92
PARTISAN REVIEW
of cinquefoil withering.
...
It is full of the incipiencies of
darkness
...
of desolation that rises as a feeling rises
.. .
Imagination wills the five purple palmations of cinquefoil .
. .
Then the texture becomes harder, closer, more geometric as Stevens
finds his obsessive theme; the abstraction is drier, its presentation more
intellectualized; and the decorative medium is more sophisticated.
Certain images and colors-green, red, black, white, yellow-are
i
used in disciplined constructions:
Green is the night, green kindled and apparelled
...
The topaz; rabbit and the emerald cat
.. .
The greenness of night lies on the page
.. .
That elemental parent, the green night
.. .
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
.. .
The lion sleeps in the sun
..
. ..
Light
Is the lion that comes down to drink
...
Ruddy are his eyes and ruddy are his claws
.. .
Red-emerald, red-slitted-blue, a fa ce of slate
.. .
R ed-in-red repetitions never going
...
Images of horse and rider, pine boughs casting sibilant shadows, the
sun, the moon, and even phrases like "washed in his imagination" or
"washed the imagination clean" become frequent in the prose as well
as the verse. The composition is in precise figurations:
To feed on the yellow bloom of the yellow fruit
Dropped down from turquoise leaves
...
Even the insatiable big bird revolving under the glare of the clownish
yellow sun ( "Esthetique du Mal") remains so entirely upon the
surface of the composition that its evocations are conceptual and
ornamental. The complications are exquisite, and sometimes, as in
"The Poems of Our Climate"
<;~-nd
"Woman Looking at a Vase of
Flowers," the gaudiness and synaesthesia of imagism are intellectual–
ized into pseudo-philosophic statement.
Such violently retinal, auditory, tactile effects are foreshortened
by the "cultivated," whimsical, even half-academic f<!Stidiousness and
punctilio of Stevens' language. In their references the poems are for–
ever alternating between civilization and savagery, the
coterie
and the
jungle. There are equatorial passages-the thunders of Yucatan, s ars
at Tallapoosa, the litter of tropical seas. Stevens has said farewell to
Florida in all but his imagery, which indicates how he has remained
not only a pagan but a fauve of the sort represented by Dufy or by
