Danusha V. Goska

Literary critic David Keily presents the reader with a "brilliant-edged" analysis of Adam Mickiewicz's "Nad Woda Wielka i Czysta" and Wallace Stevens' "The Poems of Our Climate." (Texts of these two poems can be found at the end of this paper.) Keily is admirably thorough and precise, especially in his technical exploration of the two works. If nothing else, Keily deserves the reader's surprised and delighted applause for providing a model example of the profit to be gained in bridging the gaps that separate the two poems. Yes, as Keily admits, while introducing the obvious objections to such comparison, Adam Mickiewicz's was "a political exile in Switzerland" while Wallace Stevens was a "lawyer in Hartford, Connecticut." Yes, too, the poems reflect "different literary periods, languages, and traditions" (Keily 2). In every respect, Mickiewicz was the epitome of the Romantic poet; Stevens was a modernist. Keily is too circumspect to mention the factor that mitigates against comparing the two poems which is painfully obvious to any Polish American reader: Wallace Stevens is worthy of attention and canonization; Adam Mickiewicz is a writer from "the other Europe." Stevens probably, as Keily guesses, "knew little, if anything, about Polish literature" (2). Keily has demonstrated that bringing these two works together under the same lens, as if the important differences between them were momentarily moot for the literary scholar, can reward both the critic and reader. Deeper understanding can thus be gained of the particular works in question, the universals of the human heart, and the creative demands faced, and the themes treated, by widely divergent authors. It is good to see Keily placing the hand of Mickiewicz into the hand of an acknowledged member of the English-language canon in order to bring the Polish author onto a prestigious literary playing field.

Still, "one desires so much more than that." "Flawed words and stubborn sounds" beat upon me while reading Keily's analysis; he saw much, and, perhaps, with the aid of his vision, I saw more than his analysis entails. This paper will attempt to present and argue for what I saw in Mickiewicz but missed in Keily.

Quick Review of Keily's Main Points

Before presenting my own reflections, I will present a review of Keily's main points. This will refresh the reader in them, and expose whatever I have missed in my reading of the paper.

Keily opens with a quick review of previous critical treatments of "Nad Woda Wielka i Czysta." He focuses on references to the poem as an allegory. Critics have been "delighted and mystified" searching for this allegory's exact interpretive key (1). On page two Keily introduces his approach: he will attempt to gain insight into "Nad Woda" not through the search for the allegorical key, but through comparison with Wallace Stevens' "The Poems of Our Climate." Keily, as mentioned above, admits the obvious objections to his comparison, perhaps unconsciously adopting the language of cultural elitism: why compare, he asks, a poem by Adam Mickiewicz to one written by "one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century;" making no parallel reference to Mickiewicz's acknowledged stature as Poland's greatest poet. Keily uses an admission of the technical differences of the works in question as an entree to a rigorous discussion of the technical aspects of each work (Keily 2-4). Keily notes the "system of repetitions" and exploitation of "clearly realized images" for the making of "metaphysical observations" that typify each (3). Keily notes that the repetition in the Mickiewicz poem is different than that in Stevens. Keily gives his impression of what kind of visual art the poems might best translate into. One image that both poems use is the dominant one of clear water. It is this similarity, this "convergent evolution" that justifies Keily's critical comparison of the two works, and which he hopes to exploit, in order to grain greater insight (4).

Keily then goes on to explore the "metaphorical properties of the image of clear water" (4). Although metaphors are suggestive and multivalent, he tells us, "the physical properties of clear water...limit the range of signification of this metaphor" (4). Clear water's properties can be "divided into qualities associated with purity and qualities associated with light," he tells us (4). He cites the use of water Ð seen as purifying Ð in baptism, and water's capacity to reflect, while simultaneously revealing objects beneath its surface. He cites Monet's exploitation of this property of water in his Giverny paintings (5). Too, water is fluid, it takes on the shape of its container, and it is the source of life (5). It was considered by the ancients to be one of the four essential elements serving to make up all matter (5).

Keily then focuses his attention on "The Poems of Our Climate." Like Genesis, this poem, Keily tells us, begins with "water, light, and earth" (6). Keily, reading what is left out, emphasizes that there is no creator, no actor, and no action in the first two lines. "The reader...becomes the sole source of movement, of creative activity" (6). The light of the room "reflects only itself" (7) Keily states, noting the morphology of "snowy" and "snow" (7). He argues that the cosmos is represented in the poem by the synecdoche of "the day itself" (7). The bowl, then, "becomes a metaphor for a simplified cosmos" (7). Keily then treats "simplicity" to the same analytical focus he trained on "water." To simplify, he tells us, for example, is defined as "'to reduce to basic essentials'" and "'to make more intelligible'" (7). He finds demonstrations of these qualities in Stevens' "still life" (8). Through these demonstrations, the flower arrangement in the poem becomes "a metaphor for a flawless work of art" (8). This perfection becomes "oxymoronic...incomplete, inessential" when juxtaposed with the "anacoluthic jolt" which introduces the "desiring subject" (9). The perfection that this art demands is ultimately unsatisfying and not commensurate with human needs; it is "static and inert" (9). Keily concludes from these observations that "the subtext of 'The Poems of Our Climate' is the fall" (9-10). The title of the poem explains that "'the imperfect is our paradise'" as, "Paradise is conventionally set in the tropics" (10).

Keily goes on to compare the two poems, using water and art as constants. He remarks that "the most fundamental theme of both poems is the ontological opposition of being and becoming" (11). "This theme," he goes on, "emerges in the poets' contrasts between static creation, the completed aesthetic object, and the dynamic creator, the incomplete, desiring subject" (11-12).

