Colloquy with a Polish Aunt

Last updated

"Colloquy with a Polish Aunt" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium . It was first published in 1919 and is included in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (1954). [1]

Contents

Colloquy with a Polish Aunt

Elle savait toutes les légendes du Paradis et tous les contes de la
Pologne. Revue des Deux Mondes

 She

 How is it that my saints from Voragaine,
 In their embroidered slippers, touch your spleen?

 He

 Old pantaloons, duenna of the spring!

 She

 Imagination is the will of things....
 Thus, on the basis of the common drudge,
 You dream of women, swathed in indigo,
 Holding their books toward the nearer stars,
 To read, in secret, their burning secrecies....

Interpretation

The French epigraph at the start of the poem is from Revue des deux mondes (Journal of the Two Worlds), a French literary and cultural affairs magazine that has been published monthly in Paris since 1829. The epigraph reads, "She knew all the legends of Paradise and all the stories about Poland." The first-line reference to the Polish aunt's "saints from Voragine" is most likely to Jacobus de Voragine, the author of a medieval bestseller, The Golden Legend, a book of lives of the saints. That book features St George prominently. What would such an author and such a book have to do with Stevens' 1919 poem? One answer might be that in that period St. George appeared on many World War I recruitment posters, and might appear in the romantic imaginations of young women of the time.

The poem dramatizes one of Stevens's major themes, the relationship between imagination and reality. "Colloquy with a Polish Aunt," though, is one of Stevens' many poems that resists the intelligence almost successfully. The scholar Helen Vendler writes of this poem that "Some readers have seen his subject as an epistemological one, and have written about his views on the imagination and its uneasy rapport with reality. Others have seen his subject as a moral one, a justification of an aesthetic hedonism. Still others have seen his subject as a native humanist one, the quest of the American Adam for a Paradise in the wilderness." [2]

Stevens did not often bother with justifying his aestheticism, and the term "hedonism" diminishes his artistic ambition to lift himself and his reader from the daily ennui to at least a temporary heightening and intensification of life, an aesthetic experience. Also, the speaker's exchange with his Polish aunt seems to occur in a world far removed from the American wilderness (which one encounters, for instance, in "Earthy Anecdote".

The speaker is on a "high horse" so he can have a colloquy with his devout and somewhat learned aunt. She begins by upbraiding him. She accuses him of being "splenetic" about her idealized saints, whom he probably views as fantasies.

As mentioned above, the aunt's favorite book is Jacobus of Voragine's The Golden Legend. For the skeptical and splenetic speaker, the legendary characters, the saints, are merely old buffoons (rhymes with "pantaloons"). But the Polish aunt pulls the speaker off his high horse. She tells him that the women he dreams of are "common drudges," whom his imagination dresses exotically ("swathed in indigo") and pictures as figures in a pre-Raphaelite painting, who burn secretly for otherworldly saints. What the speaker imagines of the ordinary women is almost accurate. Their imaginations blur together the exotic St. George and other young warriors, young men like those who died in the mud of World War I.

The Polish aunt in this way teaches the speaker a wise lesson about the "uneasy rapport" between reality and the imagination.

Notes

The aunt's imagination dwells on medieval saints; the speaker's imagination dresses drudges in indigo (and all that that implies); the drudges imagine the young men around them as Saint Georges (and all that that implies).

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wallace Stevens</span> American poet

Wallace Stevens was an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems in 1955.

<i>Harmonium</i> (poetry collection) Book by Wallace Stevens

Harmonium is a book of poetry by American poet Wallace Stevens. His first book at the age of forty-four, it was published in 1923 by Knopf in an edition of 1500 copies. This collection comprises 85 poems, ranging in length from just a few lines to several hundred. Harmonium was reissued in 1931 with three poems omitted and fourteen new poems added.

Helen Hennessy Vendler is an American literary critic and is Porter University Professor Emerita at Harvard University.

"The Emperor of Ice-Cream" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first collection of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1922, and is in the public domain. Stevens' biographer, Paul Mariani, identifies the poem as one of Stevens' personal favorites from the Harmonium collection. The poem "wears a deliberately commonplace costume", he wrote in a letter, "and yet seems to me to contain something of the essential gaudiness of poetry; that is the reason why I like it".

"The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book, Harmonium. Originally published in 1919, it is in the public domain. Despite general agreement that it is indebted to Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, there is uncertainty about the nature of the debt.

"Domination of Black" is a poem in Wallace Stevens' Harmonium, first published in 1916 and later (1942) selected by him as his best poem for the anthology This Is My Best.

"Le Monocle de Mon Oncle" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1918.

"Ploughing on Sunday" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923). First published in 1919, it is now in the public domain.

"The Doctor of Geneva" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923). The poem was first published in 1921, so it is free of copyright.

"The Comedian as the Letter C" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923). It was one of the few poems first published in that collection and the last written for it. John Gould Fletcher frames the poem as expressing Stevens's view "that the artist can do nothing else but select out of life the elements to form a 'fictive' or fictitious reality."

"O Florida, Venereal Soil" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in the journal Dial, volume 73, July 1922, and is therefore in the public domain.

"The Apostrophe to Vincentine" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923). It was first published before 1923 and is therefore in the public domain according to Librivox.

"Floral Decorations for Bananas" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923). It was first published Measure 26 and is therefore under copyright, however it is quoted here as justified by fair use in order to facilitate scholarly commentary.

"Of the Surface of Things" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923). It was first published in 1919, so it is in the public domain.

"Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923). It was one of the few Harmonium poems first published in that volume, so it is still under copyright. However, it is quoted here as justified by Fair use to facilitate scholarly commentary.

"Sunday Morning" is a poem from Wallace Stevens' first book of poetry, Harmonium. Published in part in the November 1915 issue of Poetry, then in full in 1923 in Harmonium, it is now in the public domain. The first published version can be read at the Poetry web site: The literary critic Yvor Winters considered "Sunday Morning" "the greatest American poem of the twentieth century and... certainly one of the greatest contemplative poems in English".

"Bantams in Pine-Woods" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1922 in the poetry journal Dial, along with five other poems, all under the title "Revue." It is in the public domain.

"Anecdote of the Jar" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. First published in 1919, it is in the public domain.

"The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. First published in 1921, it is in the public domain in the United States.

"Sea Surface full of Clouds" is a poem from the second, 1931, edition of Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1924, so it is restricted by copyright. However, brief parts of it are quoted here as fair use, and the whole poem is available elsewhere on the Internet.

References

  1. ↑ The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Vintage Books: New York, 1954, p. 84.
  2. ↑ Helen Vendler. On Extended Wings. 1969: Harvard University Press.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.