Homunculus et la Belle Etoile is a poem from
Wallace StevensWallace 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,
HarmoniumHarmonium 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 1919.
| Homunculus et la Belle Etoile
In the sea, Biscayne, there prinks
The young emerald, evening star,
Good light for drunkards, poets, widows,
And ladies soon to be married.
By this light the salty fishes
Arch in the sea like tree-branches,
Going in many directions
Up and down.
This light conducts
The thoughts of drunkards, the feelings
Of widows and trembling ladies,
The movements of fishes.
How pleasant an existence it is
That this emerald charms philosophers,
Until they become thoughtlessly willing
To bathe their hearts in later moonlight,
Knowing that they can bring back thought
In the night that is still to be silent,
Reflecting this thing and that,
Before they sleep!
It is better that, as scholars,
They should think hard in the dark cuffs
Of voluminous cloaks,
And shave their heads and bodies.
It might well be that their mistress
Is no gaunt fugitive phantom.
She might, after all, be a wanton,
Abundantly beautiful, eager,
Fecund,
From whose being by starlight, on sea-coast,
The innermost good of their seeking
Might come in the simplest of speech.
It is a good light, then, for those
That know the ultimate Plato,
Tranquillizing with this jewel
The torments of confusion.
|
The poem pursues a contrast between poetic
imagination and philosophical reasoning, the latter understood as
abstract system-building associated with the rationalist tradition
going back to
PlatoPlato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
. Stevens implicitly contrasts the philosophers'
Plato with `the ultimate Plato'. Both seek the supreme good, but
Plato and the other philosophers look for it in something abstract
like Plato's `Forms' — a gaunt fugitive phantom. The poet finds
the highest good in the sensuous lived experience of an evening in
Biscayne, where the good light of Venus, the Evening Star, reveals it
to the poet as wanton, abundantly beautiful, eager, fecund. Plato's supreme good
is accessible only to a very few intelligent people who have been trained
for many years to disregard the senses. The ultimate Plato by contrast
is accessible not only to the poet but also the drunkard, widows, and
ladies soon to be married. Stevens may be invoking some American populism
on behalf of the imagination. (For comparison see
On the Manner of Addressing Clouds"On the Manner of Addressing Clouds" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium . It was first published in 1921 according to Librivox and is therefore in the public domain....
and
Six Significant LandscapesStevens"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....
.)
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