Once every year or so, I get onto YouTube and type in “Bill Murray Wallace Stevens.”
The comedian has, at various times, invoked the verse of our Poesopher of Hartford, reading it at St. Mark’s NYC and on construction sites.
And he always picks short gems — deep cuts, indicating that he not only reads Wallace Stevens, but really reads him. (My favorite rendition is his “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts.”)
This morning, it was “The Planet on the Table,” and I found myself reliving the poem afresh.
So much so that I chose to type the entire thing out. Just to feel the syntax in my hands, and each short word which Wallace wrote.
The poem is from The Rock (1954), Stevens’ final collection, written when he was in his seventies and looking back at a life’s work of making poems. It begins with a choice that matters and seems, without that context, rather matter-of-fact: “Ariel was glad he had written his poems.”
Not Wallace Stevens was glad. Not the poet. Ariel.
Also, perhaps more significant, not Prospero.
If you know your Shakespeare, you know Ariel is the spirit in The Tempest—the airy, imaginative being who serves Prospero’s magic, creating illusions and tempests, longing the whole time for freedom (despite the fact that he’s incorporeal). At the play’s end, Prospero releases him: “Then to the elements / Be free, and fare thou well!”
Stevens chooses to see himself not as Prospero, the commanding magician (often said to signify Shakespeare himself), but as Ariel—the one who serves the creative work, who makes at another’s bidding, who seeks freedom through the making itself.
Here’s the poem:
The Planet on the Table
Ariel was glad he had written his poems.
They were of a remembered time
Or of something seen that he liked.Other makings of the sun
Were waste and welter
And the ripe shrub writhed.His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of his self,
Were no less makings of the sun.It was not important that they survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.
Glad You Could Make It
That word “glad.” Not proud, not satisfied, not triumphant—glad. It’s such a quiet word for a lifetime of work. And then the casualness of the next lines: poems about “a remembered time / Or of something seen that he liked.” That’s it? That’s what poetry is—things you remember and things you like?
But something deeper is happening. The second stanza shifts suddenly: “Other makings of the sun / Were waste and welter / And the ripe shrub writhed.” Wait, what? All those Ws slow you up. Waste, welter, writhed. And if you know Stevens—if you know “The Comedian as the Letter C,” where he plays with Crispin’s name throughout the entire nearly epic poem—you start to wonder: is Wallace working through his own letter here? The W working itself out?
Two-in-One
“A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.”
— Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
Stevens gives us sun and shrub, self and planet. The imagery is cosmic but also intimate—we can picture the “ripe shrub” writhing (writing?). The sun appears as maker, source, generative principle. The One, perhaps, personified in nuclear object. The poems sit on a table like a planet—a world unto themselves, small and complete.
The central claim comes in stanza three: “His self and the sun were one / And his poems, although makings of his self, / Were no less makings of the sun.” His self and the sun and the poems are one. This is the Summa.
Two Kinds of Making
Here’s what the poem teaches about how to live: There’s a difference between the shrub’s writing and the poet’s writing, but both are “makings of the sun.”
The ripe shrub writhed. Past tense. It moved, it grew, it expressed itself. In a sense, it wrote—participated unconsciously in the sun’s creativity, in the One’s self-expression through creation. The shrub is pure vegetative being, pure reception and expression of solar energy. It’s a making of the sun, absolutely. It’s real. And, thus, it is Beautiful.
But it cannot sing.
What’s the difference? Sapience. Consciousness? The human poet adds something the shrub cannot: the ability to witness, to choose, to bear conscious testimony. “Something seen that he liked”—that liking is the human element. The shrub can’t like. The shrub doesn’t remember. (Unless it does.) Like the cloven pine from which Ariel’s been freed, the shrub simply is.
This is precisely what Coleridge meant by the secondary imagination—the human participation in the divine creative power (the primary imagination). The sun makes through both shrub and poet, but the poet participates knowingly. The poet says “yes, and.” The poet attends, considers, imagines.
Stevens is working out the same paradox that sits at the heart of contemplative practice: How can we be so utterly contingent and, thus, dependent (creatures, servants, Ariels bound to serve something greater) and genuinely creative (makers, co-creators, shapers of reality)?
The answer this poem gives: “His self and the sun were one.” Not “the sun obliterated his self” and not “his self created independently of the sun.” Both. One. The poems are “makings of his self” AND “no less makings of the sun.”
This is humility and co-creation held together. It’s interdependent co-origination.
You can’t claim ultimate authorship—it’s all sun, all grace, all gift. But you can’t abdicate responsibility either—your particular self, your particular attention, your particular gladness matters. The shrub’s unconscious writhing is one thing. Your conscious song is another.
The Character of Craft
Now look at how the language enacts this paradox.
“Waste and welter” vs. the “ripe shrub writhed”—what’s the difference? Both are chaotic, both suggest the sun’s overwhelming creative excess. But “waste and welter” are abstract, diffuse. The shrub is particular, embodied, almost achieving something. Almost Wallace. Almost writing. The W connects them—waste, welter, writhed—but the shrub stops short of song.
If, with Crispin, the Comedian is the Letter C—what, with Wallace, is the W?
Then the syntax opens up in stanza three. Long, rolling lines: “And his poems, although makings of his self, / Were no less makings of the sun.” The “although” does crucial work. It acknowledges the objection—yes, they’re personal, yes they’re his—and then insists on the larger truth anyway. The subordinate clause structure mirrors the theological point: the self is real (subordinate clause), AND the sun is the source (main clause).
Then the final stanzas spin the paradox into yet more creative energy.
They claim humility (”It was not important that they survive”) while asserting value (”What mattered was that they should bear / Some lineament or character”). They acknowledge poverty (”the poverty of their words”) while claiming wealth (”Some affluence, if only half-perceived”).
This is the poverty/affluence paradox at the heart of language itself. Words are inadequate—hopelessly, always. But words can bear “some lineament”—some trace, some mark, some feature—”Of the planet of which they were part.”
Not about which they were written. Not describing the planet. But of which they were part. The poems don’t stand outside the world commenting on it. They’re part of the world. They’re how the planet (sun, One, God) knows itself through this particular being in the world called Wallace Stevens.
The Co-Creation
Reading this poem closely changed how I understand my own writing. I came in thinking about artistic ambition, about wanting the work to matter, to last, to make a difference. The poem offers something stranger and more freeing: Be glad you made the poems. Let them bear some trace of the world they came from. Don’t worry about survival.
As Leonard Cohen said: “Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”
It’s the same lesson you learn in contemplative practice: You’re not the source. You’re not in control. But your particular attention, your particular presence, your conscious participation matters. The shrub writhes beautifully, but it doesn’t know it’s writhing. You get to know. You get to be glad.
Stevens writing as Ariel—the spirit who served and longed for freedom—suggests that the poems themselves are the freedom. Each one is a release, a return to the elements. You make them, and they’re no longer yours. They’re part of the planet, even as they see the planet as though from above. They’re how the sun sees itself through you.
That’s not diminishment. That’s participation in something so much larger than self that the self becomes meaningful by being part of it.
The question the poem asks you to adopt: Not “will my work survive?” but “does this bear some lineament, some character, of the world it came from?” Not “am I original?” but “am I faithful to what I’ve seen and remembered and liked?”
And we, poets ourselves, are here to co-create, participant in reading, resurrecting the poet from the ash.