"Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks" 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). 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

Fair use

Fair use is a limitation and exception to the exclusive right granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work. In United States copyright law, fair use is a doctrine that permits limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders...

 to facilitate scholarly commentary.

Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks  In the moonlight  I met Berserk,  In the moonlight  On the bushy plain.  Oh, sharp he was  As the sleepless!  And, "Why are you red  In this milky blue?"  I said.  "Why sun-colored,  As if awake  In the midst of sleep?"  "You that wander,"  So he said,  "On the bushy plain,  Forget so soon.  But I set my traps  In the midst of dreams."  I knew from this  That the blue ground  Was full of blocks  And blocking steel.  I knew the dread  Of the bushy plain,  And the beauty  Of the moonlight  Falling there,  Falling  As sleep falls  In the innocent air.

The poem marks Stevens's realization that the life of the imagination is more complex and fraught with peril than he had once supposed.

Robert Buttel is impressed by an "eerie collocation of colors" which contributes to the "disturbing effect of the invasion of the world of moonlight and dream by Berserk, who personifies the violence of day."

Vendler understands the poem as Stevens meeting his own potential madness. The prince of peacocks, the poet, meets Berserk, who will not be evaded even in dreams. She thinks that the initial promise of the poem, the brutal encounter between the prince and Berserk, is dissipated in the final stanza, "an unrewarding ending".

It may be that Vendler understands the dread in the penultimate stanza to take as its object only the bushy plain. The scope of the dread is narrow. But if the scope is broad, encompassing the final stanza, then the prince knows the dread of the beauty of the moonlight. The eeriness that Buttel mentioned continues to the end of the poem. There isn't a retreat from brutality to incantation, as Vendler sees it, but rather the brutality of the blocks and blocking steel extends into the final stanza.

Compare "The Public Square

The Public Square

"The Public Square" is a poem from the secondedition ofWallace Stevens's first book of poetry,Harmonium. It was firstpublished in 1923, so it is one ofthe few poems in the collection that is not free of copyright, but it...

" for the shared architectural motif.