HAIRY APE

Eugene O’Neill’s 1922 play is a devil to stage. But Richard Jones’s production, running 90
minutes as opposed to the four hours of the Peter Stein version seen at the National in 1987,
succeeds by treating the play for what it is: a stunning expressionist spectacle in which images
count as much as words.O’Neill’s protagonist Yank – played with an adenoidal Brandoesque
drawl by Bertie Carvel – is a truculent stoker on a transatlantic liner who deludes himself that he
belongs in the new machine-made world: “I’m de muscles in steel,” he proudly boasts, “de
punch behind it.” In eight short scenes, O’Neill shows Yank to be kidding himself. Dismissed as
“a filthy beast” by an industrial tycoon’s daughter, Yank displays a rampaging violence that
disturbs even his own shipmates.Vowing class revenge, Yank finds himself rejected wherever he
turns: by the Fifth Avenue socialites he insults and by the unionised Industrial Workers of the
World for whom he proves too explosive. Only in the Zoo, where he confronts a caged gorilla,
does Yank meet a kindred spirit, but that too proves an illusion. he power of Jones’s production
lies in reminding us of how much 1920s American drama owed to German expressionism.
Stewart Laing’s design and Mimi Jordan Sherin’s lighting create a series of unforgettable
images, including the sulphurous hell of the ship’s stokehole, the ghoulish parade of the masked
New York bourgeoisie and the antiseptic orderliness of the union headquarters, with its uniform
volumes stacked on underpopulated shelves.Superb as the visuals are, I wish that Jones’s
production paid more attention to O’Neill’s language. Edmund Wilson once shrewdly observed
that, whereas O’Neill’s middle-class characters are prosily repetitive, a working-class figure like
Yank has “a mouth-filling rhythmical eloquence.” Yank, after all, revealingly says: “I ain’t got
no past to tink in, nor nothin’ dat’s comin’, on’y what’s now.” To be fair, that line sings out in
Bertie Carvel’s fine performance, which exactly catches Yank’s social alienation and internal
struggle. Carvel, as we know from his Miss Trunchbull in Matilda, has an extraordinary
physicality that, whether shovelling coal into a ship’s furnace or swinging from a steel girder on
Fifth Avenue, he leaves behind an indelible impression. It’s a courageously inventive
performance that few of his contemporaries could match, but even Carvel could do more to relish
the language. But that is my only cavil about a rare and exhilarating revival of a play that shows
the ability of expressionism to pin down the encaged isolation of the eternally oppressed.

HUCKLEBERRY FINN

In these early chapters, Twain is satirizing the "sivilized" sciety that Huck has found himself
thrust into. Most notably, the characters of the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson prove
themselves religious and moral hypocrites. One of the more minor acts of hypocrisy Huck
notices while in their care is the matter of smoking. He reports it thus:Pretty soon I wanted to
smoke, and asked the widow to let me. But she wouldn't. She said it was a mean practice and
wasn't clean, and I must try to not do it any more. That is just the way with some people. They
get down on a thing when they don't know nothing about it. Here she was a-bothering about
Moses, which was no kin to her, and no use to anybody, being gone, you see, yet finding a power
of fault with me for doing a thing that had some good in it. And she took snuff, too; of course
that was all right, because she done it herself.So she won't let Huck smoke, but she herself will
consume tobacco in another form: the very definition of hypocrisy. This is just one example of
the social criticism Twain offers. The most glaring examples come in the form of the two
women's religious practices, and the fact that they own slaves. For Twain, and hopefully for all
people who consider themselves moral or people of faith, this is one glaring contradiction that
cannot be reconciled. Calling their slaves in to say prayers before nighttime shows that they
themselves see no problem with this arrangement.Although Huck can't name it yet, he knows
that there is something very wrong with his situation. He doesn't recognize the discrepancy
between Miss Watson's criticism of him, & her insistence on describing herself as a good person,
one going to heaven. This shows his innate awareness of people's actions, and sets up his later
decision to remain with Jim wihtout turning him in.

SUNDAY MORNING

The title of the poem is "Sunday Morning," so it isn’t surprising that the "sun" is mentioned so
often in the poem. Over the course of the poem, the sun goes from being a source of comfort to
the woman sitting in the chair, to a symbol of the ultimate source of life and of the chaos in the
natural world.

