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58 Lisa Goldfarb

great bronze bells that ring every quarter hour. Tonight I heard them for the second
time—but really (or the first time to listen to them. They are immensely high up in the air.
It is splendid" (CS 261-62).
One of the most distinctive features of Stevens' musicality is not only the sheer variety of
sounds we hear, but the disparate worlds from which these sounds arise. Stevens
orchestrates a poetic world in which he measures the relations between the raw natural
sounds of the earth and the sounds of musical instruments. In some early letters one can
see Stevens ponder the shape of the unique world of sound both in the way he studies the
relations between the sounds he hears and in his delight in unusual sonic combin• tions.
That he contemplated the relation between the random sounds he heard—the playing of
an occasional street musician or a natural sound—with the concert music he appreciated
most is clear from a few early letters to Elsie. Consider the way Stevens conveys his
responses to the sound of a street harpist in the following passage from a letter of June
24. 1909:

After dinner to-night I sat out-doors for a while. A man with a harp came along and
played across the street —and may be playing yet. Yet a harp is a poor thing to play in
the street. No one could imagine, to hear it. how wonderful it is in an orchestra—in
good music—when, for example, there is a pause and suddenly (while you wait for the next
sound) arpeggios and long runs thrill over it—and the violins begin again, and all the
rest. (CS 228)

Here we can discern how he begins to measure the qualities of musical sound, one in
relation to another. Struck by what he considers the meager sound of the street harpist,
Stevens contemplates the difference between what he hears and what he knows to be
possible. Although he states that "No one could imagine" the sound of a harp in an
orchestra, once he notes his response to the harpist, he proceeds to describe exactly what
that wonderful sound might be.
In another letter that same summer, Stevens again contemplates the relation between
musical sounds when he writes about a little cricket that sang in the rain," which he
hears from his lodgings, and considers the relation between the sounds of the cricket and
instrumental music. In this meditation, he ponders a hierarchy of sound (as he will in his
poems), first comparing the cricket's sounds to the mechanical sound of a clock, then to
a composition by Alexander Glazunov:

Under my window, the little cricket that sang in the rain—so long ago, it seems—chirps, chirps,
chirps—like—well, like an old clock. (CS 264)

A fuller meditation on the sounds of the cricket comes a bit later in the letter:

chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp.... It reminds me of a Russian

symphony I heard a winter or two ago—hy Glazounoff, I think. One

23:33
(4.)
24/05/2019