Leafing through the mellifluous yet frequently indecipherable collected poems of Wallace Stevens during odd evenings the last few months, I found the book to be of greatest use in general as a tool to fight insomnia. (I mean that in the least derogatory way possible. I just literally find it a helpful means to lull the mind to sleep while engaging it in a diverting but non-taxing activity that does not involve backlit screens. There is a certain level of difficulty and obscurity that verse can attain at which it completes the horseshoe and becomes simple to read again--the mind submits and stops trying to make particular sense of it.)
But one poem in the volume woke me right up. It seemed to have a special emotional urgency: particularly for this looming election day.
I don't know (as I almost never know, reading these poems), what precisely Stevens himself could have had in mind. He was writing of course long before CNN invented the color-coded maps that assigned red for Republicans and blue for Democrats. Perhaps Stevens had in mind the earlier uses of colors (say, in British politics) to designate the rival factions.
But whatever may have been in his mind, ask yourself upon reading it if the poem does not perfectly describe our present political plight, in which the whole cavalcade of the MAGA Trumpian assault on reality, from which we thought perhaps we found a temporary respite after Biden's inauguration, appears poised to start all over again from the beginning ("hell goes round and round," to borrow a phrase from Flann O'Brien). I offer it here as an epigraph for the chaos of the election we will face tomorrow:
I heard two workers say, "This chaos
Will soon be ended."
This chaos will not be ended,
The red and the blue house blended,
Not ended, never and never ended [...]
-- Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems
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