 Line 2: An image of a sunny chair lets us know that it’s a warm, beautiful day. It sets up
more symbolic uses of the sun later in the poem.
 Line 19: The sun is used as a synecdoche to represent other qualities or "comforts," like
warmth, light, and growth. It also forms the beginning of a rhetorical question. The
woman thinks that the comforts of the sun are just as good as the thought of heaven.
 Line 70: The shivering of the willow in the sun is an image of natural beauty, as well as a
symbol for how death makes up for the loss of old things by bringing about new and
different things.
 Lines 93-95: In this simile, the sun is compared to how a god "might be." The sun is not
actually a god; it is "like" a "savage source," or a wild, divine force that creates things.
The sun’s heat and light is the source of all life, so the image is accurate. The sun is also
personified as a "naked" being who dances with the men.
 Line 110: The sun is a symbol of chaos, because it can be wild and unpredictable.
Sometimes, it grows crops; sometimes, it burns them. Also, as the source of life, the sun
is responsible for the chaos of the nature world, where things happen for no rhyme or
reason.

Stevens doesn’t write a lot of poems as structured as this one. Maybe it has to do with the fact
that "Sunday Morning" is one of the first poems he published: a lot of poets start out writing in
traditional forms, and then become more experimental. Whatever the reason, this poem is very
neat and organized, like a room where everything is in the right place. It has eight stanzas of 15
lines each, which is one line longer than the standard length of a sonnet. The stanzas don’t
rhyme, however, so they can’t be called sonnets.They are written in blank verse, which is the
meter that Shakespeare used throughout most of his plays. It just means that, although the
lines don’t rhyme, they all have the same meter. Like Shakespeare’s verse, Stevens’s blank
verse lines have ten syllables (called "beats") and are written in iambic pentameter, which
means that every other beat in the line has an accent. This is just a general rule, however. The
first line of stanza II is pretty typical: "Why should she give her boun-ty to the dead." If anything,
Stevens is even more consistent than Shakespeare in giving each line exactly ten beats. Can you
find any lines in the poem that don’t have ten? This strict pattern is probably the reason that
some lines are so difficult to understand: it takes a lot of planning to write in perfect blank
verse.

