Cy est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et les Unze Mille Vierge is a poem in 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...

. It was first published in 1915 in the magazine Rogue, so it is in the public domain. Butell characterizes it as one of the first two poems (the other is "Tea

Tea

Tea is an aromatic beverage prepared by adding cured leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant to hot water. The term also refers to the plant itself. After water, tea is the most widely consumed beverage in the world...

") to "successfully combine wit and elegance". They are the earliest poems to be collected later in Harmonium.

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.

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

Le Monocle de Mon Oncle

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

.) 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."http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/12/21/home/stevens-richardson.html?_r=1&oref=slogin Elsie did not like the poem's "mocking spirit", and one editor, Harriet Monroe

Harriet Monroe

Harriet Monroe was an American editor, scholar, literary critic, poet and patron of the arts. She is best known as the founding publisher and long-time editor of Poetry Magazine, which made its debut in 1912. As a supporter of the poets Ezra Pound, H. D., T. S...

, 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

Aubrey Beardsley

Aubrey Vincent Beardsley was an English illustrator and author. His drawings, done in black ink and influenced by the style of Japanese woodcuts, emphasized the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the Aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James A....

 in the making." She advised him to "chase his mystically mirthful and mournful muse out of the nether darkness."

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

Saint Ursula

Saint Ursula is a British Christian saint. Her feast day in the extraordinary form calendar of the Catholic Church is October 21...

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."