It's probably a passé interpretation made by everyone and her sister decades ago, but the poem always seemed to me to grow out of the refraction of light through a clear round glass jar, in which the image of everything past the jar is pulled in, contracted, and drawn up and in toward the middle of the jar, acting as a lens: Human perception and the conception of the world growing out of it pulling everything into a sort of order not there outside the jar, but in the jar, yes, and any creativity of the jar is out there in the world viewed through it. But then I always associate the poem with "Stars at Tallapoosa," which in some ways inverts the ideas of "Anecdote of the Jar"--the eye of the viewer is disembodied and encased within the dark night viewing the black lid of the night sky above it ("The body is no body to be seen / But is an eye that studies its black lid"), and where in "Anecdote" the light is refracted, curved and causing the world to curve by the jar, in "Tallapoosa" human vision is utterly straight, perhaps straighter than anything in nature, and sharp-edged and cold-minded ("The lines are straight and swift between the stars"; "But in yourself is like: / A sheaf of brilliant arrows flying straight, / Flying and falling straightway for their pleasure. // Their pleasure that is all bright-edged and cold..."). Which coheres with his frequent delight in summer warmth and vibrant colors as the pinnacle of the cyclical earthly (so often situated in the American South or other places away from New England with such delightfully tongue-tripping names), birthing green growth and rife metaphors (in at least one of his summer poems) and winter cold and barrenness as the austerity of the senses that focuses the mind upon the eternally true (and which kills metaphor, and anything that is not there and the nothing that is, which goes with the metaphysics of "Esthétique du Mal": "Except for us, / Vesuvius might consume / In solid fire the utmost earth and know / No pain... / This is a part of the sublime / From which we shrink. And yet, except for us, / The total past felt nothing when destroyed" --And if this is reminiscent of Auden's "Homage to Clio," well, that's one reason it's perhaps my favorite of Auden's poems), and the necessity of both ("The greatest poverty is not to live / In a physical world... / Perhaps, / After death, the non-physical people, in paradise, / Itself non-physical, may, by chance, observe / The green corn gleaming and experience / The minor of what we feel." "Esthétique du Mal" XV).
I find myself resisting strongly the theory that the jar is a glass canning jar. I've always seen it as an earthenware jar because it is described as "gray and bare". You could I suppose at a stretch call a glass jar "gray" but it feels like a stretch to me. Glass gleams and reflects and as a canning jar is transparent, it will take on the colors of its surroundings, which seems like the opposite or what Stevens' jar is doing.
I love this poem, but I disagree with the interpretation(s) you offer. I don't think that Stevens means for us to condemn the dominion of the jar over "that slovenly wilderness" but is rather suggesting that human art orders nature rightly and provides a valid -- perhaps the only valid? -- framework through which to apprehend it. As such, it's a metanarrative about what poetry is and does.
Thank you for the interesting analysis of an old favorite. I was thrilled when I first read of Pearce's hypothesis about the Dominion canning jar. Perhaps it doesn't help with interpreting the poem, as you say, but it connects the poem to a homely artifact in the human world. If there is a glass canning jar, somewhere there are a glass factory; gardens growing fruit and vegetables to be canned; folks who are raising the garden, picking the crop, and standing red-faced in a hot kitchen to can the harvest; shelves in a cool, dark part of a building where the cans are stored; and hot dinners in midwinter when the summer produce of the earth, changed in color and taste by the heat of canning but still nutritious and tasty, brings a family together.
Perhaps the perfect roundness of the jar is important in the sense that it does not exist in nature--or I least I suppose that's true, as I've read that no straight lines exist in nature. The poem insists on roundness, as you note indirectly--sur-round, a-round, even perhaps g-round. Natured arrayed around that roundness would no longer be wild.
Very helpful and persuasive. Thanks for investing the time and articulating what this lazier reader is more likely to leave in the status of vague feeling.
