124 CHALuOTTE WARD

 As dissertation of profound delight,
 Stopping on voyage, in a land of snakes,
 Found his vicissitudes had much enlarged
 His apprehension,...

 His violence was for aggrandizement
 And not for stupor, such as music makes
 For sleepers halfway waking....

 Crispin foresaw a curious promenade
 Or, nobler, sensed an elemental fate,
 And elemental potencies and pangs,
 And beautiful barenesses as yet unseen,
 Making the most of savagery of palms,
 Of moonlight on the thick, cadaverous bloom
 That yuccas breed, and of the panther's tread.

 But they came parleying of such an earth,
 So thick with sides and jagged lops of green,
 So intertwined with serpent-kin encoiled
 Among the purple tufts, the scarlet crowns,
 Scenting the jungle in their refuges,
 So streaked with yellow, blue and green and red
 In beak and bud and fruity gobbet-skins,
 That earth was like a jostling festival
 Of seeds grown fat, too juicily opulent,
 Expanding in the gold's maternal warmth.
 (11.1-6, 16-23, 28-30, 37-43, 48-57)

 Buttel sees the incorporation of Rimbaud's poem "Bateau ivre" ("Drunken
Boat") into Stevens' poem: "d'incroyables Florides/ Melant aux fleurs des
yeux de pantheres A peaux/ D'hommes!" ("Incredible flowered areas/ Mixing
with the flowers, panther's eyes in skins/ Of men!").16
 The poet Marianne Moore, whom Stevens had met in Arensberg's New
York apartment, is the only reviewer of this poem to mention the neo-primitive
French painter Henri Rousseau: "One is excited by the sense of proximity
to...Rousseau's paintings of banana leaves and alligators."17 Stevens' friend
Walter Arensberg owned the Rousseau painting Joyeux farceux ("Joyous
Fools," 1906), now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It is a jungle scene of
lions and hawks. More germane to Rimbaud's panthers and Stevens' poems
is Rousseau's final work, Le Rive ("The Dream," 1910). It did not come to the

16 181: (Euvres podtiques d'ArthurRimbaud (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1964) 11.45-
47, 89.
17 "Well Moused, Lion," Dial 76 (January 1924): 21-28, in Complete Prose of Marianne
Moore, ed. Patricia C. Willis (NY: Viking, 1986) 92.