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O Florida, Venereal Soil
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
O Florida, Venereal Soil is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1921[1] and is therefore in the public domain.
| O Florida, Venereal Soil
A few things for themselves, The dreadful sundry of this world, Swiftly in the nights, When you might sit, Donna, donna, dark, |
Buttel interprets the poem as continuous with Baudelaire's sense of the opposition between the corruptibility of the flesh and the perfection of an ideal world.[2] The 'few things for themselves' that Stevens lists in the first stanza aren't philosophical generics like Aristotle's conception of what's worth doing for its own sake (philosophy) or Hobbes's list of appetitive desires that motivate all human beings. Stevens's list rather is highly specific and opaque to the reader whose imagination may not be piqued by buzzards, etc. One has to look beyond this opacity to whatever piques one's imagination, however quirky that may be to others. The same holds true for the 'dreadful sundry of this world ' listed in the second stanza. The poem is about Stevens's subjective response to Florida, and he doesn't do any generalizing so as to share an abstract content with the reader.
However much the poet may be distracted by lascivious particulars, he does indeed want particulars: A hand that bears a thick-leaved fruit, A pungent bloom against donna's shade. This insistence on particularity is a familiar them in Stevens. (See his treatment of beauty in "Peter Quince at the Clavier", for example.) Bates reads the poem as Stevens's wish that Florida "were less the harlot and more the sequestered inamorata".[3] (His donna may be compared to the princess of the sea in "Infanta Marina".)
Buttel classifies it as one of the later poems in Harmonium, displaying "an extravagance of conception and an energy of language and tone that approach the violences of imagination that Stevens sought but had not found in the earlier poems."[4]He credits these later poems with showing that the book shows "an over-all development".[5].
- ^ In the journal Poetry, volume 19, October 1921.
- ^ Buttel, p 120
- ^ Bates, p. 107
- ^ Buttel, p. 246.
- ^ Buttel, p. 246. The other poems he singles out are "The Ordinary Women", "Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs", and "The Emperor of Ice Cream".
- Buttel, R. Wallace Stevens: The Making of Harmonium. 1968: Princeton University Press.
- Bates, Milton. Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self. 1985: University of California Press.