Keily discusses one quality of clear water, its ability to reflect (12-13). He enumerates the qualities of reflection: it does not so much reproduce as transform the reflected object; the image of the reflected object is reversed, making the reflection analogous, but not identical, to the original; the original "affects the appearance but not the essence of the reflecting surface"; "the phenomenon of reflection always involves an interplay of constants and variables, of essence and existence" (12-13). Keily goes on to a technical discussion of how "this interplay is reflected in the formal structure of 'Nad Woda'" (13). Through the formal elements Keily discusses, Mickiewicz is seen to "underscore issues of aesthetic essence and existence" (14). "Like Stevens' image of a flower arrangement," the alpine lake of the poem is a metaphor for art (14).

Through polyptonic repetitions of the perfect verb odbic and its imperfect counterpart, odbijac, Mickiewicz moves "from the impersonal to the personal, from the reflecting object to the reflecting subject" (16). In previous critical discussions of this switch, the lake has been interpreted as passive, the poet, more active (16). Keily faults this interpretation, and suggests seeing the relationship between the poet and the lake as metonymic (17). Mickiewicz, like Stevens, is emphasizing his role as a creator (17). Whereas Stevens made reference to Genesis, Mickiewicz alludes to the classical world, referring, as he does, to that world's conception of the basic elements of matter: earth, water, air, and fire (17). The poet is "subordinated" to this natural order (17).

Both poems, Keily states, "conclude in the revelation of tragic laws, of irreconcilable conflicts" (19). "For Mickiewicz, the Romantic, the problem inheres in the conflict between man and nature...He can never be one, however, with what created him or with what he created" (19). Stevens, on the other hand, does not so much point up a problem with creation as with human nature; humans love imperfection (19).

Another Reading

Again, one can't help but admire the rigor and precision of Keily's analysis; a rigor and precision that make his conclusions about what the two poems mean for him carry all the more weight. Even so, poetry plays to "never-resting minds"; perfection prompts "escape" into "flawed words and stubborn sounds." Without assuming myself capable of matching Keily's precision, I shall, in this paper, produce some flawed words and stubborn sounds of my own, on my readings of Mickiewicz and Stevens, primarily the former. These readings will, in some cases, dovetail and/or overlap with Keily's; in other cases my readings might be seen as not contrary, but possibly additional, to Keily's. In some cases we differ.

In the paragraphs that follow, I will

first, present my reading, and
second, attempt to support my interpretation through quotes from the poems, references to similar themes in international folklore and elite art, and,
finally, I will attempt to support my point through references to the lives and thoughts of the poets themselves, as recorded by their critics.

This ordering of supporting evidence is not accidental. I aim to discuss a poem and its affect on me, a reader Ð not the workings of the mind of a man I never met and cannot pretend to fathom. Any attempt at such an analysis would be of limited value. The Mickiewicz dealt with here or in Keily's paper is not a flesh and blood human being of idiosyncratic and impermanent beliefs; we use "Mickiewicz" as a metonym for the poems which confront us, touch us. Too, to the extent that a poet creates impressions in readers that counter what he "really meant to say" he is a failure. I can tell my interlocutor the lines from the poem that lead me to react to it the way I do; I can use folklore and elite art to provide other instances in which other audiences and/or creators of symbols have interpreted symbols in the way I have. Finally, I can see if I find echoes of these impressions in the peripheral writings of the writers I read.

My Reading of The Poems

I see a significant presence of God in "Nad Woda" and no such presence in Stevens, or in Keily's reading of either. I see that God as performing an essential function in the landscape described by Mickiewicz in his poem, and Mickiewicz as dutifully and not unhappily taking up that function.

Mickiewicz describes isolated elements of a natural scene: clouds, lightening, thunder, bedrock. For the first four stanzas, these elements do not interact, nor act; they do not do anything very interesting. They do act in the final four lines, but the dramatic interest and significance of these actions are undermined by the actions' being the result of predictable imperatives. These actions in the last four lines lack the drama of unpredictability or the greater significance of being part of any greater, more complex plot than nature taking its course. These objects cry out for a force that can redeem them, in which they can live and move and have their being. They are portrayed, indeed, as "marne." Simple, quotidian, even plodding words and poetic forms are used to picture this scene. As Keily points out, Mickiewicz uses paratactic polysyndeton: "And...and...and." Joined in this way, weighted equally like equivalent beads on a string, the elements of the scene are robbed of any poetic drama that giving one or the other greater or less weight, the placing of one in a spotlight or the other in shadow, would provide. Linked only by "and," which communicates no intriguing relationship, the isolation of each element is stressed.

A writer of Mickiewicz's stature could animate objects with a significant life and warmth; was it not he who turned the humble potato into an epic hero? Mickiewicz wrote an epic poem in which angels debate the ongoing discovery of America. Some argue against the European invasion, citing the terrible suffering of the aboriginal population the invasion would cause. Others argue for it, holding up the potato -- an American product. With the introduction of the potato, starving peasants around the world will be able to be secure of producing enough calories for their subsistence for the first time. With such evidence, the vote is swayed in favor of the admittedly otherwise tragic invasion. No such infusion of objects with their latent or perceived character occurs in "Nad Woda." The feeling of banality and triviality that Mickiewicz communicates here is meant to comment on the objects so described.

In the first two verses, however, something significant is going on, something mysterious and profound, opposed to the relatively lifeless, predictable clouds and roaring thunder. A "great" and "clear" body of water is reflecting everything's "form." Elements of the natural scene change and disappear Ð the ambitious voice of the thunder, for example Ð while the water, capable of embracing and encompassing all the changes that occur in the scene, is not changed. It stands, great and pure, in spite of its embrace of the world it reflects.

Here are qualities associated with God. God can embrace all of creation. He sees all, knows all, and does not shrink from contact with any object or quality, no matter how humble. God's witnessing and embrace of all creation lends the objects in that creation a depth and meaning they would otherwise lack in their isolated, predictable, quotidian progression from banality to banality. God's greatness is such that he remains unchanged by such an embrace. He stands, great and pure.

