NINES

Last week, for my American Modernist poetry class, I was assigned to read Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning” and to write a short response.  Prior to this semester I had little to no exposure to Stevens’ oeuvre, yet after a week of reading his poetry, I felt myself growing into an enthusiast.  Feeling more at ease with Stevensian verse, I sat down to read the first stanza.  It began, “Complacencies of the peignoir”—a seductive phrase, I thought.  I could easily be this woman he describes, surrounded by the objects that fill her late and lazy morning: the coffee, oranges, and, well, maybe not the green cockatoo.  The intensity of the tone increases as the woman dreams and “feels the dark / Encroachment of that old catastrophe.”  Ah, yes, the inevitable onset of religious guilt; I understood this, too.

But then I reached the next line: “As a clam darkens among water-lights.”

I thought it a rather strange turn of phrase amidst the sacrificial and ominous language of the surrounding lines.  But I continued to read until the end of the stanza, which ends with some of Stevens’ most blatantly religious language I’ve encountered thus far: “Over the seas, to silent Palestine, / Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.”

As is my custom, I read through the stanza a few more times, but continually stumbled over the word “clam.”  What is Stevens even trying to say?  Is this Stevens the Absurdist?  I knew he could be quirky, parading images of the emperor of ice-cream or a rabbit as king of the ghosts throughout his poetry.  But a clam? And it was darkening?  Do clams darken while exposed to light?  I didn’t know much about mollusks.  If I were a more astute scholar I would have probably assumed this to be some kind of mistake immediately.  But taking the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (that my friend had so kindly loaned me) as a sacred text, I figured I clearly didn’t get Stevens after all.  Slightly disheartened, I closed the book and decided I would attempt to write some clever analysis of those lines later.

As good fortune would have it, I bought my own, later edition of the Norton Anthology that day.  And, lo!  Upon glancing at “Sunday Morning” again I noticed that the line contained a typo!  “As a calm darkens among water-lights.”

That made infinitely more sense to me, and I felt silly for ever having considered “clam” as a viable option in that line.  I cringed at the thought of my professor reading the elaborate interpretation of the Stevensian metaphorical clam and my feeble attempt to account for its place in the poem that I no doubt would have written.  My academic horror quickly subsided, and I then laughed (probably a bit too much) about the ridiculousness that the simple erratum contributed to my reading.  Most importantly, I’d say that this scholastic interlude led me to think about the importance of textual editing that I had so often disregarded before.

My appreciation for the overlooked field of textual editing and scholarship continues to grow here at UVa through my foray into the digital humanities.  As a NINES fellow I’ve been able to experience firsthand the type of diligence and effort it takes to encode texts accurately to provide reliable resources for students online.  By learning how to use Juxta, I can now visualize the types of changes and modifications that account for an author’s finished product.  Errors are, of course, bound to happen in the process of publication, but by using online tools like Juxta, these textual discrepancies can become more manifest.  If Norton had never repaired their corrupted text of “Sunday Morning,” the meaning and interpretation of Stevens’ poem, after years of perpetuating the publication of a flawed text, could change entirely.  A tool like Juxta would very well enable inquiring students and scholars, perplexed by anomalous language embedded within, say, a line of poetry, to unearth original or otherwise forgotten meanings of the text itself.  And in the words of Stevens, we would “come back / To what had been so long composed.”

The stanza, and typo, in question.