Statistics - Analysis

Introduction and overall impression

The poem presents a quiet, ironic scene: Napoleon, restless in his tomb, is roused by the recitation of a vast, impersonal number—“Twenty-one million men”—and dismisses it as irrelevant to the concrete world he knew. The tone is both elegiac and wry, mixing the grandeur of historical memory with the banality of statistical abstraction. There is a subtle shift from a dreamlike intimacy around the sleeping emperor to a distancing, modern voice that counts forces in the aggregate.

Contextual background

Wallace Stevens wrote in early 20th-century America, an era increasingly shaped by mass organization, industrial warfare, and technocratic modes of thought. The poem invokes Napoleon as a symbol of individual military command and personal campaign, set against modern "aeroplanes" and anonymous numbers that reflect a more impersonal, mechanized view of war and power.

Main themes: individuality versus abstraction

The central conflict is between the particular and the statistical. Napoleon insists on the reality of his lived campaign—“The world I marched in / From Calais to Moscow”—while the counting voice offers only totals: “Soldiers, armies, guns, / Twenty-one million.” The poem treats numbers as a way of erasing singular experience, turning human action into data that cannot capture the flesh-and-blood logic of leadership and memory.

Main themes: mortality and historical memory

Napoleon in a sarcophagus evokes mortality and the persistence of reputation. The sleeping emperor represents how the past is housed and reverenced, yet the new world—represented by droning aeroplanes and cold statistics—keeps moving above the mausoleum. This juxtaposition suggests that history survives as image and myth, even as contemporary forces reinterpret or diminish it.

Imagery and symbolism: the number and the mausoleum

The repeated image of the sarcophagus and the sleeping Napoleon anchors the poem in classical tomb symbolism: rest, preservation, and the immobility of legacy. By contrast, the “Twenty-one million” functions as a symbol of modern aggregation and depersonalization. The aeroplanes and their motors, “droned” between mausoleum and stars, further symbolize technological mediation—noise and motion that separate past and present and flatten human particularity into measurable elements.

Ambiguity and interpretive question

The poem leaves open whether Stevens mourns the loss of the heroic individual to statistics or merely notes the inevitable transformation of historical perception. Is the sleeping Napoleon comforted by being exempt from the modern tally, or is his unreality affirmed by the dreamer’s ignorance? The ambiguity invites readers to weigh the value of singular memory against impersonal knowledge.

Conclusion and final insight

Stevens stages a quiet parable about the clash between human-scale experience and the modern appetite for quantification. Through imagery—the sarcophagus, the counting voice, the droning aeroplanes—the poem suggests that statistics can both illuminate and efface the living complexity of history, leaving us to decide what kind of world will answer when we ask “Who goes there?”