After the break made by couplet lines nine and ten in the previous verses, which, like heaven, lie above, Mickiewicz dutifully takes up the cloak of artist, God's parallel on earth, in lines which, like earth, lie below. Like the God symbolized by great, pure, supernaturally unchanging, all-embracing water, Mickiewicz faithfully reflects all. "Faithfully," of course, is a word associated with an approach to religious practice and attitudes. This is as it should be. Mickiewicz is not playing the role of Faust here; he reports no call to usurp God, merely to take his own predestined place in the grand scheme of things. By doing so he achieves his own, appropriate, union with God, with the absolute. Words and attitudes of faith are buttressed with words and attitudes of duty: stones must stand and menace; clouds must transport rain, lightening must sound and die, Mickiewicz, the poet, must flow. Here he has broken the skin separating the gnomic domain to which his banal objects are relegated, and dips his body into the liminal world of the great, pure, reflecting water, the great ground of creation Ð God Ð the faithful reflection and recording of all, which infuses all with a meaning and a drama it would not otherwise have.

An Attempt to Find Support for this Reading

In Treatments of the Mirror Motif

Exploration of the mirror as motif yields intriguing parallels in the way mirroring surfaces have been regarded and my interpretation of the mirroring water in "Nad Woda." Mirrors as motifs in folklore are powerful; they are among the very few folkloric items which have a "worldwide provenience" (sic) (Fernandez 31); Litvinskii writes, "The optical phenomenon of reflection Ð the exact duplication in a mirror of objects of the external world Ð could be interpreted by primitive and ancient man only within the boundaries of religious concepts" (Eliade ed. 557). Crawley, reporting on traditional associations with mirrors, reports: "The property of reflecting images naturally inspires wonder, and thus tends to produce superstitious beliefs and practices" (Hastings, ed. 696). In elite art, "The optical properties of the mirror are so important and impressive that all civilized thought is permeated by ideas derived thence" (Hastings, ed. 697). Modern, elite theorists have fallen under the spell of mirrors, placing reflection and mirroring surfaces as central to their theories (Babcock 1980, 1-2).

Mirrors have been seen to capture/encompass the soul, essence, or consciousness of that which they reflect. Some peoples, Frazer tells us, believe a man's soul to be in "his reflection in water or a mirror" (Frazer, 92). Hinduism made use of mirror analogies to discuss the relation between soul, self, and consciousness (Hastings, ed. 696). Fernandez, basing his conclusion on a cross-cultural discussion of the cultural value attributed to mirroring surfaces, states: "it is the mind in the mirror" (Fernandez 36) From Fiji, the Andaman islands, New Guinea, New Caledonia, and Guyana come records of men regarding their reflections in mirrors or water as their souls (Hastings, ed. 696). "In Judaism," Litvinskii writes, "the image in the mirror was viewed as a symbol of the essence of the original. For the ancient Hindus, a reflection in water or in a mirror was the soul of a man" (Eliade ed. 557). Sarmatians and Siberian tribes placed broken mirrors in graves, "for the soul of the dead person was embodied in the mirror, and the breaking of the mirror symbolically reflected the death of the person" (Eliade ed. 557). The Fang of Africa "have long believed that the essential self is seen in water reflection...particularly in still pools" (Fernandez 30). Sometimes the essence reflected in the mirroring surface is one unsullied by the vicissitudes of quotidian life: "the Japanese...use mirrors to recapture the purity of the earliest 'side of themselves'...a purity unhampered by the 'observing self'" (Fernandez 33).

Mirroring surfaces are not limited to passive reflection. There are hidden powers in this act of reflection, too Ð powers to discriminate among and change what is reflected. For example, in the vampire legend, mirrors decline to reflect the image of these soulless creatures. The mirror's supernatural powers, says Frazer, explain "the widespread custom of covering up mirrors or turning them to the wall after a death has taken place in the house. It is feared that the soul, projected out of the person in the shape of his reflection in the mirror, may be carried off by the ghost of the departed" (Frazer, 94-95). After a death in some parts of Germany and Belgium, "not only the mirrors but everything that shines or glitters (windows, clocks, etc.) is covered up, doubtless because they might reflect a person's image" (Frazer, 95). Frazer records variants of this same custom in the British Isles, Madagascar, the Crimea, and Bombay. Broken mirrors placed in graves were meant to "kill" objects placed in the grave; thus killed, these objects could then follow the dead to the other world (Eliade ed. 557). Galelareese adolescents were forbidden from looking at themselves in a mirror; "they say the mirror takes away their bloom and leaves them ugly" (Frazer, 93). Frazer goes on to record that even crocodiles can make use of mirrored reflections; Basutos say crocodiles can kill a man by dragging his reflection under water (Frazer, 93). Zulus turned mirrors to the wall during lightening storms; reflected lightening had special dangers. They and other Nguni believed that "a mirror properly adjusted to reflect the heavens could kill enemy warriors" (Fernandez 30).

Mirrors can also alter what they reflect in positive ways. In modern India, in Iran, Tajikistan, and elsewhere, "the religious ritual of looking in a mirror strengthens the bond between the bridegroom and the bride" (Eliade ed. 558). Mirrors may grant wishes or restore the youth of those gazing into them (Eliade ed. 559). One of the positive transformations mirroring surfaces can work, and another divine boon associated with mirrors, is healing. "A vast range of rituals and beliefs connect the mirror with shamanism...Buriat shamans explain that mirrors came down from heaven as gifts from the heavenly beings, and mirrors and their fragments have been used by shamans as a means for healing" (Eliade 559). In Auvergn, a cow's udders were healed through mirror magic, when "even holy water had been tried in vain" (Frazer, 93). To heal means to make whole. It follows that the mirror, reflecting, as it does, the essence or soul, could reunite the corporeal form with its essence, thereby healing it.

Again, like God, mirrors have special powers in the face of evil forces. Aztecs kept sorcerers away through mirror magic (Frazer, 93). Mirrors set in rings have been used to repel demons (Hastings, ed. 697). In China

because it was thought that the mirror protected one from evil and brought happiness, mirrors were worn on the bosom by persons ranging from the warrior to the bride. In the Han period (206 BCE - 220 CE) a mirror was placed on the breast of a corpse; it was believed that this would protect the heart and drive the evil spirit away from the corpse (Eliade ed. 558).

