Stevens from Transport to Summer to the Last Poems

‘God Is Good. It Is a Beautiful Night’ begins Stevens’s Transport to Summer (1947): ‘Look round, brown moon, brown bird, as you rise to fly’. This prayer that supplicates for vigilance, luring a harvest moon, becomes in retrospect a proem that announces a late phase, functioning like Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ in his Collected Poems: ‘The venerable song falls from your fiery wings. | The song of the great space of your age pierces | The fresh night’ (SCP: 285). Stevens’s future re-readers are transported momentarily out of his Collected Poems (1954) to his very last poem, uncollected at his death, in which ‘The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down’ (OP: 141) from the palm where it sings a foreign song. ‘Now, again’, in the brown moon’s light of ‘God Is Good’, ‘the head is speaking. It reads the book. | It becomes the scholar again, seeking celestial | Rendezvous’ (SCP: 285). The scholar, the Stevensian equivalent of Yeats’s fisherman, finds celestial rendezvous that is also down-to-earth as ‘One of the countrymen’ in the last poem of Stevens’s next collection of poems, The Auroras of Autumn (1950). ‘The angel’ ‘of reality’, in ‘Angel Surrounded by Paysans’, ‘standing in the door’, speaks to the countrymen as one of them and as ‘the necessary angel of earth’: