Study Guide

Anecdote of the Jar Analysis

  • Sound Check




    And tall and of a port in air.



  • What's Up With the Title?

    The title tells us that this poem is an anecdote, or a little story, about a jar. When we read this title alone, we can think about a jar, and all the things that a jar can do. It can store food for consumption later, it can hold fun little buttons, it can capture a bug that we've caught. In the verb sense of the word "jar," it can shock us, suddenly, changing our routine and everything that's normal.

    When we think about an anecdote, we think about little stories, sometimes they are funny, sometimes they are moral lessons, and sometimes they're just stories. But when we read this poem, it doesn't really seem like a story at all to us. It's just talking about a jar. The only plot to the tale is that it's taking over the wilderness.

    Yet, it's also a kind of relief that the tale of the jar taking over all this wilderness and making it no longer wild is just an anecdote. If this were truly, literally happening, this would be a disaster of epic proportions, not just a nice little story. So, we've got to think about the irony, the unexpected meaning, of the title as it relates to the rest of the poem. It's more of a warning, it seems like, than a description of actual reality (although, you could argue that humanity has, indeed taken over the wilderness—we'll listen to you!).

    The title is also important in one possible interpretation of the poem: to read it as in discussion with a famous poem by John Keats called "Ode on a Grecian Urn." The urn is beautiful in itself and decorated with scenes of lust and joy and life. The jar is this fat round little thing, sitting on a hill. It's not ancient, Grecian, or beautiful at all. It just is. Yet the jar—like the Grecian urn—as a mere object has some sort of strange power over the growing, living world, at least in the eye of a human beholder.

    So, maybe, especially through the echo in the title, Stevens is saying that he, like Keats, can see the power of objects to say something about life. In the hands of an artist like Stevens, a jar is more than a crummy, little jar. It's the catalyst for this story that he's telling. It's a vessel, filled with ideas about our role in the natural world.

  • Setting

    We've got a pretty clear idea of the setting of this poem. The jar is sitting on the ground, in a hill, in the middle of the wilderness. It's also, of all places, in Tennessee.

    Before we start tackling the mysteries of this setting, let's imagine a little what we already do know about the setting. We can see bushes, and birds, and vines winding up trees. If we were walking in this wilderness, we'd probably be all scratched up from the thorns that get in our way, and have to do a good bit of trailblazing. This wilderness is "slovenly," so we don't think that there could be many paths cut in it.

    But for some reason, the hill the jar is on seems likely to be as gray and bare as the jar itself. The jar is on the ground, and seems to have a central place in the landscape, which makes us think that it can't be obscured by a bush or a tree. The jar, given this place of high ground, seems to be sitting on a little throne, humbling all the scenery around it by force of sheer, man-made ordinariness. The setting of the wilderness, then, serves to heighten the contrast with this unassuming, fabricated, little jar.

    Then, of course, we've got the whole Tennessee thing. We know that Stevens was an East Coast kind of guy—born in Pennsylvania, educated in New York, and a professional in Connecticut. Maybe Tennessee had an appeal to him as a wild, more western state. Clearly, this poem would lose some of its central contrast if it took place in New York City's Central Park.

    More importantly, perhaps, than what state the poem is set in, is that it's set in a state at all. This jar, the speaker tells us, is in the wilderness—but it's also in Tennessee, the man-made name for the state whose boundaries that wilderness is in. So, even as we follow this little artifact of industry into the wilderness, we haven't really escaped civilization at all. Tennessee may be full of things that procreate, are wild, and live outside in the land of birds and bushes, but, after all, Tennessee's boundaries were drawn up by men. By this token, the speaker seems to be asking, "Is there any way to escape to a purely natural setting, one that lacks any stamp of human influence?" We're guessing… no, though it could be fun to try.

  • Speaker

    Though we only hear directly about the speaker once in this poem, the poem's very first word is "I."

    This means that, though we hear little about the personality of the speaker, the rest of the poem is in the light of his action (we're just assuming it's a he, since this is Wallace Stevens' poem). The jar, after all, didn't just magically appear on a hill in the middle of Tennessee. Our speaker put it there.

    Even though the poem moves off to consider the jar, it's important not to forget the word "I." That's because it is from the point of view of this "I" that the wilderness seems to be controlled by the jar. Maybe, he has placed the jar in the wilderness as a sort of experiment. How, he may wonder, will this jar affect the wilderness around it? In the final stanza, we get our answer to that: though the wilderness comes under the reign of the jar, the jar will never actually be part of the wilderness.

    So, this is essentially the result of the experiment that the speaker has conducted in this poem. By that token, we find it striking how Stevens himself, as the writer of the poem, is conducting a very similar experiment to the one undertaken by the speaker. The poem, in a way, represents a kind of investigation. What is the line between the natural and the man-made world? Is that line even an important one to draw? Stevens' writes his poem to think about those questions, in the same way that the speaker puts his jar on a hill in Tennessee.