We can see from these examples that, traditionally, mirroring surfaces have been seen as performing some of the functions I attribute to Mickiewicz's great, clear water. They provide visual proof of essence, of soul, of some transcendent, enduring, connected aspect of an object beyond its banal, temporal and isolated corporeality. This endows the mirroring surface with a supernatural power to transform that which it reflects. One of the transformations possible is healing. The mirroring surface, by witnessing to the existence of soul, of essence, can join the reflected object with its most important aspect and, thereby, heal.

Mirroring surfaces have been attributed with many other properties which are also associated with God. Mirrors have been seen as omniscient, or at least as having access to knowledge which normal mortals lack. To acquire this knowledge, the mortal must approach the mirror with the correct magic, perhaps a spell such as the famous: "Mirror, mirror, on the wall..." "Divination by means of a reflecting surface is an ancient and world-wide practice" Crawley reports (Hastings, ed. 697). For this, men have used mirrors, pools of ink, bodies of water, and crystal balls (Hastings, ed. 697). Magic mirrors may foretell the future, show far off places, answer questions, help find treasures, etc. (Eliade ed. 559). In German and Slavic lands, a mirror might be used to discover the face of one's future spouse (Hastings, ed. 697). Mirrors are used for divination along the west coast of Africa (Fernandez 29); still pools of water were used by Pygmies and Zulu, "who regarded any reflecting surface with respect if not with awe" (Fernandez 30) Shamans attempt to gain omniscience from them (Eliade ed. 559). "In cabalistic thought, there are the seven mirrors for each day of the week, dedicated to each of the seven planets. Having different reflecting surfaces, they are consulted for different purposes. Tuesday's Mars mirror of iron is consulted as to "imminent enmities and lawsuits" (Fernandez 31). Even God himself may consult a mirror, in order to weigh souls on judgment day. The mirror "will faithfully reflect the virtues or vices of the spectator's life" (Fernandez 31; emphasis mine). Sometimes mirrors become active and announce the truth to humans who have not solicited the mirror's aid. In Armenia and Japan, mirrors grow "dark as an individual's life prospects dim" (Fernandez 31).

In an ancient Chinese legend...a loving husband and wife once had to part. They broke a mirror and each took a half as a pledge of fidelity. When, after a time, the wife deceived her husband, her part of the mirror turned into a magpie, which flew to the husband and told him of his wife's adultery (Eliade ed. 557-558).

The mirror's ability to provide knowledge unavailable to the mortal is often part of the mirror's liminal identity. The mirroring surface is seen as a gateway to another, supernatural, world. "A savage who had been made to look into a mirror exclaimed, 'I gaze into the world of the spirits!'" wrote one psychologist, summing up a legend popular among the many anthropologists who first brought high quality glass mirrors to primitive groups (Hastings, ed. 696; Fernandez, 33). Mirroring surfaces were often assigned the role of limin: "Pausanias describes a temple near Megalopolis, within which was a mirror fixed on the wall. 'Any one who looks into this mirror will see himself either very dimly or not at all, but the images of the gods and the throne are clearly visible'" (Hastings, ed. 697). At Demeter's spring, one reflecting surface was used within another for both divination and healing in this world and the next: a mirror was tied to a cord and let down into a spring. When looking into this mirror, one could see the living or the dead (Hastings, ed. 697). In Africa it was believed "that the dead dwelt at the bottom of streams, lakes, and pools Ð behind or beneath reflective surfaces, as it were" (Fernandez 30). Too, mirrors provided entry into "the world of the imagination" (Fernandez 33). Mirroring surfaces, like the God whose presence I posit in the symbol of the great, clear water of "Nad Woda," can exist in quotidian reality while providing a limin into a different, supernatural gnomic realm.

Mirroring surfaces have been associated with other properties of the divine, and/or with the sources of life which are themselves often apotheosized: the sun and water. "In Lettish folklore there is a saying that 'When the sun rises it shines like a mirror.' In Tajik folklore, the mirror is associated with water: a stream of water originates from it, and whenever a hero casts down a mirror, at that place lakes, rivers, and ponds are formed'" (Eliade ed. 558). Pygmies consecrate their mirrors to the sun, which sees everything, "some of whose all-seeing light is confined in the mirror for future use" (Fernandez 30).

Finally, mirroring surfaces have often been explicitly associated or even identified with the divine. In these instances, the divinity in the mirror is often associated with the divine qualities listed above, i.e., omniscience, the reflecting of souls, healer, limin to the other world, etc. Nowhere is this more explicit than in Japan. According to legend, Amaterasu, the sun goddess and highest divinity, went into hiding. The other gods concocted a scheme in order to right this disaster. A mirror was fashioned and Amaterasu was called out of her hermitage for a few moments. We have here, she was told, a star "more illustrious than thine divine Augustness." When she saw herself reflected in the mirror, she ended her retreat. Now this greatest of Shinto divinities is kept stored, as it were, in a silk encased mirror, in which her essence was reflected, and thereby, to some degree, captured. This mirror "represents the sun goddess herself and therefore forms the very centre of the national worship" (Hastings, ed. 802-803). In an echo of the famous line in Genesis about God creating man in his image, Shintos say that the mirrors to which they are required to bow "in an act of self-examination" typify "the human heart, which in its purity reflects the image of the Deity" (Hastings, ed. 147).