It's probably a passé interpretation made by everyone and her sister decades ago, but the poem always seemed to me to grow out of the refraction of light through a clear round glass jar, in which the image of everything past the jar is pulled in, contracted, and drawn up and in toward the middle of the jar, acting as a lens: Human perception and the conception of the world growing out of it pulling everything into a sort of order not there outside the jar, but in the jar, yes, and any creativity of the jar is out there in the world viewed through it. But then I always associate the poem with "Stars at Tallapoosa," which in some ways inverts the ideas of "Anecdote of the Jar"--the eye of the viewer is disembodied and encased within the dark night viewing the black lid of the night sky above it ("The body is no body to be seen / But is an eye that studies its black lid"), and where in "Anecdote" the light is refracted, curved and causing the world to curve by the jar, in "Tallapoosa" human vision is utterly straight, perhaps straighter than anything in nature, and sharp-edged and cold-minded ("The lines are straight and swift between the stars"; "But in yourself is like: / A sheaf of brilliant arrows flying straight, / Flying and falling straightway for their pleasure. // Their pleasure that is all bright-edged and cold..."). Which coheres with his frequent delight in summer warmth and vibrant colors as the pinnacle of the cyclical earthly (so often situated in the American South or other places away from New England with such delightfully tongue-tripping names), birthing green growth and rife metaphors (in at least one of his summer poems) and winter cold and barrenness as the austerity of the senses that focuses the mind upon the eternally true (and which kills metaphor, and anything that is not there and the nothing that is, which goes with the metaphysics of "Esthétique du Mal": "Except for us, / Vesuvius might consume / In solid fire the utmost earth and know / No pain... / This is a part of the sublime / From which we shrink. And yet, except for us, / The total past felt nothing when destroyed" --And if this is reminiscent of Auden's "Homage to Clio," well, that's one reason it's perhaps my favorite of Auden's poems), and the necessity of both ("The greatest poverty is not to live / In a physical world... / Perhaps, / After death, the non-physical people, in paradise, / Itself non-physical, may, by chance, observe / The green corn gleaming and experience / The minor of what we feel." "Esthétique du Mal" XV).
A provocative poem.
I’ve always thought it was a remark about the incommensurate difference between human artifice and nature. Similar to what Julia says above.
Well, not always. At first I was just baffled.
I find myself resisting strongly the theory that the jar is a glass canning jar. I've always seen it as an earthenware jar because it is described as "gray and bare". You could I suppose at a stretch call a glass jar "gray" but it feels like a stretch to me. Glass gleams and reflects and as a canning jar is transparent, it will take on the colors of its surroundings, which seems like the opposite or what Stevens' jar is doing.
This is what the jar looks like in my imagination: https://www.etsy.com/listing/4338415459/small-vintage-stoneware-crock-rustic?gpla=1&gao=1&&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=shopping_us_-home_and_living&utm_custom1=_k_CjwKCAjwpefSBhBvEiwAzyEtZ6Gc8GAY-cnkyZ_JEuGkCZkSE_M5fxHxjTFUZrZ8cUdtHOD0f1yOWhoCXlEQAvD_BwE_k_&utm_content=go_22134364040_172270924023_729434469818_aud-2320558161823:pla-303628061699_c__4338415459_12768591&utm_custom2=22134364040&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=22134364040&gbraid=0AAAAADtcfRLhjchNiZp7l997dYObqHm-2&gclid=CjwKCAjwpefSBhBvEiwAzyEtZ6Gc8GAY-cnkyZ_JEuGkCZkSE_M5fxHxjTFUZrZ8cUdtHOD0f1yOWhoCXlEQAvD_BwE
I love this poem, but I disagree with the interpretation(s) you offer. I don't think that Stevens means for us to condemn the dominion of the jar over "that slovenly wilderness" but is rather suggesting that human art orders nature rightly and provides a valid -- perhaps the only valid? -- framework through which to apprehend it. As such, it's a metanarrative about what poetry is and does.
That's how I've always read it too: the jar as a symbol of poetry and human art more broadly and the order it brings.
P.S. I was quite literally thrilled to see this come up in my feed. That's how much I love the poem.
This was one of the poems on my senior comps list I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read it.
Thank you for the interesting analysis of an old favorite. I was thrilled when I first read of Pearce's hypothesis about the Dominion canning jar. Perhaps it doesn't help with interpreting the poem, as you say, but it connects the poem to a homely artifact in the human world. If there is a glass canning jar, somewhere there are a glass factory; gardens growing fruit and vegetables to be canned; folks who are raising the garden, picking the crop, and standing red-faced in a hot kitchen to can the harvest; shelves in a cool, dark part of a building where the cans are stored; and hot dinners in midwinter when the summer produce of the earth, changed in color and taste by the heat of canning but still nutritious and tasty, brings a family together.
Perhaps the perfect roundness of the jar is important in the sense that it does not exist in nature--or I least I suppose that's true, as I've read that no straight lines exist in nature. The poem insists on roundness, as you note indirectly--sur-round, a-round, even perhaps g-round. Natured arrayed around that roundness would no longer be wild.
Quite different in its personal focus, but I was weirdly reminded of Ebon Flood gently setting down his jug in the middle stanza, introducing a universal perspective in the centre of the poem ("And only when assured that on firm earth / It stood, as the uncertain lives of men / Assuredly did not,"): https://poemsancientandmodern.substack.com/p/todays-poem-mr-floods-party-be8?r=9w4rx&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Very helpful and persuasive. Thanks for investing the time and articulating what this lazier reader is more likely to leave in the status of vague feeling.