Cortege for Rosenbloom is a poem from Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar",...

's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1921 and is therefore in the public domain in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 and similar jurisdiction

Jurisdiction

Jurisdiction is the practical authority granted to a formally constituted legal body or to a political leader to deal with and make pronouncements on legal matters and, by implication, to administer justice within a defined area of responsibility...

s.

Cortege for Rosenbloom  Now, the wry Rosenbloom is dead  And his finical carriers tread  On a hundred legs, the tread  Of the dead.  Rosenbloom is dead.  They carry the wizened one  Of the color of horn  To the sullen hill,  Treading a tread  In unison for the dead.  Rosenbloom is dead.  The tread of the carriers does not halt  On the hill, but turns  Up the sky.  They are bearing his body into the sky.  It is the infants of misanthropes  And the infants of nothingness  That tread  The wooden ascents  Of the ascending of the dead.  It is turbans they wear  And boots of fur  As they tread the boards  In a region of frost,  Viewing the frost,  To a chirr of gongs  And a chitter of cries  And the heavy thrum  Of the endless tread  That they tread;  To a jangle of doom  And a jumble of words  Of the intense poem  Of the strictest prose  Of Rosenbloom.  And they bury him there,  Body and soul,  In a place in the sky.  The lamentable tread!  Rosenbloom is dead.

A letter written by Stevens in 1921 includes a commentary on the poem in which he alludes to one `Miss Fowler' at Tufts College, who wrote a letter to the editor of a collection of poetry that included Rosenbloom. Her letter left Stevens uncertain whether she was looking for exegesis or an apology for the editor's choice of the poem. He continues:

From time immemorial the philosophers and other scene painters have daubed the sky with dazzle paint. But it all comes down to the proverbial six feet of earth in the end. This is as true of Rosenbloom as of Alcibiades. It cannot be possible that they have never munched this chestnut at Tufts. The ceremonies are amusing. Why not fill the sky with scaffolds and stairs, and go about like genuine realists?

The reader of the poem almost hears the tread of the `finical carriers' of Rosenbloom's body in the slow march of this funeral procession. Although the poem's heavy beats leave no doubt that Stevens's naturalism is being expressed, there is a suggestion of ineffability when the tread of the carriers `turns up the sky'. The label transcendental naturalism is not ill-suited to characterize the outlook of this and similar poems in Stevens's oeuvre.

The transcendental naturalism of some of Colin McGinn's

Colin McGinn

Colin McGinn is a British philosopher currently working at the University of Miami. McGinn has also held major teaching positions at Oxford University and Rutgers University. He is best known for his work in the philosophy of mind, though he has written on topics across the breadth of modern...

 work, which construes the mind-body connection (the `world knot') as a natural feature of homo sapiens but `cognitively closed' to our epistemic horizons, is a philosophical analog of this outlook. Stevens comprehends the philosophical impulse to comprehend the transcendent but deems it doomed to fail. We can fill the sky with scaffolds and stairs, but they will not take us where we might want to go. Stevens's so-called `pataphysics' could be viewed as a poetic redirection of the frustrated philosophical desire to know the transcendent nature of things. Compare Homunculus et la Belle Etoile

Homunculus et la Belle Etoile

Homunculus et la Belle Etoile is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1919.The poem pursues a contrast between poeticimagination and philosophical reasoning, the latter understood as...

and Invective Against Swans

Invective Against Swans

"Invective Against Swans" is a poem by Wallace Stevens from his first book of poetry, Harmonium .-Overview:The poem seems to be an insult poem slamming swans, of all things, calling them ganders and...

.

Buttel cites this poem to illustrate the rhythmic effects of Stevens's free verse, comparing and contrasting its effects with Infanta Marina

Infanta Marina

Infanta Marina is a poem in Wallace Stevens' Harmonium about a seaside princess. Helen Vendler presents the poem as a "double scherzo" on 'her' in the possessive sense and on 'of' in its partitive and possessive sense....