Adrienne Rich's "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" can be found here [link]
Wallace Stevens's "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" can be found here [link]
another example of the difference between the poetic and prosaic modalities
In writing the previous post, it was not my original thought to follow up with more examples to the same point. Though, a door had been opened (if not a new door); and I was not unaverse to holding to the line of thought if opportunity presented itself. Which it did, by two unrelated online incidences, the first of which returned Wallace Stevens's "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" to my thoughts, the second of which brought Adrienne Rich's "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" to my attention. By coincidence, both verses feature tigers and use them in similar ways. Plus there is the bonus that "Disillusionment" is one of my favorite short verses by Stevens. So why not.
This post will differ from the previous in three ways. First, I am going to speak a little more about verseform, about the material aspects of the works. Second, in this post I cover the poetic work, Stevens's, and before the prosaic, Rich's. Third, I'm not going to dwell as much on the theoretic aspects of the poetic and prosaic; indeed, I may take this post in a different direction.
That said, I will begin with the reminder that while the prosaic works in the modality of the factual and the poetic in the modality of the symbolic, that does not mean that the poetic cannot or does not use factual statements. In the two verses under examination here the tigers appear in sentences that, on their own, are factual statements.
Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen, bright topaz denizens of a world of green. Only, here and there, an old sailor, drunk and asleep in his boots, catches tigers in red weather. |
"On their own" is key to the point. A prosaic text functions through independent statements logically coordinated into a whole. The statements in a prosaic text never move outside their own factual being. Putting two factual statements into coordination with each other does not change the nature or reading of the statements, even when the logical relationship established is one of opposition.