13坛子的故事

Anecdote of the Jar

——Wallace Stevens

I placed a jar in Tennessee 我把一只坛子放在田纳西 And round it was, upon a hill. 它圆圆的，矗立在山顶 It made the slovenly wilderness 原本凌乱的荒野 Surround that hill. 因它而向小山环聚 The wilderness rose up to it, 荒野向它涌来 And sprawled around, no longer wild. 并向四周蔓延，不再狂野 The jar was round upon the ground 圆圆的坛子在地面上格外突出 And tall and of a port in air. 高的像空中的海港 It took dominion everywhere. 它统治着所有地方 The jar was gray and bare. 虽然它光秃秃、灰溜溜 It did not give of bird or bush, 它既不长鸟又不长植物 Like nothing else in Tennessee. 但它与田纳西的任何一样东西就是不同

This is a symbolist poem illustrating the order of art in the midst of the confusion of life, and their mutual influence. Symbols : “I”-----artist “Jar”---art

“Wilderness in Tennessee---nature

The poem is characterized by repetition and echo, a series of significant connections.

The theme of the poem is about the relationship between reality and imagination, between art and nature .

Actually this poem explains the relationship between art and the natural world. The jar changes how we perceive nature.

This is about the white man coming to Tennessee and sticking out like a jar on a hill, but having dominion over the wild natives and plants and creatures, and taming them. Like the jar（罐）, the white man put himself above nature, and didn't give back.

文章分析

In the poem, Stevens portrays the complex relationship between human beings and nature through confusions of who is greater than whom, how they depend on each other, the connection between the two, and the form the poem is written in. Stevens makes the reader feel the confusion and chaos present between the jar which is a symbol for human, and nature. This relationship can be felt and read through the form the poem is written in.

The poem uses confusing wording to show the relationship between human beings and nature. For example, line 9 says, \took dominion everywhere.\\refers to nature, meaning the power that nature has over that of the jar (humans). Nature's dominant power weakens humans'. Human beings then become powerless and vulnerable to whatever nature has become. Another line proves this dominant state, \jar was gray and bare.\This line describes the jar of being plain and simple. This normalcy becomes ineffective and powerless. The ordinary doesn't have as much power as the objects that stick out from the crowd. Human beings don't seem to stand out in the vastness of the wilderness.

The next line turns the control in an interesting way: \bush.\Because the jar is in the previous line, it is natural to think \in this line refers to the jar. The plot begins to thicken as it is previously suggested that the wilderness had all the control in the relationship. The jar now becomes an authority because it will not give into the natural world. To the reader, the relationship just becomes undefined. The power is turned over from nature to man.

Stevens also shows the dominant issue in the beginning of the poem. He says, \made the slovenly wilderness /Surround that hill.\The authority is placed again in front of the jar. The wilderness is careless and aware of this new object placed in its environment. Then the poem states, \wilderness rose up to it / And sprawled around no longer wild.\charge. The reversal of the roles contains the poem in an environment of utter confusion. Stevens showed the reader that this relationship really was chaotic, throughout the poem, to prove his point.

Stevens created this confusing state to allow the reader to really feel what the relationship is between the two. This relationship is hard to understand and is something that cannot be set. Using irregular rhymes and wording, Stevens was able to create this unsolvable relationship. Stevens proves that his idea of the relationship between human and nature is correct. For example, this very paper is from a tree that man has cut down, showing that nature is defenseless. On the other hand, there are certainly a number of hurricanes, tornadoes, avalanches, etc. happening in the world every day. Humans can do nothing to prevent these disasters from happening. Neither human nor wilderness is the dominant source.

来自维基百科

\first published in 1919, so it is in the public domain.[1]

This famous, much-anthologized poem succinctly accommodates a remarkable number of different and plausible interpretations, as Jacqueline Brogan observes in a discussion of how she teaches it to her students.[2] It can be approached from a New Critical perspective as a poem about writing poetry and making art generally. From a poststructuralist perspective the poem is concerned with temporal and linguistic disjunction, especially in the convoluted syntax of the last two lines. A feminist perspective reveals a poem concerned with male dominance over a traditionally feminized landscape. A cultural critic might find a sense of industrial imperialism. Brogan concludes: \the debate gets particularly intense, I introduce Roy Harvey Pearce's discovery of the Dominion canning jars (a picture[3] of which is then passed around).\

Buttel suggests that the speaker would arrange the wild landscape into the order of a still life, and

though his success is qualified, art and imagination do at least impose an idea of order on the sprawling reality.

