Anecdote on 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.

by Wallace Stevens

Eugene Peterson, in Reversed Thunder: The Revelation of John and the Praying Imagination, comments on an interpretation of the poem in regards to the power of worship:

Christians at worship find their place in a cosmos of redemption, the lines drawn against the devil's anarchy. The exactly measured temple, altar, and worshipers are like Wallace Stevens' ''jar of Tennessee'' that took dominion of the ''slovenly wilderness'' simply by being set on a hill. Even though completely unostentatious (''the jar was gray and bare''), it forces us to see sprawling Tennessee in relation to the shaped jar and not the other way around. Order, if only a jar, if only a liturgy, quietly subjects disorder to itself. The picture is little more than a vignette: a reminder that the place of worship is established, inviolate, so that we can gather energy for the tough life of witness to which we are commissioned.

Only in the worship-filled life does the world in which we live ever make any sense.