"Anecdote of Canna" is a poem from Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens

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 a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar",...

's first book of poetry, Harmonium

Harmonium (poetry collection)

Harmonium is a book of poetry by U.S. poet Wallace Stevens. His first book, it was published in 1923 by Knopf in an edition of 1500 copies. He was in middle age at that time, forty-four years old. The collection comprises 85 poems, ranging in length from just a few lines to several hundred...

(1923).

Anecdote of Canna  Huge are the canna in the dreams of  X, the mighty thought, the mighty man.  They fill the terrace of his capitol.  His thought sleeps not. Yet thought that wakes  In sleep may never meet another thought  Or thing....Now day-break comes...  X promenades the dewy stones,  Observes the canna with a clinging eye,  Observes and then continues to observe.

In the poem's legerdemain the cryptic middle stanza conceals the sleight of hand. Poor X wakes in his sleep ("Now day-break comes") and consequently his eye clings to the canna

Canna

-Places:Australia*Canna, a locality in the Shire of Morawa, Western AustraliaItaly*Canna, Calabria, a comune in the Province of Cosenza*Cannae, a frazione in the Province of Barletta-Andria-Trani, ApuliaScotland*Canna, Scotland, an island in Lochaber...

 forever. The cleverness of the poem links it to "The Worms at Heaven's Gate

The Worms at Heaven's Gate

The Worms at Heaven's Gate is a poem from Wallace Stevens' first book of poetry, Harmonium . It was first published in 1916 and is therefore in the public domain....

". The poetic conceit

Conceit

In literature, a conceit is an extended metaphor with a complex logic that governs a poetic passage or entire poem. By juxtaposing, usurping and manipulating images and ideas in surprising ways, a conceit invites the reader into a more sophisticated understanding of an object of comparison...

 here may be contrasted with Descartes' philosophical proposition that a person must always be thinking when asleep, on pain of ceasing to exist. Day-dreaming, sleep-walking, catatonic X is fixated upon the showy canna that fill the terrace of his capitol, his consciousness.

Buttel forgoes this interpretation in favor of the idea that the poem celebrates the poetic counterpart of a painter's "primitive eye". Such poets would achieve what Monet and the Impressionists desired, recovering from blindness and seeing the world "with utmost clarity, without preconceptions." "They would be like X in Stevens' 'Anecdote of Canna'," Buttel writes, "who at daybreak 'Observes the Canna with a clinging eye,' as though for the first time."