Have you ever been around the kind of old married couple where one person always speaks on
behalf of the other person? You’ll ask the wife something, for example, and the husband will
answer, as if he thinks that he knows her mind better than she knows it herself. Our speaker,
though not the woman’s husband, is one of those types. For the entire poem, he’s telling us
what the woman thinks as she eats her breakfast. But, he can’t help himself and keeps
interrupting with his own thoughts about Roman myth, or the meaning of death, or questions
about whether fruit fall in heaven.Fortunately, however, he actually does know the woman as
well as she knows herself: that’s the beauty of being a poet. He gets to go inside her head and
quote from her thoughts, as he does at the beginning of stanzas IV and V. But, he also has
knowledge and opinions of his own, and he gets into something like a dialogue with the woman
in the middle of the poem, to help her come to terms with change and the natural cycle of
death and birth. He’s like the therapist who lives inside her head, and asks the right questions
at the right times to nudge her along the path to understanding.Aside from that, he’s a smart
guy. If we had to guess, we’d bet he went to good schools and studied his Shakespeare and the
classic Greek and Roman myths. He can sound a bit pretentious when he uses words like
"complacencies" and "peignoir," or when he talks about old-fashioned things like "maidens"
and "lutes." But, he can’t be that pretentious, because he’s really fascinated by this normal
woman eating a late breakfast instead of going to church. We’re also pretty sure that he would
have a membership to the Sierra Club or some other environmental group: he and the woman
are both huge nature-lovers. Especially birds. Boy, do they love birds.After a long, cold winter,
it’s finally springtime in some pretty New England town. (At least, we’re guessing it’s New
England, because there are wild berries and Stevens lived there for most of his life.) It’s Sunday
– maybe Easter Sunday – and a woman has just woken up. She’s eating coffee and oranges in a
loose, comfortable dress, and it’s sunny and beautiful outside. Maybe she’s in a breakfast room
with big windows, or maybe she’s outside on the patio. The whole scene looks like normal,
suburban America, except the tropical cockatoo on the rug might be a sign that the woman has
an adventurous side.All of a sudden, everything gets dark and quiet. We go from suburban
America to the coast of the ocean, where lights of some kind are shining. On the other side of
the ocean: Palestine, where Jesus Christ is buried. Should she cross? This is the big
question.While the woman tries to make a decision, the poem takes a big mental trip through
the woman’s past memories and future desires, kind of like George Bailey’s adventure from the
classic Christmas movie It’s a Wonderful Life. We get to encounter not one, but several,
versions of heaven – but all of them are kind of disappointing. One of them has delicious fruit to
eat, but the fruit never falls from the tree, so what’s the point?We also get to see a pagan ritual
where naked men sing to the sun and dance around in a circle. After visiting all these places and
more, the woman decides not to cross to Palestine, after all. So, we wind up back at home
again, at a pretty little house in New England. It’s evening, and quails are calling out from the
trees. All of a sudden, a group of pigeons appears in the sky, swooping and turning this way and
that. After this acrobatic performance, they spread their wings and fly off into the
darkness.What do Wallace Stevens and hip-hop music have in common? Rhythm, and lots of it.
In both "Sunday Morning" and a hip-hop song, the rhythm matters at least as much as the
words. A hip-hop singer is usually willing to risk using a lyric that doesn’t make perfect sense if it
flows really well. Stevens does the same thing in his almost-perfect blank verse lines, which
usually have exactly 10 syllables. The meaning doesn’t have to be crystal clear, but it had better
sound good.Take these lines from stanza III about the Roman god Jove: "No mother suckled
him, no sweet land gave / Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind" (lines 32-33). You can
probably ask a lot of scholars what these lines mean, and you’ll get a lot of different answers.
What exactly are "large-mannered motions," and is "mythy" even a word? But, if you read
these lines out loud, they just make sense somehow. The rhythm is interesting, and the
repeated use of words that begin with the letter "m" slows down the poem and prepares us for
the word "magnificent." Something about those "m" words – we’re not sure exactly what –
gives the impression that the poem is talking about a powerful and important subject – which is
appropriate, because it’s talking about the chief god of Roman mythology.The rhythm of a good
hip-hop song is never boring or monotonous. There are usually a lot of pauses, and the song
speeds up or slows down at different times. Sometimes, the artist will throw in some word or
reference that will make the listener say, "Whoa, where did that come from?" Stevens does all
of these things. Check out how many periods and commas there are in the middle of his lines.
He’s constantly mixing things up. He uses all kinds of cool-sounding adjectives like "ambiguous,"
"savage," and "inarticulate," along with old-school words like "wont" and "whither."And, just
when you start to follow what he’s saying, he changes the subject – like when he comes out of
nowhere to describe naked men singing at a pagan ritual in stanza VII. It’s not that he
deliberately tries to be confusing: he just wants to keep you on your toes. When you are
learning to dance, people always say that following the beat is the most important thing. Do the
same thing while reading "Sunday Morning," and you’ll discover that it is poetry you can
(almost) dance to."Sunday Morning." A pretty straightforward title, right? But, it provides
information about the setting that we otherwise wouldn’t know from reading the poem. If you
hadn’t read the title, you’d probably wonder why in the world this woman keeps thinking about
the sacrifice of Jesus. Some scholars even believe that the poem is set on Easter Sunday, which
celebrates the resurrection of Christ after his crucifixion. This is quite possible – it does seem
like the poem takes place in the springtime – but, even if the poem is set at Easter, Stevens
doesn’t want us to know that. He wants to keep the title general. This could be any warm Sunday
morning.Although the poem gives us the very specific thoughts of one woman, Stevens figures
that most Americans can probably relate to the experience of enjoying a late breakfast in their
pajamas on the "day of rest," when things slow down and people have time to think serious
thoughts. Also, keep in mind that "Sunday" also reads as "Sun-day," the day of the sun. We
normally associate Sunday with the Christian calendar, but, here, it could refer to a different kind
of "day of worship": worship of the sun.

(8) Snow Line

It's extremely difficult trying to figure out what every line means. Some of the images are crazy-
confusing, and even Stevens’s editor at Poetry magazine couldn’t figure them out. But, if you
stick to the main path and focus on the conflict between different ideas of "heaven" and
"paradise," you’ll get a lot out of this poem.
Beautiful, totally confusing images

At a lot of points in this poem, you might find yourself thinking, "Wow, that’s an amazing
image. Now, what the heck is he talking about?" What does it mean, for example, to say that, "a
calm darkens among water-lights" (line 8)? Quite frankly, we don’t know. But, doesn’t it just
sound awesome? That’s Stevens for you. If you don’t mind being baffled, check out his poem
"Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock," which includes a baboon and a drunken sailor.