Jasmine's Beautiful Thoughts Underneath The Willow 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. It was first published in 1923 and is therefore still under copyright. However, fair

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...

 use in scholarly commentary justifies its being quoted here.

Jasmine's Beautiful Thoughts Underneath The Willow My titillations have no foot-notes And their memorials are the phrases Of idiosyncratic music. The love that will not be transported In an old, frizzled, flambeaud manner, But muses on its eccentricity, Is like a vivid apprehension Of bliss beyond the mutes of plaster, Or paper souvenirs of rapture, Of bliss submerged beneath appearance, In an interior ocean's rocking Of long, capricious fugues and chorals.

This is a love poem, or the closest approximation permitted by Stevens's sensibility and the indirection of his style, which renders his poems' semantics more or less opaque and often requires an unusually complex syntax. It may be compared to 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...

, which can be understood to be about the travails of Stevens's marriage. If Monocle reflects on the difficulty of `transporting' love into middle age, Jasmine's Beautiful Thoughts muses on the eccentricity of his youthful love and may even suggest that it survives in some form, because of a strength like "an interior ocean's rocking", submerged beneath appearance.