Mystic Garden

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"Mystic garden" appears in Stevens' poem "A Thought Revolved." The second stanza, titled "Mystic Garden & Middling Beast," is a continuation of Stevens' search for a satisfactory definition of "the idea of man" and her relation to the "idea of god," between which there is a "struggle" in the poet's mind. Here, Stevens creates the poet as a character, "striding" among the facticity of everyday life that is represented as the "space of stone" within which the idea of man must be formed, that is, within the realm of the "real" as base. The "hymns" the poet sings within this boundary are "Happy rather than holy" and are set in opposition to the "constellated rhymes" that celebrate god and man as, respectively, "mystic garden/ And middling beast," an equation that, as the rest of the poem works out, remains insufficient to Stevens' project of discovering an "abstract" idea of man that satisfies our need to replace a lost god. The "mystic garden," then, as "garden of paradise" may be seen as an antiquated illusion that no longer serves in the poet's search for the "Son only of man" who can serve as an "earthly leader."