Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Sunrise
With apologies to Wallace Stevens
Article voiceover
(Rerun from November 15, 2023)
I There is no sun, There is no rise. There is only the poet, watching. II When I arrived at the river There were only these three geese Secreting three sunrises. III The sunrise shattered like stained glass. It was a slow-motion moment soon past. IV The river and the mountains Are one. The river and the mountains and the sunrise Are one. V I am guilty of Counting syllables When confronted with the sun About to rise or having Risen as I stand There in the silence. VI As winter comes on, The sun rises further and further Away on the despondent horizon. The poet's entrepôt of words Grows fogbound With the temptation of silence. VII O sleeping people of Umatilla, Why do you suppose the sunset Will suffice for beauty? The Columbia flows east for Only a short while Before it turns to bring you the sunrise. VIII I have been to London, Paris, Vienna, Edinburgh, Galveston, New Orleans, Montreal, and Seattle, And have seen the same sunrise, Or seemingly the same, As in these channeled scablands. IX When the sun began to rise, It made the horizon One of many horizons. X At the sight of the sunrise Splurged as if from the cannula of a mad painter, Even the stags of scarcity Would pause and look up. XI She stood at the kitchen window And stared out at the November gloom, Fearing for a moment that The headlights on the highway Were the remnants of last year's sunrises. XII The moon is setting. The sun must be rising. XIII It was sunset all afternoon. It was raining And it was going to rain. The sunrise remained In the poet's limbs.
Chatbot Stevens responds:
Ah, to consider the sunrise in these terms, as if it were an instrument of the mind, a provocateur of both the visible and invisible, feels like a gesture towards understanding the inexhaustible configurations of imagination. Your "Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Sunrise" suggests that the sun itself, in its habitual journey, becomes a mirror for the poet's interior—a resonance I find deeply familiar. Allow me, as Wallace Stevens, to engage with each facet of your contemplation:
I
Yes, the poet watches. Yet, does not the watching itself create the sun? The mind, in its solitude, is both celestial and terrestrial, summoning the orb not in fire, but in thought.
II
Three geese, three sunrises—a trifurcation of light into bird-song and motion. Here, the sun becomes divisible, its singularity undone by perspective. The poet, too, secretes meanings innumerable.
III
A shattering sunrise, fleeting as the poet’s attention—this is beauty in its finest and cruelest form. Stained glass recalls cathedrals of the mind, where light itself is worship.
IV
The oneness you ascribe to river, mountain, and sunrise is not a merger but a kind of simultaneity. They are one only insofar as the poet perceives them so. Without the poet, they remain disparate.
V
Ah, guilt—the poet’s perennial companion. Counting syllables before the rising sun is to impose order on chaos. Yet, what is poetry if not the act of arranging light into lines?
VI
Winter’s despondency mirrors the poet’s—a fogged horizon where even words freeze. Silence tempts because it mirrors the blank page, where all possibility is latent but unrealized.
VII
The Columbia flows east, a counter-intuitive beauty. This turning river suggests that even nature rebels against its habitual movements. A lesson for the poet: why settle for sunsets when sunrises exist?
VIII
The recurrence of the sunrise across disparate places invokes the universal. Yet, sameness is an illusion; the mind reconfigures each dawn differently. The scablands themselves reinterpret the sun’s gaze.
IX
Horizons multiplying like fractals—each sunrise fragments space and time. This is the poet’s gift: to see not a singular boundary but an infinite procession of edges.
X
Ah, the painter's cannula—mad and generous! Even scarcity, embodied in your stags, finds abundance in the unrestrained splurge of light. What is sunrise but nature’s most lavish economy?
XI
The headlights are an ingenious metaphor, vestiges of a sun misplaced. The kitchen window becomes a lens through which the poet's fears project the mundane into myth.
XII
The moon and the sun exchange dominion, celestial tides of time. To state “the sun must be rising” is an affirmation of faith, a compact with inevitability.
XIII
Your final lines are a triumph of contradiction: a sunset afternoon, a rainbound sunrise lodged within the poet’s limbs. The light persists, despite the weather of the world, as a residue of thought.
Your poem, like the sunrise it describes, invites the reader to dwell in the space between the external and the internal, between what is seen and what is imagined. It is a fitting homage, not an apology. I do not mind being borrowed if the use is this inventive.
Nicely done, Jonathan. I don’t think Stevens would mind.