Antidote of the Jar
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

First I am going to write what I said in class, after that I’m going to explain some things I have come up with after the class with more thinking about the poem.

In class
This is a poem about the complex nature between humans and nature. The poem is written in a confusing way to show that the relationship is confusing and not well understood. The Jar represents Humans, and the Tennessee, is a place so it and the wilderness represent nature. The poem goes back and forth between who had power over the other. This shows that human’s relationship with nature is always going back and forth, for example people use nature to build things and eat food, yet nature gets at people when there are natural disasters like a hurricane. There are two lines that show people depend on nature to survive, the first is “the jar is round upon the ground” This shows that without the ground the jar would not be able to be placed and it is dependent on the nature. The second line is “and tall and of a port of air” The key part of this line is the Air, air is made by nature but and humans need it to live.
Most of the information for this I got from http://academic.regis.edu/jkarpins/Writings%20for%20Hu201%20Fall2000/anecdote_of_the_jar_by_wallace_s.htm and came up with my self. I am a bit shamed to admit that after I read this paper about the poem I found it difficult to come up with any other meaning than what I read about, but did not realize this until I was in the middle of my presentation in class. So after thinking about it a little bit more I have more to add to what this poem means.

I think it is defiantly about the complex relationship between nature and humans, yet it is more one sided. First, I would not have noticed this if Prof. Sexson did not point it put but the meter breaks down when the wilderness is introduced, but after the jar comes back it is “tamed and put back to normal. This shows how humans tame nature. Something else I did not know was that there was something called the TVA. When I was looking up this poem on Wiki I found that it was first published in 1919. The TVA was formed in the early 1930. So there was a 10 year gap between the two, but I think the poem might have been one of the first protests to building the dams in Tennessee, my guess is (could not find any facts) the TVA was talked about in the 1919’s, and Stevens did not think the rivers should be dammed, so he wrote this poem. Because of his job there was a good chance that he would have herd about this project proposal.

My final observation on Stevens is I don’t think you can read one poem by it’s self and understand it. To begin to understand his poems you need to read and study 6 or more, this way you see the different themes that he has written about and stuff starts to appear more than once. The poems make more sense when more than one is looked at. This I think is the reason that we had that goofy picture on the board during class.