"The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage" 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 1919, so it is in the public domain

Public domain

Works are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...

. There is general agreement that it is indebted to Botticelli's

Sandro Botticelli

Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, better known as Sandro Botticelli was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance...

 The Birth of Venus, though there is some/major uncertainty about the nature of the debt.

The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage  But not on a shell, she starts,  Archaic, for the sea.  But on the first-found weed  She scuds the glitters,  Noiselessly, like one more wave.  She too is discontent  And would have purple stuff upon her arms,  Tired of the salty harbors,  Eager for the brine and bellowing  Of the high interiors of the sea.  The wind speeds her on,  Blowing upon her hands  And watery back.  She touches the clouds, where she goes  In the circle of her traverse of the sea.  Yet this is meagre play  In the scrurry and water-shine  As her heels foam ---  Not as when the goldener nude  Of a later day  Will go, like the centre of sea-green pomp,  In an intenser calm,  Scullion of fate,  Across the spick torrent, ceaselessly,  Upon her irretrievable way.

Helen Vendler takes it as obvious that the poem is about "our impoverished American Venus, who has none of the trappings of Botticelli's Venus

Venus (mythology)

Venus is a Roman goddess principally associated with love, beauty, sex,sexual seduction and fertility, who played a key role in many Roman religious festivals and myths...

, but who will eventually accumulate aura and mythological fullness through new American art." She dismisses the English poet Craig Raine

Craig Raine

Craig Raine is an English poet and critic born in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, England. Along with Christopher Reid, he is the best-known exponent of Martian poetry.-Life:...

's identification of the paltry nude with a sailboat. ("The nude is, one guesses, a sailing boat....Later, the ship will be weather-beaten, a goldener nude, and will eventually sink.") That only confirms that "the English incomprehension of Stevens continues almost unabated", she acidly remarks, conceding that Frank Kermode

Frank Kermode

Sir John Frank Kermode was a highly regarded British literary critic best known for his seminal critical work The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, published in 1967 ....

 is the exception that proves the rule). She might concede that the "archaic" one of the first two lines is foam-arisen Aphrodite

Aphrodite

Aphrodite is the Greek goddess of love, beauty, pleasure, and procreation.Her Roman equivalent is the goddess .Historically, her cult in Greece was imported from, or influenced by, the cult of Astarte in Phoenicia....

, who the paltry nude is not, but might well disapprove of the suggestion that the one who "scuds the glitters" is the American Venus (reduced to scudding on a weed) and that "the goldener nude" is Botticelli's Venus.

Ronald Sukenic declares with equal certainty that "the nude is an emblematic figure of spring. There is a comparison between spring, in the first part of the poem, and a similar figure representing summer, in the latter part. Thus spring is 'paltry,' particularly early spring, spring at the start of her voyage, as compared with the fullness of summer described later on." He also declares that the correct word is "scurry," not the "scrurry" of the Collected Poems as reproduced here. (Ibid.)

Compare Stevens's poem "Bantam in Pine-Woods

Bantam in Pine-Woods

"Bantams in Pine-Woods" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1922 in the poetry journal Dial, along with five other poems, all under the title "Revue". It is in the public domain....

, which also makes a statement about the new American art.