A Tale of Two Jars – Analysis and Commentary

In this post I offer analysis and commentary about two of my favorite poems.

ANECDOTE OF THE JAR by Wallace Stevens

I placed a jar in Tennessee,  

And round it was, upon a hill.  

It made the slovenly wilderness  

Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.  

The jar was round upon the ground  

And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.  

The jar was gray and bare.

It did not give of bird or bush,  

Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Wallace Stevens’ “Anecdote of the Jar” has taken its honored place in the American canon as a modernist classic. It is widely anthologized, commonly studied, and extensively expounded. We might ask ourselves why a poem so humdrum on the surface has attracted so much attention.

At first glance, the poem appears to be about just a jar. The poem says nothing more than what it literally states. The speaker in the poem says he placed a jar on top of a hill, and the wilderness grew up around the jar. He reports his impression of the entire scenario—the jar dominated the burgeoning surroundings, not the other way around. We are tempted to simply acknowledge his sentiments and give them no further thought.

However, the way the poem is written, indeed, the very fact that the anecdote is constructed as a poem, tells us that we are being presented with more than just a trivial story.

We are told that once the jar had been implanted, the wilderness was “no longer wild.” Atop the hill, the jar assumed a notable salience—it was “of a port in air” and it “took dominion everywhere.” Whatever the state of Tennessee gave “of bird or bush,” the jar exceeded it “like nothing else in Tennessee.” In other words, the jar is more important than the state of Tennessee, and the treatment of the jar in the poem indicates that it is more than what it is and that it stands for something else.

Some have said that the jar represents the dominion of humanity over nature—a plausible enough interpretation. Others say the poem plays on the timeless motifs elaborated in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats. Still others understand the poem to be about patriarchal oppression, wherein the wilderness is cast as feminine.

Whatever the jar symbolizes, the most compelling aspect of this poem is its assertive and insistent symbolism. “Anecdote of the Jar” is a symbolic poem. It cannot be interpreted any other way.

MANUNGGUL JAR (Manunggul Cave, Palawan; late Neolithic) by Luisa A. Igloria

Someone is loosing the rope

that tethered our boat

to the pier. Here we are, easing

forward into the fog, into the cold

that seems to have gotten colder.

We’ll pass the shuttered town,

we’ll slip into the currents

blue with the ink of unborn stars.

We’ll love them no less, no more,

even as the water swirls, changing

from jade to milk. The world we enter

then leave is round as the bowl of our

desires, and here the word for horizon

is the same as faithfulness: invisible

rudder our hands have always held,

even as now we cross our arms

across our chests, preparing

to travel farther, deeper.

See: https://poetryofgonzalinhodacosta.blogspot.com/2016/03/a-favorite-poem.html

Wallace Stevens has been described as “willfully difficult.” This recently published poem by Luisa A. Igloria about a Philippine burial jar is, in contrast, an easy read, nowhere near impenetrable.

Between the archaeological object in the poem and death there is a literal and symbolic connection: the jar is used to entomb the bones of the dead.

Principal subject of the poem is the clay sculpture that embellishes the jar’s lid. Depicted in miniature are two voyagers on a boat, Charon’s yacht minus the ferryman.

The poem is distinguished by its deftly wrought, often multi-layered metaphors—ocean currents of a cosmos “blue with the ink of unborn stars,” for example, or our desires a “bowl” making up a “world,” the description of a state of being, as it were. Memorable images in dreamy succession evoke contemplative introspection.

The poem is not simply about death but also the afterlife. The afterlife is understood not as extinction but mystery, so that death, and in continuity with it, life, converge.

Two last lines of the poem imply endless advancement in the afterlife, Saint Gregory of Nyssa’s epektasis or “perpetual progress,” possibly.

Closing softly—we feel the pause in “farther, deeper”—the poem rounds out.

It is a fine lyric masterpiece.

Gemini