In other traditions, too, mirrors are associated with God. In Africa the Cabindas "bind a mirror round the image of their household divinities for purposes of divination" (Macculloch, 123). In the Upanishads reflected images are the self, are Brahman, that which is one with God (Hastings, ed. 696). Incas kindled their sacred fire on the summer solstice with a mirror (Hastings, ed. 697). Kubaba, a goddess of ancient Syria (c. 900 BCE) was depicted with a mirror; Sarmatians buried priestesses with mirrors (Eliade ed. 558). As previously mentioned, Buriat shamans say that mirrors were brought from heaven by heavenly beings. Rumi, the great Sufi Muslim poet and mystic, advised the use of mirrors in efforts to tap divine wisdom. Ibn al-'Arabi, another Muslim mystic, stated: "'God becomes the mirror in which the spiritual man contemplates his own reality, and man in turn becomes the mirror in which God contemplates his names and qualities" (Eliade ed. 559). These last two authors' works clearly parallel my interpretation of Mickiewicz. The great, clear water is, as Rumi says, a reflection and possible entry to divine wisdom Ð the wisdom of the essences of things. Mickiewicz contemplates his reality and that of his surroundings in the great, clear water, and then, taking up the reflecting role of the poet, becomes a mirror in which God can contemplate his names and qualities, which, are, in this poem, the rocks, clouds, water, and self which Mickiewicz has, as a dutiful poet, entering the mirroring surface of God, recorded in his art.

It must be stressed again here that my reading of this poem is symbolic; I do not believe that Mickiewicz, a "devout Catholic" (Weintraub 270). or the Muslim poets just mentioned, for whom, of course, idolatry or pantheism would constitute sin, believed that mirrors or water were God, any more than Mickiewicz believed that if one lifted the shirts of the Paris workers one could see the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove on Frenchmen's chests (Milosz 231). (Mickiewicz, in St. Peter's, grabbed the pope's sleeve and shouted: "The Holy Spirit dwells under the shirts of the Paris workers!") Words that describe a material reality are being used to talk about spiritual processes and functions.

The divinities most explicitly associated with mirrors that I have come across in my research have been female. In fact, mirrors have often been associated with female mortals. In Egypt, which possibly first manufactured mirrors, mirrors were used "in ladies' toilettes" (Hastings, ed. 695). "Hebrews were familiar with them at an early period for women's use" (Hastings, ed. 696). Centuries later, Jewish rabbis forbade men to use mirrors, as doing so was considered "effeminate" (Hastings, ed. 696). In Indian marriage rituals, a mirror is placed into the left hand of the bride (Hastings, ed. 696). This association of mirroring surfaces with females may be part of the reason why Narcissus was so severely punished for gazing into his own reflection, and liking the experience. In the heavenly realms, Aphrodite was one of several divine beings sometimes depicted holding a mirror (Hastings, ed. 696; Eliade, ed. 558). In Catholic tradition, Mary has been called the "speculum sine macula," the mirror without blemish (Fernandez 36).

The obvious conclusion would be that mirrors are associated with women because of the association of both women and mirrors with vanity. Some negative traditions would imply that this is so, some of the time; "in English, French, Welsh, and Italian folktales, the devil appears when a woman looks at herself in a mirror after sunset. In Jewish tales...the mirror acts as a chastity index justly reflecting the degree of a woman's devlishness" (Fernandez 31). The Hindu wife is instructed, once she receives her mirror, to perform a womanly duty Ð dress her hair Ð thus making herself physically attractive for her husband. Another association of women, mirrors, and divine power, however, may offer us more insight into Mickiewicz's poem.

Mirrors and women are both associated with creation and the nurturance of life. Women and mirrors bring things into being, or affirm and nurture the life they reflect. As we have already seen, mirrors are widely associated with those sources of life: light Ð most typically in the form of the sun Ð and water (Eliade ed. 558). "The association of the mirror with the feminine principle and with the cult of fertility has been widespread. The Chinese have a belief that the mirror attracts the 'water of life' and the mirror is thought to have been associated with the feminine deity" (Eliade ed. 558). Tibetans regarded the mirror as a feminine symbol, as opposed to the phallic arrow. Joined with this conception is the notion of the mirror as liminal and as the source of life; it is called "gsang bai gnas" or "secret place" (Eliade 558).

This brings us to the symbolic work mirroring surfaces perform in modern societies. Mirrors have often been used to discuss the work of the arts, that is, work that is creative, like God, like women's bodies; work that is said to be inspired by the Muses, feminine powers. Artists of both genders have often used God, women, and mirrors as metaphors to describe what they see as their appropriate role. In Elizabethan times, "mirror" was a favorite component of book titles; here it meant "true description...pattern, exemplar, model" (Hastings, ed. 697). This work of "true description" has been taken on by all the arts at various times, and religions and sciences, too. Religion has been said to be the supreme "pattern of patterns," the "traditional mode by which men interpreted their world to themselves" (Robert Bellah, quoted in Eliade, ed. 237). Religion, in this case, is man taking on what mirroring surfaces had been said to do Ð reflecting back to man the soul or essences of things. Philosophy sees itself in this role. Reflection, thought about thought, or "reflections" of the thought process, has been celebrated by eminent philosophers from "Socrates to Arendt," including Plato, Aristotle, and St. Augustine "as a higher form of consciousness, and it is frequently regarded as transcendent, if not explicitly divine" "For Kant and Hegel, ultimate meaning, if not divine, is nonetheless described respectively as 'transcendental reflection' and 'absolute knowledge'" (Eliade ed. 235-236). Anthropology, too, has described itself as a mirror held up to mankind, a mirror which can aid man in discovering his transcendent essence (Fernandez 34).

The myth of Pygmalion has been treated as a meditation on the power of sculpture to mirror reality (Elsner). Ovid, a writer, co-opted the power of this tale for meta-art: art about art (Elsner 154). As early as Plato thinkers drew parallels between painting, mirrors, and reflection (Eliade ed. 557). The legend of Parrhasius and Zeuxis, in which painters vie to prove which of them can mirror nature most realistically in his paintings, points out the unique status artists, as specially gifted artificers, have. Zeuxis is able to paint fruit that fools even the birds Ð like God, he is above natural creation. Parrhasius, however, is able to paint a curtain that fools Zeuxis, and thus wins the contest, because he fooled not just birds Ð equal elements of creation Ð but an artist, a special being with a god-like duty in relation to nature. Velasquez is just one of many more modern painters to use mirroring surfaces to comment, within paintings, on his craft (Fernandez 27-28). The striving after faithful reflection is not limited to art's hoary ancestors; recently, New Historicists and others have debated, often virulently, the faithfulness of Monet's reflections of reflections (Longenbach). Monet would make the perfect subject for a study of reflexivity in the visual arts; he and his fellow impressionists moved their easels out of the studio into plein aire. Even there Monet could not help but play God and comment upon such play in his paintings; he built his own world, his garden of water lilies, and then painted, not just that man-made nature, but its reflection.

