Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et Les Unze Mille Vierges

Last updated

"Cy est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et les Unze Mille Vierges" is a poem in Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium . It was first published in 1915 in the magazine Rogue, so it is in the public domain. [1] Butell characterizes it as one of the first two poems (the other is "Tea") to "successfully combine wit and elegance". [2] They are the earliest poems to be collected later in Harmonium.

Contents

Cy est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et les Unze Mille Vierges

 Ursula, in a garden, found
 A bed of radishes.
 She kneeled upon the ground
 And gathered them,
 With flowers around,
 Blue, gold, pink, and green.

 She dressed in red and gold brocade
 And in the grass an offering made
 Of radishes and flowers.

 She said, "My dear,
 Upon your altars,
 I have placed
 The marguerite and coquelicot,
 And roses
 Frail as April snow;
 But here," she said,
 "Where none can see,
 I make an offering, in the grass,
 Of radishes and flowers."
 And then she wept
 For fear the Lord would not accept.
 The good Lord in His garden sought
 New leaf and shadowy tinct,
 And they were all His thought.
 He heard her low accord,
 Half prayer and half ditty,
 And He felt a subtle quiver,
 That was not heavenly love,
 Or pity.

This is not writ
In any book.

Interpretation

The poem describes a woman and her prayer ceremony in a garden, and the Lord's religiously unorthodox response. If the "true subject" of the poem is an erotic moment, the "poetry of the subject" is a delicate poetic bouquet.(For more on this distinction see "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle".) Or one might follow Joan Richardson in viewing it as a record of Stevens's relationship with his wife, Elsie, disguised as a mock-medieval legend to "throw anyone who might be curious completely off the scent." Elsie did not like the poem's "mocking spirit", and one editor, Harriet Monroe, wrote a rejection letter to Stevens in 1915 that characterizes this and other submitted poems as "recondite, erudite, provocatively obscure, with a kind of modern-gargoyle grin to them --- Aubrey-Beardsleyish in the making." She advised him to "chase his mystically mirthful and mournful muse out of the nether darkness." [3]

Bates speculates that the poem's title comes from a fifteenth-century French translation of the Legenda Aurea. It would have identified a simple woodcut of the martyrdom of Saint Ursula and her eleven thousand followers at the hands of the Huns. He sees the poem as lifting the veil which obscures "the subliminal side of religious piety." [4]

Notes

  1. ↑ Buttel, p. 97. See also the LibriVox site for the complete public domain poems of Wallace Stevens. Archived 2010-10-13 at the Wayback Machine
  2. ↑ Butell, p. 87.
  3. ↑ Bates, pp. 73-4.
  4. ↑ Bates, p. 73.

Related Research Articles

<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.

"The Plot Against the Giant" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1917, so it is in the public domain.

"Peter Quince at the Clavier" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. The poem was first published in 1915 in the "little magazine" Others: A Magazine of the New Verse, edited by Alfred Kreymborg.

"The Ordinary Women" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium.

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

"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.

"Last Looks at the Lilacs" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1923.

"Anecdote of Canna" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923).

"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".

"Banal Sojourn" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was originally published in 1919, therefore it is in the public domain.

"Depression Before Spring" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923). It was first published in 1918 and is therefore in the public domain.

"Stars at Tallapoosa" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1922, so it is in the public domain.

"Explanation" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923). It was first published in 1917, so it is in the public domain.

"Six Significant Landscapes" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1916, so it is in the public domain.

"To the One of Fictive Music" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. First published in 1922, it is in the public domain.

"Hymn From A Watermelon Pavilion" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1917, so it is in the public domain.

"The Death of a Soldier" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. The poem uses free verse to describe the death of a soldier.

"Tea" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1915 in the journal Rogue.

References

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.