898
PARTISAN REVIEW
by this time we have a somewhat elaborate idea of what it stands for,
and can turn back to the last verse of "Palace of Babies"
(Harmon–
ium)
:
The walker in the moonlight walked alone,
And in his heart his disbelief lay cold.
His broad-brimmed hat came close upon his eyes.
This was certainly never one of the more difficult poems, but it had
seemed a little thin. Years later Stevens enunciated a luxuriant con–
notation for the walker's broad-brimmed hat (a hat that obviously
had no flare ) and so he enabled his earlier image to explore in a
more significant way the nature of the moonlight walker's disbelief.
The day "The Pastor Caballero" was written the "Palace of Babies"
became a better poem than it had been the day before: one might
even say that it had been revised. This is not as odd as it may sound,
for if a poet creates his own language he does not cease to create
it until he has ceased to be a poet- and there is a sense in which a
poet rewrites his collected works every time he writes a genuinely new
poem.
But "The Pastor Caballero" offers relevant insights into other
early poems as well.
If
one reads it together with Stevens' well-known
"Bantams in Pine-Woods," for example, one senses how closely united
Azcan is to the more faintly evoked Most Merciful Capitan:
Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan
Of tan with henna hackles, halt!
Damned universal cock, as if the sun
Was bl6ckamoor to bear your blazing tail.
Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal.
Your wfirld is you. I am my world.
You ten-foot poet among inchlings. Fat!
Begone! An inchl!ing bristles in these pines,
Bristles, and points their Appalachian tangs,
And fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos.
The rather brassy appeal of this poem exists at a more superficial