Writers, as well as visual artists, have offered meta-art within art to celebrate their own status as creators, as mirrors. Shakespeare has Hamlet instruct an actor on the goal of drama: "To hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to Nature" (Hamlet, iii, 2). Court jesters, and those who exploit court jesters in their writing, have made use of the liminal quality of mirrors. They use "one world to comment upon another, often in an inverted and licentious manner" (Babcock 5). Anne Sexton used treatments of Grimm's fairy tales as magic mirrors to comment on these folklore classics (Hall). Each artist seems to want to claim his discipline's reflective work as paramount, as primary and exemplary. One modern writer on mirrors and reflection uncategorically states that her tool of choice, language, "is the most important mirror in which the self is created and reflected" (Babcock 1980, 1). Throughout the arts, one senses the process so perfectly described by Merleau-Ponty:

[the mirror is] the instrument of a universal magic that changes things into a spectacle, spectacles into things, myself into another, and another into myself. Artists have often mused upon mirrors because beneath this mechanical trick, they recognized just as they did in the case of the trick of perspective the metamorphosis of seeing and seen which defines both our flesh and the painter's vocation (Merleau-Ponty, quoted in Babcock 1980, 5).

Thus we find an insistence on the parts of creators of systems of signification from many times and many cultures Ð from legends to myths to religions and philosophy, to elite painting, sculpture, poetry, drama, and literature Ð that it is the reflected image that is transcendent, true, paramount. This sentiment can be summed up thus: "Many a mind Ð and not only a Platonic mind Ð is passionate to escape mere being itself, lusting after the perfections of abstraction. Mirrors, as devices by which essence or perfection can be perceived, can serve that purpose as well" (Fernandez 33). I would argue that Mickiewicz as poet felt such a drive, and that's why he locates his essence in the essence of water, thus accepting the role of the faithful reflector.

Too, as I have stated above in my reading of Mickiewicz's poem, nature's reflection by a conscious witness is a way to break out of the lack of meaning inherent in an isolated state. Another author talked about the witness's power thus: "'The thing that moves us to pride or shame is not the mere mechanical reflection of ourselves, but an imputed sentiment, the imagined effect of this reflection upon another's mind'" (Cooley, quoted in Babcock 1980, 2). Fernandez writes:

Beyond that, the mirror is and always has been a crucial device of extension and linkage. Given the essential solitary quality of the human condition, the mirror has been a device for escaping the fate of isolation. It is a device by which we can extend ourselves with the other, while, at the same time, linking ourselves with that other (Fernandez 39).

Scholarship on Mickiewicz and Stevens

So far, world folklore and high culture support my reading of the Mickiewicz poem. Question: did the milieu Mickiewicz grew out of articulate any of these ideas of mirroring surfaces, mental reflection, and the role of the artist? I was unable to find any scholarly works that dealt specifically with Mickiewicz and these issues; however, I did find one work dealing with reflexivity and German Romanticism. I justify reference to this work on the grounds that it provides insight into the milieu which produced Mickiewicz. Mickiewicz personifies Romanticism, and his discovery of German writers was called his "Germanomania" (Weintraub 15).

Alice Kuzniar, citing Walter Benjamin, whom she credits with having "laid the groundwork for ...investigations of Romantic self-reflexivity" states that reflection, for the Romantics, was the ability of art "to reflect back on itself, to contemplate the conditions, performance, and substance of its being. Reflection is the adjunct consciousness of self." This process, for the Romantics, led to transcendence: "the reflecting subject (or artistic imagination) thereby comes to a fuller, even maximum understanding of itself, to an immediate and unmediated self-intuition" which leads to "the unity of the contemplating and contemplated subject, or the total transparency of the latter to the former." This brings about a "limpid consciousness, identity, and self-presence." "Reflection reinstates identity and meaning" (Kuzniar 77). For the Romantics, too, reflection is liminal. Through it, one may enter the absolute: "the pure realm of the imagination where poetry, reigning supreme, refers not to a world outside but to its own inner workings. Poetry thus contains within itself its own criticism; indeed, according to the Romantics, only poetry may truly evaluate poetry" (Kuzniar 77). Kuzniar quotes Lacoue-Labarthe: "La poesie romantique entend penetrer l'essence de la poiesie, la chose litteraire y produit la verite de la production en soi...de l'autopoiesie" (Kuzniar 77). In the same way that folkloric and divine mirrors reflect essences, in the same way that the great, clear water reflects the essence of the rocks and clouds, Romantic poetry, in reflecting on poetry, reveals its essence (Kuzniar 77-78).

I repeat here my argument that Mickiewicz was describing that Romantic reinstatement of identity and meaning when he described the great, clear water's reflection of clouds and stones; that Mickiewicz, the poet, achieved the above-described Romantic unity when he entered the great, clear water and took on his duty to flow, to flow, to flow. Further, since the poem is about poetry, it performs the duty of poetry: to comment on itself. Part of this duty is to redeem or restore the works it treats; a complex web of dependencies are formulated: "the self depends upon the reflected other for its being" (Kuzniar 78). For humans, literature is the perfect redemptive mirroring surface:

the self comes into being only as a trope, only through language, or, in other words, at the moment reflection begins. The subject can only give voice to itself (sic) through reflection and language...language and consciousness are linked...language and being...acquire significance insofar as they are interpreted or reflected upon (Kuzniar 81-82).

