‘Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself’

Abstract

‘Not Ideas’ unfolds in and out of everyday conceptions of time. According to normal methods of measuring time, the poem marks the time of the approach of morn, specifically the March morning of the vernal equinox that heralds the first season of the year; since it is the period around sunrise, as an almanac would tell us, the clock has just turned, or is just about to turn, six. Stevens’s poem is as exact as Dante’s ‘elaborately astronomical’ beginning to Canto II of Purgatorio, his ‘first representation of the redeemed life’ (Sinclair 1961: ii. 41): the speaker wakes to the zodiacal constellation of Aries; to the time of the first house, which is also the first stage of the period between death and birth (see VB: 223). ‘Not Ideas’ tells of a time that precedes its telling while occurring hereafter, changing the very language that makes it known: