O Florida, Venereal Soil 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 the journal Dial, volume 73, July 1922 and is therefore in the public domain.

O Florida, Venereal Soil A few things for themselves, Convolvulus and coral, Buzzards and live-moss, Tiestas from the keys, A few things for themselves, Florida, venereal soil, Disclose to the lover. The dreadful sundry of this world, The Cuban, Polodowsky, The Mexican women, The negro undertaker Killing the time between corpses Fishing for crayfish... Virgin of boorish births, Swiftly in the nights, In the porches of Key West, Behind the bougainvilleas, After the guitar is asleep, Lasciviously as the wind, You come tormenting, Insatiable, When you might sit, A scholar of darkness, Sequestered over the sea, Wearing a clear tiara Of red and blue and red, Sparkling, solitary, still, In the high sea-shadow. Donna, donna, dark, Stooping in indigo gown And cloudy constellations, Conceal yourself or disclose Fewest things to the lover --- A hand that bears a thick-leaved fruit, A pungent bloom against your shade.

Buttel interprets the poem as continuous with Baudelaire's sense of the opposition between the corruptibility of the flesh and the perfection of an ideal world.
The 'few things for themselves' that Stevens lists in the first stanza aren't philosophical generics like Aristotle's conception of what's worth doing for its own sake (philosophy) or Hobbes's list of appetitive desires that motivate all human beings. Stevens's list rather is highly specific and opaque to the reader whose imagination may not be piqued by buzzards, etc. One has to look beyond this opacity to whatever piques one's imagination, however quirky that may be to others. The same holds true for the 'dreadful sundry of this world ' listed in the second stanza. The poem is about Stevens's subjective response to Florida

Florida

Florida is a state in the southeastern United States, located on the nation's Atlantic and Gulf coasts. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. With a population of 18,801,310 as measured by the 2010 census, it...

, and he doesn't do any generalizing so as to share an abstract content with the reader.

The word 'venereal' refers to Venus, not to the sexual disease, as in Milton's "venereal trains" (Milton, Samson Agonistes 533). She sometimes carries symbolically fertile fruit in her hand.

However much the poet may be distracted by lascivious particulars, he does indeed want particulars: A hand that bears a thick-leaved fruit, A pungent bloom against donna's shade. This insistence on particularity is a familiar them in Stevens. (See his treatment of beauty in "Peter Quince at the Clavier

Peter Quince at the Clavier

"Peter Quince at the Clavier" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium.The poem was first published in 1915 in the "little magazine" Others: A Magazine of the New Verse , edited by Alfred Kreymborg....

", for example.) Bates reads the poem as Stevens's wish that Florida "were less the harlot and more the sequestered inamorata". (His donna may be compared to the princess of the sea in "Infanta Marina

Infanta Marina

Infanta Marina is a poem in Wallace Stevens' Harmonium about a seaside princess. Helen Vendler presents the poem as a "double scherzo" on 'her' in the possessive sense and on 'of' in its partitive and possessive sense....

".)

Buttel classifies it as one of the later poems in Harmonium, displaying "an extravagance of conception and an energy of language and tone that approach the violences of imagination that Stevens sought but had not found in the earlier poems."He credits these later poems with establishing "an over-all development" in the book..