I receive a surprising number of Google hits from people searching for information about two Wallace Stevens poems that I have previously discussed, “The Emperor of Ice Cream” and “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock.” Since getting these types of Google hits is vastly more rewarding than getting hits for “cigarettes that billie joe smokes” and “babes in gym shorts,” I decided to dissect another Wallace Stevens poem, one that uses seasonal phrases like “turgid summer” and “thunder’s rattapallax” (a word that’s not in the dictionary, but still in limited usage on the internet).
“Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs.” It’s a fun title, rhyming, obviously a food chain, but what does it mean? Well, the poem features one character, a simple man who built a cabin and tended a field. His life is “indolent, arid,” and time seems to suckle “on his arid being.” Note how Stevens uses the word “arid” twice in reference to the man. This guy is parched, probably an old, withered man who is just trying to survive.
Compare the parched man to the other character in the poem, the swine-like rivers, so swollen with water that they tug at the banks like a hog’s snout foraging for food. Like a hog, the river is lazy, greedy, and relentless. The parched man is a frequent visitor to the river; this is made clear by Stevens’ reference to “quirks of imagery,” that such an arid man would be in the presense of the lush moisture of the river, so “grotesque” in its persistent flow.
It’s tempting to make grand proclamations about what Stevens is saying in this poem because it seems rife with allegory. You could say, for instance, that the hog and the river represent nature, and the man represents humanity, and while humanity may rule the food chain for now, in the end nature will endure, yadda yadda yadda. But Wallace Stevens didn’t like his poetry to “think” like this, so I think Stevens is writing about an old man whose time for eating hogs has come and gone.
“Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs”
It is true that the rivers went nosing like swine,
Tugging at banks, until they seemed
Bland belly-sounds in somnolent troughs,
That the air was heavy with the breath of these swine,
The breath of turgid summer, and
Heavy with thunder’s rattapallax,
That the man who erected this cabin, planted
This field, and tended it awhile,
Knew not the quirks of imagery,
That the hours of his indolent, arid days,
Grotesque with this nosing in banks,
This somnolence and rattapallax,
Seemed to suckle themselves on his arid being,
As the swine-like rivers suckled themselves
While they went seaward to the sea-mouths.
–Wallace Stevens
