Of the Surface of Things
"Of the Surface of Things" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923). It was first published in 1919,[1] so it is in the public domain.
I
In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;
But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four
hills and a cloud.
II
From my balcony, I survey the yellow air,
Reading where I have written,
"The spring is like a belle undressing."
III
The gold tree is blue.
The singer has pulled his cloak over his head.
The moon is in the folds of the cloak.
Buttel understands the poem as implementing Stevens's "anti-poetic" strategy of moving into a poem in an offhand way. He finds that the prose rhythms of the first stanza contrast strikingly with the metrical regularity of the quoted line about the belle undressing. That line is so delicately honest that it almost had to be quoted in order to give the speaker some distance from it. The sturdy epistemic modesty of the first stanza contrasts with the intense opacity of the final stanza. Is it saying that the real tree basks in the illumination of imagination? Is the singer a poet like Walt Whitman, who pushes through what is prosaic ("three or four hills and a cloud") or beyond his understanding, in order to give full vent to his imagination in, for instance, "Song of Myself"? [2]
Milton Bates speculates that the "cloak" is probably the cloud and the "singer" one of the hills.[3]
The poem can also be read as one of Stevens's many commentaries on the relation of imagination to reality: the poet's previously written line about the belle undressing (the imagination's formulation) contrasts with the actual scene portrayed in the first part of the poem. To the imagination the color of a tree is easily transformed. The "singer" in the penultimate line is, by such a reading, the poet who obscures the real world by pulling the cloak of his imagination over his head, enabling him to see the Moon in its folds.
Notes
References
- Bates, Milton J. Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self. 1985: University of California Press.
- Buttel, Robert. Wallace Stevens: The Making of Harmonium. 1967: Princeton University Press.
External links
- The Complete Public Domain Poems of Wallace Stevens, Volume 1
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- "Earthy Anecdote"
- "Invective Against Swans"
- "The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage"
- "The Plot Against the Giant"
- "Infanta Marina"
- "Domination of Black"
- "The Snow Man"
- "The Ordinary Women"
- "The Load Of Sugar-Cane"
- "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle"
- "Nuances of a Theme by Williams"
- "Metaphors of a Magnifico"
- "Ploughing on Sunday"
- "Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et Les Unze Mille Vierges"
- "Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores"
- "Fabliau of Florida"
- "Doctor of Geneva"
- "Homunculus et la Belle Etoile"
- "The Comedian as the Letter C"
- "From the Misery of Don Joost"
- "O Florida, Venereal Soil"
- "Last Looks at the Lilacs"
- "The Worms at Heaven's Gate"
- "The Jack-Rabbit"
- "Valley Candle"
- "Anecdote of Men by the Thousand"
- "The Apostrophe to Vincentine"
- "Floral Decorations for Bananas"
- "Anecdote of Canna"
- "On the Manner of Addressing Clouds"
- "Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb "
- "Of the Surface of Things"
- "Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks"
- "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman"
- "The Place of the Solitaires"
- "The Weeping Burgher"
- "The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician"
- "Banal Sojourn"
- "Depression Before Spring"
- "The Emperor of Ice-Cream"
- "The Cuban Doctor"
- "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon"
- "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock"
- "Sunday Morning"
- "The Virgin Carrying a Lantern"
- "Stars at Tallapoosa"
- "Explanation"
- "Six Significant Landscapes"
- "Bantam in Pine-Woods"
- "Anecdote of the Jar"
- "Palace of the Babies"
- "Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs"
- "Jasmine's Beautiful Thoughts Underneath The Willow"
- "Cortège for Rosenbloom"
- "Tattoo"
- "The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws"
- "Life Is Motion"
- "The Wind Shifts"
- "Colloquy with a Polish Aunt"
- "Gubbinal"
- "Two Figures in Dense Violet Night"
- "Theory"
- "To the One of Fictive Music"
- "Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion"
- "Peter Quince at the Clavier"
- "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
- "Nomad Exquisite"
- "The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad"
- "The Death of a Soldier"
- "Negation"
- "The Surprises of the Superhuman"
- "Sea Surface Full of Clouds"
- "The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade"
- "Lunar Paraphrase"
- "Anatomy of Monotony"
- "The Public Square"
- "Indian River"
- "Tea"