Kuzniar states the equation of God's reflection of his creation and poetry's similarly redemptive reflection as cures for overcoming the divisions caused by reflexivity: to "overcome and redeem such division" Romantic writers posit "a pre-reflexive ground of being" or by "finding reconciliation in the poetic order" (Kuzniar 78). The process of reflection prompts a moral imperative Ð to love the other (Kuzniar 80). The reader will remember that I argued above that the great, clear water redeemed the objects it reflected.

Romantic poets admit the impossibility of realizing their ideals. That absence of realization could be beautiful to the Romantic mind, which adored ruins, as Mickiewicz demonstrated in his Crimean sonnets. The Romantics did not strive for a "brilliant-edged" perfection, the kind of bullet-proof artistic product or critical analysis that both Keily and Stevens seem to demand of themselves. "Writing must elude understanding" (Kuzniar 78). Romantics admitted the problems of reflection, its unachievable goals (Kuzniar 78-80), but did not lament them. "Just as the work of art is in itself fragmentary, so too every interpretation of it must remain both unfinished and unauthoritative." The Romantics advised a freedom of interpretation (Kuzniar 82). Though the goal is unattainable, the drive must continue (Kuzniar 80). "Whoever does not yearn to lift the veil of the virgin is no true apprentice of Sais. But...the veil would extend itself as one tried to lift it" (Kuzniar 82).

Hegel warned the Romantic writer not to aggrandize himself; the Romantics "freely admit that the self somehow escapes its own control" when doing the work of reflection (Kuzniar 81). This, I would argue, is why Mickiewicz is so humble in his description of himself doing his poetic work: "I must flow, flow, flow." These words, I would argue, are not, as Keily states, a voicing of a "tragic law" or an "irreconcilable conflict" (Keily 19). This is Mickiewicz humbly voicing his God-like role in the great chain of being depicted in the poem, with God as the great constant, and the poet as halfway between nature and God. Weintraub, too, sees the Lausanne lyrics as hailing for "humility as the chief virtue" (Weintraub 277).

Wiktor Weintraub, the imminent Mickiewicz scholar, seems to argue that Mickiewicz falls into the above-described Romantic tradition. In a review of Weintraub's work by David Frick, another prominent scholar of Polish literature, Weintraub is quoted as typifying Mickiewicz's career as that of "poet as prophet" (Frick 135). As befits such a position, Mickiewicz had a "life-long interest in 'connections between the visible and invisible worlds" (Frick 135). The mirror-as-limin metaphor as described above would serve him perfectly. Mickiewicz regarded his talent as supernatural (Frick 136). In St. Petersburg Mickiewicz "began to take his gift as a sign of divine election" (Frick 136). He saw his work as a "great distinction, but also a great responsibility" (Frick 137). He fashioned one work into a "continuation of the Gospel," and argued that he "acted only as a mouthpiece for God" (Frick 138).

Thus, we can see that in his interest in the liminal; in his belief that he was a prophet Ð i.e., a source of knowledge not attainable by more ordinary mortals; in his announcement that he was acting as a mouthpiece for God, Mickiewicz's recorded views of himself and his role jibe with my reading of his poem in which, like the folkloric mirror, he occupies the liminal space, acquires perceptions not attainable by ordinary mortals, and takes up a divine work.

Further, Mickiewicz's other Lausanne lyrics do not contradict my reading. In one of them a critic has read a struggle within Mickiewicz himself to attain Godly power, a power he is tempted to assume when he "sees through" God's books (Weintraub 276-277, and footnote # 2). Here Mickiewicz seems to dare God to prove his superiority at the work they both do: "Yield up thy mystery! Prove that thou art mightier, or confess that thou possessest no more wisdom and might than I do." In another of the Lausanne lyrics, Mickiewicz describes a mystical experience in which he takes on the qualities of light and the all-seeing God: "I was at the same time light, and the pupil of the eye. And I spread over the whole expanse of nature in one, the first, flash. I threw my beams into every point, and into the middle of myself, as if in the focus, I felt the whole of Nature at once." (Weintraub 278).

To Stevens

I see no such presence of God, nor interest of discussing God, in Stevens' poem. Appropriately, there is also no equally significant mirror imagery and, unlike "Nad Woda," no exact mirroring in the form of the poem itself, as Keily points out (Keily 3). On page six he tells us that the reader is verbally manipulated into taking on the role of creation in the opening lines; Keily, like Stevens, feels no need to pause and remark on the absence of God in a poem about, as he identifies it, Creation and creation. Unlike Keily, though, I found the presence of God in Mickiewicz, and the absence of God in Stevens, worth commenting on. I found that this jibes with what Stevens scholars have written about him. Mickiewicz "chose the life of action as if to confirm what he had once said...it is more difficult to live honestly through one day than to write a book. He was devoured by the need for shaping history directly, and poetry for him did not seem powerful enough; it lost out in a struggle with reality" (Milosz 229). "Through his life of service to the Polish cause [he] grew into the embodiment of the 'national bard' and a spiritual commander for the generations to come" (Milosz 232). Stevens, on the other hand, has been criticized for his political invisibility (Longenbach, inter alia; Brogan, 86); this very invisibility has been interpreted as a political statement (Brogan 1). If Mickiewicz was a Romantic poet who adopted the work of God and mirroring surfaces, Stevens is a post-Heisenberg-uncertainty-principle poet; a poet of the Irony Age. Faithful refection is no longer possible; the evilly compounded 'I' is in fact each individual eye, which can reflect only what it chooses to see, or is capable of seeing (Brogan 79). Instead, the poet must retreat to words themselves as his absolute (Brogan 75). Stevens articulated these concerns in opposition, not to the Romantic mission described above, a sloppy, inexact, emotional process of love and redemption, but against the crystalline "objective" poetry of contemporaries like William Carlos Williams (Brogan). Thus, when Keily argues that Stevens is protesting human dissatisfaction with a work of art Ð "simplified...stripped of extraneous torments" (Keily 9) Ð Stevens is decidedly not talking about the passionate, visionary art of Mickiewicz's Romantic era. The objective model, unlike the Romantic one, demanded precise, "objective" descriptions, and allowed little room for the personal and intuitive qualities that the Romantics prized. Williams, Stevens claimed, expressed a desire to produce an "exact definition of his subject" (Brogan 78). Stevens argued that that was impossible. Unlike the Romantics, who stayed the course of attempting to faithfully reflect nature, in spite of acknowledging that that was impossible, Stevens abandoned and subverted the enterprise. In "The Poems of Our Climate" he states that even if we could get clarity, we wouldn't want it (Brogan 78-79). What had been a divine vocation Ð doing the mirroring work of God Ð becomes perverse, quirky, idiosyncratic, dismissable, and plays to a disinterested audience. No longer a commission from God, art becomes its own God. Brogan writes that language is "the only (however ironic) source of meaning" for Stevens. Keily points out that the light of "Poems of Our Climate" reflects only itself (Keily 7). Stevens produced what Keily argues that he mocks as unsatisfying: poetry that has been cut from its roots in real life and brought indoors (Keily 8-9). Keily argues that Stevens is urging a return to a "variegated, kinetic, lusty world of nature" (Keily 9). This seems insupportable given what other critics have said about Stevens and about what he himself says: that only our own creation, no Godly creation which it reflects, is our ground.

