A review of Wallace Stevens' poem "The Glass of Water"

 

The Glass of Water

  

That the glass would melt in heat,

That the water would freeze in cold,

Shows that this object is merely a state,

One of many, between two poles. So,

In the metaphysical, there are these poles.

 

Here in the centre stands the glass. Light

Is the lion that comes down to drink. There

And in that state, the glass is a pool.

Ruddy are his eyes and ruddy are his claws

When light comes down to wet his frothy jaws

 

And in the water winding weeds move round.

And there and in another state  -  the refractions,

The metaphysica, the  plastic parts of poems

Crash in the mind - But, fat Jocundus, worrying

About what stands here in the centre, not the glass,

 

But in the centre of our lives, this time, this day,

It is a state, this spring among the politicians

Playing cards. In a village of the indigenes,

One would have still to discover. Among the dogs and dung,

One would continue to contend with one’s ideas.

Wallace Stevens, 1942

 

Wallace Stevens’ “The Glass of Water” in Three Logical Modes

     Aristotle called metaphysics as “first philosophy,” the branch of philosophy that deals with first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time, and space. Wallace Stevens in his poem, “The Glass of Water,” explores these concepts in three stages, or, what I call the three “logical modes.” The poem moves from the physical to the imagination and to the actual world of our lives. Through the poem’s structure, aural patterns, and vivid imagery, Stevens seeks to probe the layers of existence. What Stevens calls “states” that things are in is very similar to what the 17th century philosopher Leibniz calls “possible worlds.” Leibniz postulates that there are many possible worlds including this actual one we live in.  Stevens calls them states that exist between poles. With the glass of water perceived as merely a state between two poles, solid and liquid, serves as the basic analogy as the poet moves into other spheres. What stands in the “center (centre),” like the glass of water, is not the whole or end of reality. There are other possible states or worlds.

     Stevens divides his twenty-line poem into four cinquains - with occasional rhyme. The poem follows an accentual  but not a strict metrical pattern, with a didactic tone as sixteen lines end with an accent. Wallace Stevens was the age of sixty-three when he penned this poem in 1942. This would suggest that he had mused the concepts carefully, separating what is “real” from what is “unreal.” That is, what is possible from what is actual. What is possible is what the imagination conceives and what is actual is the village of “dogs and dung” where “one would continue to contend with one’s ideas.”

     The aural pattern of this poem is very interesting. The first two lines both contain three accents divided between anapests and iambs. The first line has two iambs following an anapest while the second line has one iamb following two anapests. These two lines immediately set up the phenomenon of things changing from solid to liquid and from liquid to solid. The rest of the cinquain tell us that the object (the glass of water) fluctuates somewhere between these two poles (liquid and solid). The argument is from the particular to the universal; namely, from glass and water to poles, and what’s more, the fact that things can change so radically from one state to another we have to posit the ideas of poles, as in first-order logic, a “free-variable” proves the general case as the variable is not bounded by a quantifier.

     The second cinquain of this poem challenges our imagination to entertain the imagery of light as a lion and the glass as a pool where the lion comes down to drink. The lion is described as a ruddy creature in his eyes and his claws. This stanza ends with an iambic pentameter for its last line: “When light comes down to wet his (the lion’s) frothy jaws.” Following this the first line of the third stanza has a wonderful alliteration of the “w” sound in “…water winding weeds…” Then something wonderful is stated about the nature of poetry itself in relation to metaphysics. “…the refractions, // the metaphysica, // the plastic parts of poems // Crash in the mind…” The word “refractions” indicates that the light is broken down to its component colors as it travels through two different media (air to water). I would call this some sort of “deconstruction.” This process reveals to us the “technical” parts of poems; that is, how they are constructed.  And this revelation “Crash(es) in the mind,” meaning, rudely wakes us up, as seeing a lion would. But this is a short-sighted attempt to grasp reality, Stevens tells us, because what stands in the center is a temporary state, and not a pole, meaning a final state.

     To summarize so far, we have in stanza one, looked at what is physical, in the sense that our eyes and other sense organs can perceive and these objects have definite properties, but yet, they are just possible states. These days modal logicians speak of possible world semantics where they assume that there are other worlds besides the one we are in. With this semantics, philosophers are able to analyze language in more ways than whether a sentence is true or false. And in computer science, these “states” are steps in a computation, and they can even prove whether a certain computer algorithm will terminate rather than go on computing forever.

    Before we go to analyze the final stanza, it is helpful to look closely at the title of this poem, “The Glass of Water.” We are talking about a definite glass of water by the word “the,” which is a pointer as it were to the physical glass of water, standing on the night dresser or wherever. We are not talking about
“a glass of water,” which will make it indefinite and so in some sense more general, making it a category rather than something with a particular and unique form. That is why Stevens writes in the last two lines

of the third stanza “But fat Jocundus, worrying // About what stands here in the centre, not the glass//.

“Fat Jocundus is Latin for “pleasant”//. Stevens wants to say that this is a short-sighted concern just to apprehend the immediately state or what is physically there, as many philosophers, Schopenhauer, for one, asks us to distinguish “appearance” and “reality.” Stevens then in short asks us to probe, to engage in metaphysical exercise to determine what are first causes.

     As we dealt with title of the poem with definite descriptions, now when we read the last stanza we see many pointer words as in “the centre,” “this time,” “this day,” “this spring,” “the politicians,” etc. These pointer words “the” and “this,” make things in our “locality,” and make them actual in the sense that we share the immediacy with them. And in the actual, things go on in a routine, predictable way, and this is a far cry from the wild imagination that we can perceive light shining on a glass of water as a lion that comes down to a pool to drink, while winding weeds move around in the water. The imagination is that of the metaphysical, something that can exist but whose realm is not accessible to us necessarily.

     We have the politicians playing cards, we have a population of native people (the indigenes) and we have the messiness of life (dogs and dung), and so here in the actual things are as concrete as they can be, but it is somewhat oppressive, we have no comic relief and we need to forever “contend with one’s ideas.” This is to say that one must still exercise one’s imagination, since not doing so will not let us see through the surface machinations of the local politicians. And so Stevens ends the poem in an admonishment.

     Another aspect of this poem is distinguishing the de dicto and de re of a proposition. A proposition is true de dicto because of its form such as in logic A=A or a bachelor is an unmarried man. De re refers to  

Something being true because of its essence or properties. This is the difference between form and content, or what is formally true and substance. The way I understand it is to do a jigsaw puzzle with the front (the picture) turned face down and just fitting the pieces by their shape alone. That’s de dicto. And de re is seeing what one is doing by fitting the jigsaw puzzle by seeing how the picture fits, that is, working with the content.

     There In these twenty lines of the poem, a fascinating discussion about form and content and an interesting discussion possibility and actuality keep the reader probing beneath the words that appear on the page. The ideas are dense and yet it is a fun read. And it makes one think. 

      Koon Woon