Georgia Review, 30 (1976): 5-31

[Wallace Stevens' poem] "The Rock" contains at least four linguistic "scenes," repertoires of terms adding up to a distinct pattern. The poem is like one of those paintings by Tchelitchew that are simultaneous representations of several different objects, superimposed or interwoven [example], or it is like one of those children's puzzles in which the trick is to see the five monkeys hidden in the tree, or, more grotesquely, the sailboats in the vegetable garden. The poem contains a scene of love, even a love story: the meeting at noon at the edge of the field . . . , an embrace between one desperate clod / And another"; "as a man loves, as he lives in love." The poem presents a geometrical diagram. This diagram is described and analyzed with appropriate mathematical and logical terminology: "absurd," "invention," "assertion," "a theorem proposed," "design," "assumption," "figuration," "predicate," "root," "point A / In a perspective that begins again / At B," "adduce." The poem presents in addition a natural scene, the rock which in the turn of the seasons and in the diurnal warmth of the rising and setting sun is covered with leaves, blossoms, and fruit. Man shares in this natural cycle as he eats of the fruit, or as he becomes himself a natural body rooted in the ground, his eye growing in power like the sprouting eye of a potato: "They bud the whitest eye, the pallidest sprout, / New senses in the engenderings of sense." "The Rock," finally, describes and analyzes itself. It presents a theory of poetry, with an appropriate terminology—"icon," "copy," "figuration," "imagery," and so on.

The question, it would seem, is which of these scenes is the literal subject of the poem, the real base of which the others are illustrative figures. This question is unanswerable. Each scene is both literal and metaphorical, both the ground of the poem and a figure on the ground, both that which the poem is centrally about and a resource of terminology used figuratively to describe something other than itself, in a fathomless mise en abyme. The structure of each scene separately and of all four in their relation is precisely a dramatization, or articulation, or iconic projection of the uncanny relation, neither polar opposition, nor hierarchy, nor genetic filiation, between figurative and literal.