For Stevens, nothing replaces the work of redemption, except for the cold comfort that we are only flawed creatures of a flawed plan, satisfied with a flawed creation ("The Poems of Our Climate," final four lines). In another poem, Stevens' words could be taken as a validation of modern art, where form has taken precedence over content: "I suppose there is a doctrine to this landscape. Yet, having just escaped from the truth, the morning is color and mist, which is enough" (Stevens 204-205). The speaker sounds like a world-weary observer of the titanic waves of destruction that have scarred the twentieth century, all inspired by fervently-embraced belief systems. While the folkloric and Romantic mirror gave unique life to creation, or testimony to its transcendence, reflection for Stevens has become "an imprisoning 'doctrine' that denies being" (Brogan 81). Stevens explicitly councils against belief (Brogan 81). He advises the destruction of the "old descriptions" of the world, particularly the old descriptions' ideas of themselves as valuable (Brogan 87).

Stevens seems a bit drunk with the power he sees poets as having: "'There is no life except in the word of it'...the power of literature is that in describing the world it creates what it describes" (Brogan 82). Keily seems most wrong when his, "Stevens does not despair that he can never be a Pygmalion" (19) is placed against this quote of Stevens, in which Stevens announces that writers like him create the world. There's no room for God here. The poet is doing it all, including providing creation with its transcendence: "'Those things that are not described do not exist'" (quoted in Brogan 82).

As I saw in "Nad Woda," that which is not reflected has no significant existence; but no God has preceded the poet, no God will outlast him, and no God provides the model, the inspiration, and the vocation for the work which the humble poet, like Mickiewicz, takes up out of a sense of duty. Nothing precedes Stevens or poets like him on the scene: the things they don't describe don't exist. Further, rather than submitting humbly to the wonders of creation, Stevens runs from the "pressures of reality" which might serve to distort his pure poetry, were he to let them. Those "pressures," argue some critics, included Hitler's invasion of Poland and World War II (Brogan 84; Longenbach). Stevens worked, as he said, "in the absence of a belief in God." In that absence, "'the mind turns to its own creations and examines them;" and art "'is of the first importance'" (Davis 106). This results in the conclusion that "one must depend fully and finally only on the self and make of that self all the world there is" (Davis 106).

Conclusion

Mickiewicz, the Romantic, dove into the great, clear water and humbly took up the God-like task of writing which was his duty. I read his great, clear water as God, as limin and essence, and as art, based on parallels in world-wide folklore and references to elite culture regarding mirroring surfaces and all the major arts, and quotes from Mickiewicz's own writings. Keily was remiss in missing this aspect of the poem in his otherwise rigorous and certainly technically precise paper.

Stevens has already dismissed God before coming to write "The Poems of Our Climate." He's interested in talking about poetry in a world of men and man's creations. This interpretation does not run terribly contrary to Keily's, except for a few points.

Before I close, I'd like to pay one last hat tip to the inter-arts theme of Keily's analysis. Keily sees "Nad Woda" as a triptych, and Stevens as a still life. I have to disagree with him on both points. Triptychs reached their height in the Gothic era. There is nothing of Gothic art in Mickiewicz's poem. It is Romantic, and, as such, I think of it as a Bierstadt. Bierstadt, of course, was a member of the Hudson River school. The Hudson River School was born of Romanticism. It was nationalistic in the same two ways that Mickiewicz and his works were: the artworks it produced celebrated the nation, and the school itself hoped to produce a body of work America could call its own. Just as Mickiewicz aimed to reflect faithfully, and is credited with capturing a lost Poland in Pan Tadeusz, the Hudson River painters were reverential in their reproduction of America's rapidly changing scenery. Though Bierstadt painted natural scenes, his work lacks spontaneity. Like Mickiewicz's poem, his paintings are obviously uses of nature rather than nature itself. What they lack in verisimilitude they make up for in grandness; one gets the sense that some great message about God, art, and man's place in the cosmos is being communicated by sBierstadt's remote, grand, rocks, clouds, and waters.

I think Keily himself could be quoted in arguing against casting Stevens' poem as a still life. As Keily tells us, the poem argues against such "purified" "simplified" art. It speaks, rather, of the "dynamic" "never resting" human mind (Keily 9), a mind which is dragged into the poem as creator (Keily 6). The visual artist who best, for me, captures this juxtaposition of brilliant-edged descriptions of still life with idiosyncratic, never resting, evilly compounded eye is Magritte. In Magritte, cool, simple, realistic still life is juxtaposed with the bizarre and random products of human consciousness, for example, in his famous painting, "Time Transfixed," in which a locomotive emerges from a realistically painted mantelpiece.