Men in Black Space

The image of Men in Black Space is addressed most succinctly in Wallace Stevens' poem "Metaphor as Degeneration," published in the Auroras of Autumn collection (1950). In the poem, the reader is introduced to a "man in black space" who "[s]its in nothing that we know, / Brooding sounds of river noises . . ." (4-6). The figure is juxtaposed to a white marble man who longs for immortality and is introduced in the first three lines of the poem:
If there is a man white as marble
Sits in a wood, in the greenest part,
Brooding sounds of the images of death . . .. (1-3) [1]
While the white marble man who hopes to defy death sits in a green natural setting and contemplates the degenerative properties of the physical world, [2] the man in the black space remains "unchanged" (11) as he contemplates and engages with the Pennsylvania tributary Swatara  that "[is] not Swatara. It is being" (16). [1] The dark figure, then, represents   George Santayana's  basic belief that nature and man's consciousness of being interact harmoniously. [3] Moreover, while the physical world may degenerate in a natural flow of events, much like the flow of a body of water, the full acceptance of the water's natural course, not as a representation of the flow of life but as the flow of life itself, feeds the "undulate" (20) [1] imagination and frees man from a preoccupation with death. Significantly, an appreciation of the natural sounds of the river experienced by "[t]he man in the black wood" is in direct contrast to the inability to engage in the natural world for fear of a natural, eventual, and final death experienced by "[t]he marble man [who] remains himself in space" (11, 10). [1] He remains both suspended from engagement in life and marbleized by his fear.
==Notes==
1. Stevens in Kermode and Richardson 381.
2. Blessing 131.
3. George Santayana
==References==
Blessing, Richard Allen. Wallace Stevens' "Whole Harmonium." Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1970. Print.
George Santayana
Stevens, Wallace. "Metaphor as Degeneration." Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank  Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997.