A poem, a painting, a poem. Dickinson, Vermeer, Stevens.
Here's Emily Dickinson's poem, "There's a certain Slant of light" (#258 in the Johnson edition, #320 in the Franklin edition):
There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons–
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes–
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us–
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are–
None may teach it–Any–
"Tis the Seal Despair–
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air–
When it comes, the Landscape listens–
Shadows–hold their breath–
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death–
This poem takes me back to Friday morning services in the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, to the columnar quiet and then the first blast from the organ, that pressure: I feel the heft. The clamor that framed — and punctuated — our time in that cool space.
“Balance” is a verb. Poems perform balancing acts. In the last stanza of Dickinson’s poem, we balance, briefly, with the listening landscape, the shadows holding their breath, between the coming and going of the Slant of light. The poem makes room for that; the sentences make room. Listening space, breathing space.
A certain Slant of light streams in the window in Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance, alighting on her face, her hand, the twin pans of the balance, her other hand balancing lightly on the table. In the winter of 1995, I had tickets to see the Vermeer Exhibition at the National Gallery—but the show was closed by a government shutdown. On the last day before my flight away, when the show briefly reopened, I was in the long line waiting in the cold to get in. And the crush! Impossible to linger in front of a painting, to approach it slowly from across the room. That mattered, of course – but it felt as if it didn’t matter, as if the focus and balance in the paintings invited me in. Almost pressed against The Lacemaker (barely the size of a sheet of note paper) I lean with the woman in her toward her pins and bobbins, and the almost invisible strands threading between them. Although her face is towards us, in my memory I’m somehow looking over her shoulder, as if steadying myself to do her work.
“Still” is a verb. Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance stills us – not by freezing us, but by offering us a balance; we slow down until our stillness matches the stillness seeming to arrive in the painting. A momentary stay against confusion. Our breathing could unsettle the golden pans.
Less than ten years before Vermeer painted this painting, an immense explosion (90,000 pounds of gunpowder, stored in a convent), devastated Delft. I don’t think his paintings shut that explosion out; instead, I think their fragile balancing acts are performed humbly, aware of the threat of chaos they might counter.
The reader in Wallace Stevens’ poem, “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm,” leans in the summer night above his page like Vermeer’s Lacemaker over her lace:
The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
Just now, the “calm world” in Stevens’ poem feels wished for, rather than achieved. The fulcrum in the poem comes in the sixth and seventh lines, where the reader
…leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought….
Bent. Inclination. In the pandemic winter, I enter into this poem’s wanting. The smoothly unspooling phrases tense and catch on these intermediate commas, and bunch up in the much most of a wish that can’t quite manage to smooth itself out. The poem’s perhaps not, as it seems, an assertion or description of calm, but a balancing act.