"The Apostrophe to Vincentine " 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...

(1923). It was first published before 1923 and is therefore in the public domain according to Librivox.http://librivox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4077

The Apostrophe of Vincentine  I  I figured you as nude between  Monotonous earth and dark blue sky.  It made you seem so small and lean  And nameless,  Heavenly vincentine.  II  I saw you then, as warm as flesh,  Brunette,  But yet not too brunette,  As warm, as clean.  Your dress was green,  Was whited green,  Green vincentine.  III  Then you came walking,  In a group  Of human others,  Voluble.  Yes: you came walking,  Vincentine.  Yes: you came talking.  IV  And what I knew you felt  came then.  monotonous earth I saw become  illimitable sphere of you,  and that white animal, so lean,  turned vincentine,  and that white animal, so lean,  turned heavenly, heavenly Vincentine.

Stevens's conflicted idealization of women in poems like "Vincentine" may not be to everyone's taste, but the poem can be appreciated as a remarkable kind of love poem as well as a study about his recurrent theme of transforming the world through imagination: the animal Vincentine, turned heavenly. She is Stevens's "unaccommodated object of desire before she has been clothed in the beauty of fantasy", according to Vendler.

Buttel helpfully draws attention to the line "Was whited green", which startles the reader, "through a verbal approximation of painting technique, into a vivid mental recognition — the object realized in art." He presents this as a device that Stevens often uses to clarify our vision, indirectly evoking the actual "by causing us to reflect on the resemblances between it and the visual and tactile qualities of paintings.".

Buttel also compares the poem to "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....

" and detects the influence of Stéphane Mallarmé

Stéphane Mallarmé

Stéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...

, even suggesting that the phrase "white animal" derives from Mallarmé's "blancheur animale" in "L'Après-Midi d'un Faune". He sees Vincentine as giving profound meaning to Earth through her perfection, but not quite a fully realized deity of both earth and heaven.

For Vendler this lack of full realization is the point: "Brutality and apotheosis end in stalemate." The white animal and the transfigured woman (brunette, dressed, walking, talking, feeling) remain in a problematic relation. "There is no diction appropriate to both."