Chocorua to Its Neighbor by Wallace Stevens
"Chocorua to Its Neighbor" is a poem by Wallace Stevens that delves into the complexities of heroism through the metaphor of a mountain. The poem presents a perspective in which Chocorua, the mountain, observes human conflicts and the nature of the hero myth, likening the creation of a hero to the alchemical process of transforming base metals into gold. Comprising twenty-six five-line stanzas of blank verse, the work reflects on the mass movements of armies, emphasizing the anonymity of individual soldiers amidst the chaos of war.
The mountain perceives a "prodigious shadow," representing humanity's collective essence, and explores how mythic figures derive significance from the experiences of individuals. Stevens suggests that true heroism emerges from human desires and the shared imagination that creates these figures. The poem articulates a vision of poetry as the highest form of expression, where the human voice encapsulates the essence of human experience without transcending it. Ultimately, "Chocorua to Its Neighbor" is a meditation on the interplay between human consciousness, myth, and the nature of creation, emphasizing that the hero exists within the collective narrative shaped by humanity's longing for meaning.
Chocorua to Its Neighbor by Wallace Stevens
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1947 (collected in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, 1954)
Type of work: Poem
The Work
A poem that illustrates Stevens’s growing preoccupation with the hero and the nature of heroism, “Chocorua to Its Neighbor” features a mountain discussing the human hero myth. “Chocorua” consists of twenty-six five-line stanzas of blank verse, and it develops the definition of the heroic through images from alchemy. The creation of the hero, then, is a mystical process, like the transmutation of the base metals into gold. Like alchemy, the creation of the hero is really a process of self-refinement.
The poem begins with an indication of the mountain’s perspective. The mountain has the detachment of distance, of objectivity, of largeness. Armies and wars are perceived as mass movements of numbers, not as individual soldiers in combat. A war is “A swarming of number over number, not/ One foot approaching, one uplifted arm.”
Nevertheless, there is a “prodigious shadow” which represents humankind, visible on the mountain. It is “the self of selves” who is represented (in section 5) as a quintessence, or alchemical fifth essence, through references to the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water and to the “essay,” a vessel for the transmutation. The figure is “the glitter of a being,” half perceived, the blue “of the pole of blue/ And of the brooding mind”—that is, half real, half imagined. This figure speaks, explaining “the enlarging of the simplest soldier’s cry/ In what I am, as he falls.” That is, the mythic human gives meaning to an individual life. The soldier’s death has its significance because of this central human.
The man-myth doubts its own reality in section 12 but then grows “strong” from new reflections in section 13. Essentially it draws its power from its source, which is human beings’ desire for its existence, for something outside themselves that would dignify their lives. It now ponders the fact that there is a galaxy of myth—the captain, the cardinal, the mother, “true transfigurers fetched out of the human mountain.” That the human mind has produced such beings that in some sense exist is the proposal of this poem, which then summarizes its implications about the process of creation in a section that could stand for Stevens’s whole aesthetic:
To say more than human things with human voice,
This hero, this self-creating creation, is true poetry or “acutest speech.” True poetry does not speak with a voice of elements beyond human experience, nor does it speak with some inhuman wisdom of human concerns. Rather, it is the human voice speaking of and within the range of human lives.
The rest of the poem explores the nature of the shadow-myth-hero. It is constantly in flux, constantly re-becoming and reinvigorating the space it inhabits: “where he was, there is an enkindling, where/ He is, the air changes and grows fresh to breathe.” It is not “father”—that is, it is not an authority figure to impose its views from above—but “megalfrere”—brother and equal. It is the “common self”; moreover, it is the “interior fons. And fond.” It is the spring, the baptismal well, basis of the self, and although it is “metaphysical metaphor,” it is “physical if the eye is quick enough.”
It is, then, both imagined and real, brought into existence by the intensity of human need for it. The mountain concludes its meditation by recognizing greatness of this presence—a human figure greater than nature, enlarged by consciousness of itself.
This poem was written during that period of Stevens’s career in which his preoccupation was imagining the hero; this figure is heroic in Stevens’s imaginings, in his representation of the collective imagination. As his poetics developed, Stevens turned more and more to the poetic act itself as subject. His last poems verge on an alchemical transformation of world into mind; those poems, difficult and demanding, are not usually found in more general anthologies.
Bibliography
Bates, Milton J. Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003.
Cleghorn, Angus J. Wallace Stevens’ Poetics: The Neglected Rhetoric. New York: Palgrave, 2000.
Critchley, Simon. Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Ford, Sara J. Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens: The Performance of Modern Consciousness. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Leggett, B. J. Late Stevens: The Final Fiction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005.
Morse, Samuel F. Wallace Stevens: Poetry as Life. New York: Pegasus, 1970.
Santilli, Kristine S. Poetic Gesture: Myth, Wallace Stevens, and the Motions of Poetic Language. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Sharpe, Tony. Wallace Stevens: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.