Hermitage at the Center

This poem appeared in The Rock (1954).
==Helen Vendler's Reading==
In Last Looks, Last Books, Helen Vendler articulates a concept she calls “binocular vision”—the idea that poets, when near death, must in one poetic moment “do justice to both the looming presence of death and the unabated vitality of spirit” (1).
A poem like “The Hermitage at the Center” tackles one of the problems of style that Vendler associates with binocular vision. At first glance the poem is opague, but Vendler points out that it actually contains two poems: one about death and another about love. These poems have been “interdigitated,” meaning that the beginning 12 lines of “Hermitage” must be read out of order in order to tease out the two poems. (The image on the left contains a helpful key for ascertaining which lines belong to the death poem and which belong to the life poem.) The final three lines of “Hermitage” form a coda where these themes converge.
Here is Stevens’s central aesthetic difficulty, according to Vendler:
As the poet wonders how to render not only his own unintelligible physical tottering, creative depletion, and expected dissolution but also the soft grass, the little ducklings, and the intelligible presence of a reposing Primavera, he feels that both are equally true, and must be simultaneously held in a binocular frame in which neither can obliterate or dominate the other. (4)
Basically, the poem’s style—which initially renders the meaning unintelligible—forces the reader to work out the underlying patterns, uncovering “a fixed pattern of recursive intelligibility when understood” (4). Thus can Stevens navigate between life and death simultaneously.
Vendler, Helen. Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2010. Web. 27 Feb 2014.