A Description Reconsidered: James Schuyler's "February"
"I can't get over / how it all works in together"
In her plenary lecture for “The Uses of Literature” conference held in November, 2021, to honor the end of Rita Felski’s fellowship at The University of Southern Denmark, Toril Moi shared a set of exciting and challenging thoughts about how the idea of modernity can be understood as an aspect dawn — drawing from and insightfully connecting major contributions by the likes of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, Thomas Kuhn, and Richard Rorty. I eagerly anticipate this research when it is published in Moi’s promised short (!) book.
I want to improvise on just a thread or two, possibly remarks that Moi made in passing. “Your world here and there will seem different,” Moi said, elaborating in the spirit of Wittgenstein’s “Philosophy of Psychology, a Fragment.” Seeing the concept of modernity as an aspect-dawn will not change the structure of an overall historical-philosophical experience. (The Revolution of the Ordinary, as in the title of Moi’s most recent book, is not to be plotted by the same coordinates as the Industrial or the French Revolution.) The status of modernity, typically narrated as a rupture and break, Moi discerns rather case by case, emerging through forms of engagement. She exemplified this claim through observations on the very iconoclasms of the modernist arts, which it can be argued practice forms of engagement and attachment to their predecessors in the “Romantic” Nineteenth Century by the very act of disavowing them.
The “New York School” poet James Schuyler (1923-1991) experiences what I think we are right to call such a dawning of an aspect in his quintessentially “descriptive” poem “February.” He, in the poem, also seems to experience revolution as and by means of attachment. The beginning and end of the poem in particular display break as Zusammenhang (connection), rupture in the disarming and surprising form of an emergence of fit.
Wordsworth praised nature wedded to mind in his Prospectus to The Recluse (and William Blake despised him for it): “How exquisitely the individual Mind / (And the progressive powers, perhaps no less, / Of the whole species) to the external World / Is fitted:—and how exquisitely, too— / (Theme this but little heard of among men—) / The external World is fitted to the Mind.” I am sure Schuyler knew these famous declamatory lines (he read Wordsworth’s 1957/1966 two-volume biography by Mary Moorman), and I wonder indeed if he specifically thought of them in “February.” But Wittgenstein’s philosophy and Schuyler’s poetry do not proclaim the “fit” of individual mind to nature. They display belonging in its aspectual movement, in perceptual transit. They are queer writers, too. I think of this fact as a further aspect of their non-identifying relation to the metaphor of weddings of mind and nature, and in light of the maternal act seen in the end of Schuyler’s poem.
The mood achieved by Schuyler’s “February” is quietly glorious and yet, as it “takes place” on the last day of a February on what is possibly a leap year, it is precisely about what Stanley Cavell deems the uncanniness of the ordinary. An act of ekphrasis that is therefore also a kind of jubilee within the year’s shortest month, the month with an often unwanted addendum, “February” achieves, constructs, receives, the refulgence of a moment of making an aspectual connection. Like Wittgenstein’s philosophy, it aspires ultimately to leave things alone apart from the ostensive act of pointing in witness. Yet in an age, a city (New York) of overproduction, this act we are most prone to feel is transformational:
A chimney, breathing a little smoke.
The sun, I can’t see
making a bit of pink
I can’t quite see in the blue.
The pink of five tulips
at 5 p.m. on the day before March first.
The green of the tulip stems and leaves
like something I can’t remember,
finding a jack-in-the-pulpit
a long time ago and far away.
Why it was December then
and the sun was on the sea
by the temples we’d gone to see.
One green wave moved in the violet sea
like the UN building on big evenings,
green and wet
while the sky turns violet.
[…………………………………..]
I can’t get over
how it all works in together
like a woman who just came to her window
and stands there filling it
jogging her baby in her arms.
She’s so far off. Is it the light
that makes the baby pink?
I can see the little fists
and the rocking-horse motion of her breasts.
It’s getting grayer and gold and chilly.
Two dog-sized lions face each other
at the corners of a roof.
It’s the yellow dust inside the tulips.
It’s the shape of a tulip.
It’s the water in the drinking glass the tulips are in.
It’s a day like any other. (CP, 4-5)
At the poem’s opening, the sun that Schuyler “can’t see” makes “a bit of pink” he “can’t quite see.” In the poem’s second half, Schuyler describes the woman — or a woman — "who just came to her window /and stands there filling it / jogging her baby in her arms.” This woman, physically and gesturally, fills the window’s negative space. But the “all” that so evocatively “works in together” even at the end of the poem includes an all that is perhaps not quite there, were we to exempt the happening of the poem and the mind. The woman’s presence itself is a simile (“like”) for an interrogative adverb (“how”). That how affirms. The simile is drawn from what I think we are right, and permitted, to feel are real bodies seen right then through the window. Yet in this poem as so characteristically in Schuyler’s poetry there is no distinction of actualities between the simile and its referent. What the association juxtaposes is two things, differently though equally real.
And, indeed predication too, the mere “it is” of the simplest complete sentence, can be commensurate with poetic figure. The first “It’s” makes a statement with a full subject and predicate, with a descriptive content and a notice of the passage of time in the time the poem itself takes: “It’s getting grayer and gold and chilly.” But the four “It’s” to follow, in the final four lines of the poem, have no assignable referent if we do not allow that to be the unassuming wonder of the day: the “it” of “how it all works in together.” (The “works in” is painterly language: it could either be like the working in of paints on a palette just before they are applied; or it is like the keeping of harmonious perspective in a finished painting — the way parts compose the full picture in their relation.) Each “It’s” is the same assemblage of “dust,” “shape,” “water,” and “day,” but the slow quartet, as line by line drops stolidly, discloses a new aspect one element at a time before ending on the environing whole. The poem ends with a combination of joy and in-difference to this day: “It’s a day like any other.” In “February” Schuyler has written something like the intimate opposite of the many poems (“Dec. 28, 1974,” for instance) in which he does not so much designate or refer by the act of titling the poem by the date, as lovingly name the day.
Schuyler writes in another poem that he does not want his poetry to be “open”; he wants to “see and say things as they are.” What often makes his poetry so revelatory in the dailiness of its aspectual dawnings is that the means, the mode, the “object,” and the occasion — all— compose part of the thing. Attention is no adjunct in this poetry: What Schuyler sees and says too comprises “just the thing.”