Helen Vendler, in a reading that contradicts Brogan's and Buttel's, asserts that the poem is incomprehensible except as understood as a commentary on Keats's \on a Grecian Urn\alluding to it as a way of discussing the predicament of the American artist, \cannot feel confidently the possessor, as Keats felt, of the Western cultural tradition.\imported from Europe (\read\palinode, retracting the Keatsian conceits of \Morning\and vowing \stop imitating Keats and seek a native American language that will not take the wild out of the wilderness.\

Wallace Stevens，1879～1955.美国著名诗人。他一向认为，诗人应该在现实与想象两个领域内生活，努力在它们之间架设桥梁。作者一生热衷于探讨和表现这两个领域的关系。这是理解他的诗歌的关键所在。作者最关心的问题是在这个道德沦丧信仰动摇孤独苦闷的现代世界中，艺术家的使命与艺术的价值究竟何在？人们的精神空虚及信仰危机何以补偿？现实中失去的秩序与信仰可在艺术中重现，艺术家应像过去的传教士那样，在这个迷惘的世界中为人们指明方向，做他们的精神向导。“在人们的现实生活中肩负起自己的使命，并努力为他们和他本人创作出他们在这种生活中所需要的诗歌。”Stevens的诗反复探讨想象力的作用。他认为诗人要从污秽的现实里发现美、快乐、意义和目的。在他看来，具有想象力的诗人是英雄般的诗人，诗歌是现代生活中的一种重要启示，它启示人们看到英雄主义，看到现代人正视现代生活的虚无性质，并赋予生活以秩序和意义，给人以勇气和力量。 《坛子的故事》所表现的可能是艺术的功能及其与现实关系。坛子可能是艺术和想象力的象征；田纳西州的荒野是自然界的象征。当坛子立在荒野上时，一个奇迹出现了：本来混乱无章的荒野变得秩序井然。换言之，坛子为荒野带来形式、秩序和意义。诗人可能在说，人所见到的秩序是他自己造就的，他所生活的世界大多也是自己造就的。另一方面诗人又似乎又说，坛子作为人造的“艺术品”又与其周围的一切有所不同，它之所以能发挥任何作用，又是因为有周围世界的存在，即周围的自然界对它有限制作用。

其他资料（大家随便看看吧）

With all the confusion in the poem, Stevens reveals an underlying message to the reader. Line 7 in the poem reads, \dependency of humans on nature. Through the rhymes of \relationship. To achieve a rhyme such as this, the two words have to be consistent and dependent on each other. Stevens shows the dependent relationship of humans to nature through these two words. It is a very solid line that helps the reader not to be totally confused when reading the poem. This line also begins to show the base for the relationship.

The next line (8) also supports this hidden security of the relationship between human and the natural world. It says, \between human and nature. The \refers to a connecting force that ties the relationship together. The jar, being \confusion and chaos, there is a deeper meaning to the relationship. The \

confusion to get above it and reveal the true relationship. Stevens used the word \the unseen connection. We, as humans, depend on air to survive. Although we have never seen, touched, or heard air, we know that it is there and depend on it to live. Stevens refers to air to show the unseen connection between mankind and the natural world. This connection is very important and crucial to the relationship. In fact, the relationship depends on this connection. Another way to look at the connection of humans to the natural world is through the first and last lines of the poem. These two lines embody the poem to start and finish in a calm way. Both end in the word Tennessee. This can show the relationship outline as being simple. Just as the port went above all the chaos, the outline of the poem goes around the chaos The first line of the poem is the beginning of the relationship. This opens the reader in a confusing state to figure out what Stevens is really trying to get across. This mass confusion is the body of the relationship. Somewhere in the poem, Stevens shows in a deeper meaning of the relationship through a connection. As the poem nears the end, the same word is used to end the poem. That is the end of the relationship; there is no more to be added. It leaves the reader feeling satisfied, even if he or she didn't understand the content of the poem.

Stevens truly does a wonderful job of portraying the relationship of humans to nature. By using the jar to represent man, he was successful in creating an environment not only expressed in the poem, but also felt by the reader. He used irregular rhymes and role changes to express the complex relationship. The reader is left with confusion but an slight understanding of the relationship. Stevens expressed the relationship of humans to nature very well m this piece of work.

After reading and thinking about the poem above, have you understood something out of those lines? It is only about a jar literally, but figuratively reflect more about the relationship between nature and humans, the meaning of art, as well as the philosophy of comphehending the world which we are living in every single second.

Without a jar, the wilderness is the wilderness.The living things there have their own ways to live without any order among them. Birth, existence, survival and death, no emotion, no more thought, the circulation of species would be impassively on-going. This quiteness of nature can be maintained millions of years if no interruption occurs.

Till appears the jar, everything in the wilderness changed dramatically. Imagine that you are standing in the wild Tennessee and looking around, you must see nothing but the jar---definitely the focus. You would think how it is there? why it's been left there? Whether it is nice? What your feelings are when seeing it? etc. Suddenly, the whole place of Tennessee becomes meanful and it's nolonger desolate anymore.