  • Tough-o-Meter

    (7) Snow Line

    It may seem like a little poem about a jar would be pretty simple to get through, but this one is, well, more jarring than round and smooth. There are lots of lines that throw us for a loop, and the meaning of words and phrases can be easily distorted, as if we'd seen it through the glass of a jar. Yet once we twist open the meaning of this poem, it yields delicious, thought-provoking fruit. And it tastes all the sweeter for the work it took to take off the lid!

  • Calling Card

    Intentional Ambiguity




  • Form and Meter

    Sets of 4, Irregularly





    And round it was upon a hill. (2)


    It made the slovenly wilderness (3)


    Surround that hill. (4)


  • The Jar

    This jar is not your average jar—but then again, it's not your average jar because, well, it is your average jar. Its significance is that it's normal, average, commercial—something you could expect in any and every household. Yet, in this poem, it's been placed into the wilderness, and in this new context, gains a whole new meaning. The jar stands up as a man-made, civilized object in a world that perpetuates itself knowing no laws. Thus, the jar has become a symbol, and is no longer just an object, making it all the more important that we pay attention to its appearances in this poem.

    • Title: This title lets us know that this poem will be about a jar. It's also possibly an allusion, or reference, to the poet John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn."
    • Line 1: This line sets up the imagery of the scene surrounding the jar. With the crucial mention of the word "I," and the state of Tennessee, it shows us that the wilderness in which we later come to see the jar is actually accessible by man, and within a state whose boundaries, certainly, were drawn by men. 
    • Line 2: Surprise, surprise: the jar is round. Aren't most jars round? Well, yes. And so, indeed, are hills. This line makes the scene seem quite ordinary—though we have no idea why the speaker felt the random urge to place the jar on a hill, in Tennessee. Still, we're intrigued. 
    • Line 3: This line is showing us personification, because the jar is taking on human characteristics. Jars can't make anyone do anything—they're not human, they can't persuade. Okay, maybe if they're full of fruit, they can make us salivate, but it's still not the jar, it's the fruit. But that's what's so fun about personification—it opens up a whole new world for our imagination, and a world of power for the jar. 
    • Line 7: Again, we hear about the roundness of the jar. This line shows us some internal rhyme, with "round" and "ground." (More about those sounds in the "Sound Check" section.) It also sets the scene some more, showing us that this jar wasn't special enough to be put on a bush, or a stump. It's just on the ground, on a hill. 
    • Line 8: Again, this line seems like personification. We'd expect to hear about a person being tall, and a person's "port" (according to that definition which means way of carrying oneself). But no, we still see the jar. It can also be a port, as in a harbor—perhaps between wilderness and civilization, the man-made and the self-grown. 
    • Line 10: This is one powerful jar. Some think the word "dominion" could be a historical reference to a type of jar that was popular in the 1920s, when this poem was written, the "Dominion Wide Mouth Special."
    • Line 10: Here, we see again how this is just described as a normal jar. But this normal, man-made object, has the power to distort the wilderness. 
    • Line 11: This line again contrasts the jar to the wilderness. The jar, obviously, cannot procreate, whereas birds and bushes have their ways of spreading without man's help. So, the jar's powers are limited after all.
  • Wilderness

    Standing apart from, yet dominated by, the jar is the wilderness. The speaker doesn't seem to think much of this wilderness, calling it "slovenly" (3), and portraying it as completely under the control of the gray bareness of the jar (6). Yet, in the end, we start to think that this wilderness, no matter how tarnished it is by the presence of the jar, is still free. Unlike the jar, the wilderness does give of bird and bush—it is, well, wild and green. It grows and breeds.

    • Line 3: This speaker doesn't sound so fond of the wilderness upon first glance of this line. It's being described as slovenly: messy, dirty, unkempt. Yet we almost want to root for the wilderness to struggle against the boring jar's command. 
    • Line 5: Again, we see the wilderness being controlled by the jar—rising up to the hill. We've got to think about the word "rose" on both the figurative and literal level. Literally, it could be raising in elevation. Figuratively, it could be raising in status, to reach the man-made jar. 
    • Line 6: Though the wilderness is being described as no longer wild, the word "sprawled" still sounds wild, immense, to us. 
    • Line 11: Here, the jar is being compared to two aspects of the wilderness: bird and bush. These two things are full of colors and procreation—birds breed, bushes grow. The wilderness may finally be getting back at this jar, retaining a power of its own.
  • Shapes


    • Steaminess Rating


      While there's certainly no explicit mention of sex and violence in this poem, the second to last line, which claims that the jar "does not give of bird or bush," points towards the wilderness' power of procreation. It might take a mature mind to fully get this poem, but there's no content that should be restricted to mature audiences only.

    • Allusions

      Literary and Philosophical References

      • John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (whole poem)

      Historical References

      • Dominion Wide Mouth Jar (whole poem)