WALLACE STEVENS' CARIBBEAN DREAM 125

United States until 1934.18 It was not given to the Museum of Modern Art in
New York until 1954, by Nelson Rockefeller.19 Nevertheless, there were
reproductions of it in books such as Henri Rousseau (Dusseldorf: Ohle, 1914).
In that painting we have Stevens' "sleeper halfway waking," a nude woman
on the modern couch in the foreground, to the left (see Fig. 1 "The Dream").
The eyes of two panthers dominate the center foreground. Just behind them,
the eyes of a human in a blue-red-purple-yellow-green striped skirt is playing
a musical instrument. The small glimpse of sky on the right is filled by a full
moon. Stevens had commented on Rousseau's lighting in a letter to his
fiance, April 18, 1904 (Souvenirs and Prophecies 132). A raspberry-breasted
bird is centered in an orange tree. A large bird to the left has feathery, golden
plumes. An orange snake is to the right of the panthers. Pink, white, and
blue lotuses mingle with the eyes, A la Rimbaud. The three monkeys are
possible in the Caribbean, but the white elephant is not.
 It was long thought that "Le Douanier Rousseau" ("The Customs Collector
Rousseau") had been conscripted into the Napoleonic army of Mexico as a
musician. The poet Apollinaire had said so in his 1914 memoir Les Soirees de
Paris. Gauguin was a neighbor of Henri Rousseau in Paris, returned from the
South Pacific and Martinique, and Rousseau let people think that. But Henri
Certiguy showed that the fifty-first Angers unit returned from Mexico one year
before Rousseau enlisted.21 Upon retirement from his toll booth duties,
Rousseau began to paint and give music lessons. A music student of his
daughter, Yann LePichon, had access to Rousseau's library, and in the February
15, 1961, edition of Arts magazine, he published irrefutable proof that Rousseau
had copied animals and plants from popular publications, such as that Bird of
Paradise at top left of The Dream (see Fig. 1 above) from Cent rdcits d'histoire
naturelle (Paris: Hachette, 1884), exotic fruits from Larousse pour tous, the
Commedia del Arte figures in his painting A Carnival Evening from advertising
for Ibled chocolates.22 Paysage exotique, painted the same year as The Dream,
has an American Indian fighting an African gorilla-not very realistic, but a peau-
rouge does figure in the first stanza of Rimbaud's "Bateau ivre." The painting
was given to the Richmond, Virginia, Museum of Fine Arts by Paul Mellon.

18 The Art Digest (February 15, 1934): 8.
19 Cornelia Stabenow, Henri Rousseau, 1844-1910 (Cologne: Taschen, 1992).
20 Image of "The Dream" by Henri Rousseau provided by Digital Image  The Museum
of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resources, NY. "Le Douanier" is a nickname
for the painter Henri Rousseau, meaning "the customs official," while "Le Rive" is
the original title of the painting in French; I refer to the painting interchangeably as
Le Reve or The Dream throughout the essay.
21 R.H. Wilenski, DouanierRousseau (London: Faber & Faber, 1953); Roger Shattuck,
The Banquet Years (NY: Harcourt Brace, 1955,1958) 39; Carolyn Keay, Henri Rousseau,
Le Douanier (NY: Rizzoli, 1976) 9.
22 The World ofRousseau, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (NY: Viking, 1982) 210, 241, 35.