Mozart, 1935 - Wallace Stevens #3
There were critics who felt that Wallace Stevens’ work was ‘out of tune’ with the times within which he wrote. There were also critics who felt that poets and artists such as Stevens were selfish to be churning out art while thousands of people suffered through the Great Depression. Mozart, 1935 was Stevens’ response to such critics.
Mozart, 1935
Poet, be seated at the piano.
Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo,
Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic,
Its envious cachinnation.
If they throw stones upon the roof
While you practice arpeggios,
It is because they carry down the stairs
A body in rags.
Be seated at the piano.
That lucid souvenir of the past,
The divertimento;
That airy dream of the future,
The unclouded concerto . . .
The snow is falling.
Strike the piercing chord.
Be thou the voice,
Not you. Be thou, be thou
The voice of angry fear,
The voice of this besieging pain.
Be thou that wintry sound
As of the great wind howling,
By which sorrow is released,
Dismissed, absolved
In a starry placating.
We may return to Mozart.
He was young, and we, we are old.
The snow is falling
And the streets are full of cries.
Be seated, thou.
Early in the poem, Stevens beckons himself to “be seated at the piano” and “play the present.” His ear is tuned to the sounds of the 1930s - the “hoo-hoo-hoo…shoo-shoo-shoo…ric-a-nic” of popular music. In 1935, Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, the backing music for this piece, was performed for the first time. Strongly rooted in the past and present, Gershwin’s piece would soon run into trouble with its representation of race in America.
In Mozart, 1935, Stevens ponders the role of the artist as an individual against the politicized charge of the present. In the poem, the present is seen as something fleeting yet intense. Stones are thrown at his home; death is all around. Wrapped up in the moment, Stevens seems to assert, we lose our place in time, and the history it yields.
But the present must pass, and what is created remains. It is not the second coming of Christ that will comfort and save the masses in this poem; it is Mozart. It is the power of expression and the imagination that can reflect the present and offer absolution and the release of sorrow. We need to save ourselves, by force of the imagination and the transformation of what we experience into something that will survive to relate the experience to humanity as it gets older. Thus, the young Mozart still comforts and offers something to us, grown old and weary from war, economic depression, personal tragedy, and the inevitibility that it will all happen again.
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