Last Looks at the Lilacs 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...

. It was first published in 1923 (in Secession 4, January) 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.

Last Looks at the Lilacs To what good, in the alleys of the lilacs, O caliper, do you scratch your buttocks And tell the divine ingenue, your companion, That this bloom is the bloom of soap And this fragrance the fragrance of vegetal? Do you suppose that she cares a tick, In this hymeneal air, what it is That marries her innocence thus, So that her nakedness is near, Or that she will pause at scurrilous words? Poor buffo! Look at the lavender And look your last and look steadily, And say how it comes that you see Nothing but trash and that you no longer feel Her body quivering in the Floréal Toward the cool night and its fantastic star, Prime paramour and belted paragon, Well-booted, rugged, arrogantly male, Patron and imager of the gold Don John, Who will embrace her before summer comes.

Robert Buttel compares this poem to "The Plot Against the Giant

The Plot Against the Giant

"The Plot Against the Giant" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1917, so it is in the public domain....

" as concerning the humorous disparity between gauche male and suave female.
Robert A. Wilson makes a surprisingly plausible case (in a single-page article in The Wallace Stevens Journal

The Wallace Stevens Journal

The Wallace Stevens Journal is an academic journal established in 1977 and the official publication of The Wallace Stevens Society. It is devoted to the works and life of the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens. The journal is published twice a year by the Johns Hopkins University...

, complete with an image of the label from a bottle of "Lilac Vegetal" after-shave lotion) for a connection between the poem and Stevens's experience at a barber shop.

Caliper'd reason, measuring everything but appreciating nothing, is contrasted unfavorably with well-booted imagination, as in Whitman

Walt Whitman

Walter "Walt" Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse...

's "When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom'd" or indeed the very poem under discussion. Lilacs can be connected to the fragrance of vegetal or to a cool night's fantastic star, but Stevens favors the latter and the final stanza shows why. Cook reports that "lilacs do not make Stevens happy" and reads the poem as blunt and atypical, comparing it to some of the more strained effects in The Comedian as the Letter C.