The Jack-Rabbit 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 in that collection, so it is still under copyright, but it is quoted here as justified by fair use

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...

 in order to facilitate scholarly commentary.

Overview

The Jack-Rabbit In the morning, The jack-rabbit sang to the Arkansaw. He carolled in caracoles On the feat sandbars. The black man said, "Now, grandmother, Crochet me this buzzard On your winding-sheet, And do not forget his wry neck After the winter." The black man said, "Look out, O caroller, The entrails of the buzzard Are rattling."

The jack-rabbit's joyful jig contrasts with the prospect of its
demise, anticipated by the black man who invokes a symbol of death
that applies both to his grandmother and her burial garment, and
to the dancing jack-rabbit. For the dichotomy of life and death this
poem bears comparison to ``The Emperor of Ice-Cream

The Emperor of Ice Cream

"The Emperor of Ice-Cream" is a celebrated poem from Wallace Stevens' first collection of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1922, so it is in the public domain...

(specifically on Helen Vendler's interpretation). If that is the
subject of the poetry, then the poetry of the subject is the word
play, swinging from carolling in caracoles and "feat sandbars" to a
rural idiolect.

Buttel views the black man's words as a fusion of the native folk tradition with the motif of sewing and embroidering from Jules Laforgue

Jules Laforgue

Jules Laforgue was an innovative Franco-Uruguayan poet, often referred to as a Symbolist poet. Critics and commentators have also pointed to Impressionism as a direct influence and his poetry has been called "part-symbolist, part-impressionist".-Life:...

, a French Symbolist poet who was influenced by Walt 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...

and in turn influenced Stevens (as well as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound). Buttel notes that the buzzard appears frequently in native folk and humorous literature, and that Stevens uses it several times in his poems, "along with bantams, grackles, and turkey-cocks."