The jar means humanity, means culture, means art and artistic imaginations. With a jia being there, the wilderness got a center, and then, an order for everything. The soil, the sand, the patches of grass and clumps of bush are soon under dominance of it. The jar adds some thought to this place, just like art, turning the dead to live. Art is magic. It fantasize the nature. Without art, we are nothing and dead.

The jar means humanity, means culture, means art and artistic imaginations. With a jia being there, the wilderness got a center, and then, an order for everything. The soil, the sand, the patches of grass and clumps of bush are soon under dominance of it. The jar adds some thought to this place, just like art, turning the dead to live. Art is magic. It fantasize the nature. Without art, we are nothing and dead.

Industry and the urbanization of the American landscape had taken a stronghold by the early twentieth century. By the 1950s and 1960s, technology formed the American way of life. The union of man's technological inventions with an American wilderness is metaphorically represented in Wallace Stevens's poem, \pastoral theme to create an existence of \against nature's cyclical and incessant pattern.

\of the theme. Stevens asserted himself that giving an explanation for a poem removes all curiosity to explore the meaning any further, and paraphrasing obliterates the meaning (Lensing 270). The versatility of interpretation is limited to the subject, but there is no definitive explanation as Stevens expressed when asked to define his own poetry.[1] For this reason, the pastoral theme is only one view of the different \

Pastoral themes are evident throughout literary history.[2] The ancient pastoral ideal applies to modern society's search for the utopian paradise without negating civilization.[3] Tennessee wilderness, where the narrator places the jar, is an uncorrupted but slovenly nature. Civilization, or art created by man, is composed within the jar, man's manipulation of the natural elements. The jar of civilization when placed in unadulterated nature \

wilderness surround that hill.\for humankind's pastoral vision.

Many critics have compared \Urn.\of bird or bush.\poems and unifies the artifice of man in the presence of sublime nature.[5] According to Northrop There is a pastoral similarity between the art represented in both

Frye, an unifying symbol can connect two poems and unify the \archetype.[6]

The pastoral image appears to exist for no other reason but to describe pleasing scenery for pure aesthetics,[7] pastoralism is in opposition to modern technology, and this magnetic opposition is discussed at length by Leo Marx in his The Machine in the Garden published in 1964, some 40 years after Stevens wrote \Western except when humankind exerts its \

society rejuvenated the ancient pastoral ideal. The American view of life became \retreat to an oasis of harmony and joy\in the discovery of the New World, but industrialization became the 'machine' is the 'jar.' Marx illustrates the contradictory union of civilization and man just as Stevens does in \Jar.\[8]

Nathaniel Hawthorn describes \out among the woods, which surround it on all sides, it being pretty near circular, or oval, and two or three hundred yards...But hark! there is the whistle of the locomotive---\This passage examines the technology of man in a metaphorical circular union with nature because after the train goes by and the whistle noise disappears in the distance

everything returns back to nature. Just as nature \longer wild\circular\that occurs again and again in American literature (32). The roundness in \Stevens's \shapes the pastoral metaphor occurring in American poetry.

The circular, round, and repeating pattern of the \against an external reality, one of a never-ending interplay of \inconstancy.\passing through nature as we long for an eternal existence among nature? The \humankind's aesthetic existence within the constant and

[1]\the other hand, it is not the simplest thing in the thing in the world to explain a poem. I thought of it this way this morning: a poem is like a man walking on the bank of a river, whose shadow is reflected in the water. If you explain a poem, you are quite likely to do it either in terms of the man or in terms of the shadow, but you have to explain it in terms of the whole\271).

[2]Pastorals about shepherds were first written by Theocritus (c. 316-c.260 BC). \great antiquity and interpenetrates many works in Classical and modern European literature.\(Cuddon 686).

[3]\the court and town, away from corruption, war, strife, the love of gain, away from 'getting and spending.' In a way it reveals a yearning for a lost innocence, for a pre-Fall paradisal life in which man existed in harmony with nature\

[4]Helen Vendler discusses the poverty of the American poet represented in Stevens's Anecdote of the Jar\[5]Bromwich states \Bevis suggests the \Western civilization that \[6]Frye's myth criticism looks at poetry as a \a communicable symbol.... And when pastoral images are deliberately employed...we can see that the convention of the pastoral makes us assimilate these images to other parts of literary experience\

[7]Ettin defines the pastoral image's existence \sheer satisfaction of the scene described\a pastoral poem with \pastoral images function in more traditional works, opposing clutter and corruption (33). [8]\with the aesthetic of technology\birds, and flowers...\share the excitement that many of his contemporaries voiced about the look of urban modernity\(Steinman 135).

[9]Carroll argues the poem as a conflict between imagination and reality, and \Tennessee represents a purely formal principle of order, and this order cannot satisfy the deepest needs of Stevens's imagination\

[10]Gray argues the form of the poem leaves an open ended and continuous struggle between the imagination of man and nature by \

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