"Now in midsummer come and all fools slaughtered
And Spring's infuriations over and a long way
To the first autumnal inhalations, young broods
Are in the grass, the roses are heavy with a weight
Of fragrance and the mind lays by its trouble."

These lines were written by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), an American poet whose work is not much read these days. This is from "Credences of Summer," written in 1946. Stevens' writing is notoriously difficult to interpret, but this first stanza is sometimes thought of as being both about the season and the middle age of a human life. The "fools slaughtered" in the first line could be anything from April fools, April flowers gone with the spring, or the foolishness of one's earlier life. The mind lays by its trouble, that is, it puts aside its trouble (our modern English often mistakes "lay" for "lie," so this needs clarification) in a summery backyard sort of leisure. And this poem of Wallace Stevens is about just now, that midsummer moment of slowness before the decline into autumn, the balmy apex of the year's parabola.

Stevens, despite the lavish proliferation of imagery in his poetry, seemed to yearn for a way of writing and a way of perception that was devoid of any encumbering metaphor or frivolity of language. Here he is later in "Credences," expressing his fervent wish for purity:

"Postpone the anatomy of summer, as
The physical pine, the metaphysical pine.
Let's see the very thing and nothing else.
Let's see it with the hottest fire of sight.
Burn everything not part of it to ash.

"Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky
Without evasion by a single metaphor.
Look at it in its essential barrenness
And say this, this is the centre that I seek.…"

As a mathematics and physics learner, I wonder whether Stevens should have been a mathematician or physicist instead of a poet. Wouldn't those disciplines, so abstract, exact, and non-metaphorical have satisfied his desire for "the very thing and nothing else?" He could have had his fill of equations and measurements and data and theoretical calculations, without any pretty poetry or colorful metaphors or sometimes, even a subject at all. Isn't that "essential barrenness" the realm of mathematics, where poetry is irrelevant? The "beauty" would then be only in the neat, pure equations or the theory that explains the phenomena. I have often envied those lucky souls (usually males) whose imagination does not clutter their minds with stories, colors, images, wordplay and shadowplay. They calculate and theorize in a world of whitened abstraction, without evasion by a single metaphor. Or do they?

Wallace Stevens' poetry goes well with calculus. Here's a quote from another verse of "Credences of Summer:"

"One of the limits of reality
Presents itself in Oley when the hay,
Baked through long days, is piled in mows. It is
A land too ripe for enigmas, too serene.…

Things stop in that direction and since they stop
The direction stops and we accept what is
As good. The utmost must be good and is…"

Oley is a place in Pennsylvania, where Stevens sometimes traveled. He sees the geometry of farmland. But this is not about mathematical limits, let alone seasonal or geographic limits, but the limits of thought, word, description. He's trying real hard, but his poetry betrays him, because the only way he can write it is with words, thoughts, specific language, description. But he at least knows where things stop.

I am still working with limits in calculus and because I am not that pure mathematical imageless type, this sounds like poetry to me. In problem 6 on page 93, my answers read like this:

"Let y = f(x). As X approaches 4 from the negative side, going right, its limit is 1. As X approaches 4 from the positive side, going left, its limit is 1. As both sides approach 4, the limit is also 1. And f(4) = 1.
As X goes off into infinity towards the negative side, the limit of the function is negative infinity. As X goes off into infinity towards the positive side, its limit is positive infinity."

I am coasting along the line of the function in the graph, in the perfect absolute grid universe, with the landmark of X = 4 in my sight. I will never reach it, yet I have already reached it and passed it. I can see my prospects towards a negative infinity of endless winter, or a positive infinity of endless summer. The direction stops, but it never really stops, for this is calculus, not solid algebra. The utmost must be good, and is…mathematical.

Posted at 10:40 pm | link