelessness in the very structure of the poem. Though all is peaceful “where they [the peaches] are,” we have no indication of location in place or time. The sentences are simple declarative ones that provide a view that seems outside both realms— “The windows are open. The sunlight fills // The curtains” (CPP, 206). Certainly, Valéry’s words to describe how the sounds of hammer on wood transport him outside of time could well describe the experience of Stevens’ speaker: “This naïve restitution seems to tell me that the indiscernible has no date. The clear and pure sensation is without age.”27

29Stevens suggests, however, how fragile and complex the kind of knowledge is that the senses bring in the poem’s last lines. So intent is his speaker to hold onto the past in the present, and the distant in the near, that he acknowledges that the slightest sound might break or alter the memory: “Even the drifting of the curtains, / Slight as it is, disturbs me.” Stevens gestures, in the end, to the inner knowledge that the speaker finds in the lines that close the poem. Although the speaker has become conscious of the way the peaches summon his memories, it is striking that rather than recording what he learns in positive terms, he uses negative language and notes what he “did not know” (CPP, 206). Rather than reaching a rational explanation for the power of his sense experience, Stevens’ speaker grasps how elusive and “indiscernible” knowledge is when we bring our whole bodies to our search.

30If Stevens does not elaborate on his ideas about sensual knowing as fully as Valéry does in his notebooks, the reverse is the case in his poems, where he untiringly explores the relationship among the senses, reason, and knowledge. In these two poems, he considers memory, to borrow from Valéry’s metaphor, as “the blood of thought in which sensation is the nourishment,”28 bringing many of the French poet’s principles to life. His speakers confront geographical and temporal displacement that, in turn, spurs meditations on the workings of time and memory, which, like a sense, brings a kind of interior knowledge—in Valéry’s words, “indiscernable” and “sans âge.”29 Powerful sensual language marks both poems as Stevens contemplates how we come to know ourselves, and speculates on how and what we know and don’t know in time and place. While “APostcard from the Volcano” and “ADish of Peaches in Russia” express varying thoughts about displacement, regret, and time, Stevens works in each one with an intensely sensory language and marshals all the senses—taste, sound, sight, touch, smell, and even memory—to bridge enigmatically in poetry the very distance in time and place that he contemplates.