Wallace Stevens in Connecticut

The people of New Haven, "plain men" in a plain town, confront the world without (for example, the projection of tropical luxuriance, which has to be imagined later in the poem), but they do have architecture and culture, Yale and everything it represents. Section VII offers the city's cultural institutions as sources of interpretation of the "Naked Alpha" with which the experience of reality begins, as well as the "hierophant Omega" (in VI), where it concludes:

In the presence of such chapels and such schools,

The impoverished architects appear to be

Much richer, more fecund, sportive and alive. But these cultural monuments are not the only forms after which we model our experience. In fact, they and other external manifestations of form reinforce a rather commonplace notion of reality:

The objects tingle and the spectator moves

With the objects. But the spectator also moves

With lesser things, with things exteriorized

Out of rigid realists. It is as if

Men turning into things, as comedy,

Stood, dressed in antic symbols, to display

The truth about themselves, having lost, as things,

That power to conceal they had as men,

Not merely as to depth but as to height

As well, not merely as to the commonplace

But, also, as to their miraculous,

Conceptions of new mornings of new worlds. New Haven tempts us to "fling ourselves, constantly longing, on this form" (VIII), on commonplace reality. The streets breathe it, and we breathe the breath of the streets, so "We keep coming back and coming back / To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns / That fall upon it out of the wind." Tempted by powerfully concrete manifestations, "We seek / the poem of pure reality, untouched / By trope or deviation" (IX) and attempt to link word and object in a simple but impossible bond. But like seekers of real toads in imaginary gardens we can enter the metaphysical streets of physical New Haven, and through the imagination see real things more fully, more as themselves. "Juda becomes New Haven, or else must" (XI) because the "profoundest forms" are the product of metaphysical seeing. Only a town that could remind one of Juda and yet still be made of the most commonplace reality could satisfy Professor Eucalyptus, who looks for god in a shabby room in New Haven, whose pantheism suggests the aesthetic that rejects trope and would embrace the word as if embracing the thing itself:

The dry eucalyptus seeks god in the rainy cloud.

Professor Eucalyptus of New Haven seeks him

In New Haven with an eye that does not look

Beyond the object. He sits in his room, beside

The window, close to the ramshackle spout in which

The rain falls with a ramshackle sound. He seeks

God in the object itself, without much choice.

It is a choice of the commodious adjective

For what he sees, it comes in the end to that.

(XIV)

Clearly New Haven lends itself to this sort of seeking because it is so utterly, temptingly commonplace, a "dilapidation of dilapidations" (XVI). This is precisely the city Stevens requires for his musing on self-dilapidation and the temptation to allow the imagination to wither under the pressure of reality. Its very ordinariness tempts the ephebe to envision something beyond it. just as the free verse of "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" slyly suggests blank verse to the eye and ear but refuses its formal confinement, so the city itself suggests larger ideas of form, larger ideas of reality than it actually embodies. The pressure of reality is not as great here as it first appears, just as the poem's verse is not so restrictive as it appears. If one brings "a strong mind" to "a weak neighborhood" (XIII) one is able to define "a fresh spiritual" and distinguish "The actual landscape with its actual horns" and get "at an essential integrity."