Ghosts as Cocoons

Wallace Stevens's Ghosts as Cocoons

Wallace Stevens’ "Ghosts as Cocoons" is a poem that oscillates between the tangible and the ethereal, the fertile and the decayed, the anticipated and the absent. Like much of Stevens’ work, it resists easy interpretation, instead offering a meditation on creation, desire, and the tension between the ideal and the real. This essay will explore the poem’s historical and cultural context, its intricate literary devices, its central themes, and its emotional impact. Additionally, we will consider how Stevens’ philosophical preoccupations and modernist sensibilities shape the poem’s meaning.

Historical and Cultural Context

Stevens wrote during a period of profound cultural upheaval—the early to mid-20th century—when traditional religious and social structures were being dismantled by industrialization, war, and philosophical skepticism. Modernist poets like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Stevens himself grappled with the fragmentation of meaning in a post-religious world. "Ghosts as Cocoons" reflects this anxiety, particularly in its preoccupation with absence and the deferred fulfillment of desire.

The poem’s imagery—grass in seed, young birds flying, vetch turning purple—evokes cycles of nature, yet these signs of renewal are juxtaposed with absence: "the house is not built, not even begun" and "where is the bride?" This tension suggests a world in which natural processes continue, but human meaning remains elusive. The bride, a symbol of fulfillment and perhaps divine presence (as in the Biblical Song of Songs or the mystical bride of Romantic poetry), is missing, leaving the world incomplete.

Stevens’ work often engages with the secular sublime—the search for transcendence without recourse to traditional religion. Here, the invocation of "highest heaven’s lust" suggests an almost erotic yearning for the divine, yet the poem’s world is "mangled, smutted," a "semi-world hacked out / Of dirt." This duality reflects the modernist crisis of faith: the desire for transcendence persists, but the means of achieving it have been corrupted or lost.

Literary Devices and Structure

Stevens employs a rich array of literary devices to create a sense of urgency and fragmentation. The poem’s opening lines establish a natural rhythm—"The grass is in seed. The young birds are flying"—yet this organic progression is immediately undercut by negation: "Yet the house is not built, not even begun." The absence of the house (a symbol of stability, domesticity, or perhaps spiritual dwelling) creates a void that the rest of the poem seeks to fill.

The rhetorical question "But where is the bride?" becomes a refrain, echoing the Biblical lament "Where is thy God?" (Psalm 42:3). The bride’s absence is not just personal but cosmic; she symbolizes the missing link between human desire and fulfillment. Stevens then addresses a series of figures—"butcher, seducer, bloodman, reveller"—who represent the violent, chaotic forces of existence. These figures, perhaps stand-ins for humanity’s baser instincts, are incapable of summoning the bride, underscoring the poem’s tension between degradation and transcendence.

The phrase "This mangled, smutted semi-world hacked out / Of dirt" is particularly striking. The alliteration ("mangled, smutted") and harsh consonants ("hacked out") evoke a world that is both constructed and violated, a crude approximation of an ideal. The moon, traditionally a symbol of poetic imagination in Stevens’ work (as in "The Man with the Blue Guitar"), cannot "blot this with its dove-winged blendings." Even art’s harmonizing power is insufficient to repair the world’s brokenness.

The imperative "She must come now" introduces a desperate urgency. The grass is "high," the season ripe, and those "to be born" depend on her arrival. The idea that "love being a birth" suggests that creation—whether artistic, spiritual, or biological—requires the bride’s presence. Yet the language remains fraught with contradiction. The speaker implores the bride to come "pearled and pasted, bloomy-leafed," adorned in natural and artificial beauty, while "the domes resound with chant involving chant." This image suggests ritual, perhaps religious, but also hollow repetition—"chant involving chant" implies a recursive, possibly meaningless incantation.

Themes: Desire, Absence, and Creation

A central theme of "Ghosts as Cocoons" is the interplay between desire and absence. The bride is both longed for and missing, much like the absent gods in modernist literature (one thinks of Eliot’s "The Waste Land" or Yeats’ "The Second Coming"). Stevens’ bride may symbolize artistic inspiration, divine presence, or the unattainable ideal—what he elsewhere calls "the impossible possible philosophers’ man" ("Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction").

The poem also engages with the idea of the "ghost" as a cocoon—a transitional state between decay and rebirth. The title suggests that what appears spectral or insubstantial may actually be a vessel for transformation. Yet the poem’s tone is ambivalent: will the bride emerge from this cocoon, or is she forever deferred?

Another key theme is the relationship between beauty and corruption. The fly on the rose—a classic image of imperfection—prevents full communion with the bride. The speaker acknowledges this paradox: the season is "excelling summer," yet the ghost of fragrance falls "on dung." Even in moments of transcendence, decay intrudes. This duality is quintessentially Stevensian; his poetry often embraces the tension between the ideal and the real, refusing to resolve it neatly.

Emotional Impact and Philosophical Underpinnings

The emotional weight of "Ghosts as Cocoons" lies in its unresolved yearning. The speaker’s plea—"Come now"—is both commanding and plaintive, evoking the human desire for meaning in a fractured world. The poem’s closing image of "domes resound[ing] with chant involving chant" suggests ritual without resolution, a cyclical longing that never achieves fulfillment.

Stevens was deeply influenced by philosophical pragmatism and the idea that meaning is constructed rather than given. In this light, the bride’s absence is not just a lament but an existential condition—we must create our own significance in a world where the ideal is always out of reach. The poem’s emotional power comes from its honesty: it acknowledges desire without offering false consolation.

Comparative Analysis and Conclusion

Comparisons can be drawn between "Ghosts as Cocoons" and other modernist works that grapple with absence. Eliot’s "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" similarly depicts deferred desire ("And indeed there will be time / To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’"), while Yeats’ "Leda and the Swan" explores the violent intersection of the divine and the human. Stevens’ poem, however, is less narrative than meditative, more concerned with the abstract tension between presence and absence than with mythic or personal crisis.

In conclusion, "Ghosts as Cocoons" is a richly layered poem that encapsulates Stevens’ preoccupation with the limits of imagination, the persistence of desire, and the imperfect world we inhabit. Its imagery of growth and decay, its urgent invocations, and its unresolved longing make it a compelling meditation on the human condition. Stevens does not offer answers but immerses us in the question—how do we live in a world where the bride never comes, yet we must keep calling for her? The poem’s brilliance lies in its refusal to simplify that dilemma, instead leaving us suspended between seed and blossom, ghost and cocoon.

This text was generated by AI and is for reference only. Learn more