CHARLOTTE WARD


 Above the forest of the parakeets,
 A parakeet of parakeets prevails,
 A pip of life amid a mort of tails.
 (The rudiments of tropics are around,
 Aloe of ivory, pear of rusty rind.)
 His lids are white because his eyes are blind. (11.1-6)

The next stanza recalls the golden bird of paradise in Rousseau's painting:

 He is not paradise of parakeets,
 Of his gold ether, golden alguazil,
 Except because he broods there and is still. (11.7-9)

Alguacil is Spanish for "bailiff," and the pun on mortt" as "great quantity"
and "death" is typical Stevens. The bird begins to sound like a poetry critic
without imagination:

 But though the turbulent tinges undulate
 As his pure intellect applies its laws,
 He moves not on his coppery, keen claws. (11.13-15)

 Back home again in Hartford, Connecticut, Stevens penned "Sunday
Morning," his most admired poem.38 It is even known in the Spanish-speaking
world through Borges' translation in Sur (March-April 1944). J.V. Cunningham
said, "The central concern for Stevens' poetry, the concern that underlay
Crispin's voyages, and the poet's meditative argument with the woman in
'Sunday Morning,' as well as most of the more or less curious divergencies
of his career, is a concern to be at peace with his surroundings, with this
world, and with himself. He requires for this an experience of the togetherness
of himself and Nature, and interpretation of himself and his environment,
something to satisfy the deeply ingrained longings of his religious feeling."39
Roy Harvey Pearce thought Stevens was working in the opposite direction
from El'ot, away from his Presbyterian and Lutheran roots, toward the
concrete world.40 Similarly, the poet Richard Eberhart saw him moving in
the opposite direction from the Transcendentalists.41 Certainly once he left
home, walks in Nature did replace church. In his journal on August 10, 1902,
he had written, "An old argument with me is that the religious force in the

38 Anca Rosu, The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama
P, 1995) 100.
39 "Tradition and Modernity: Wallace Stevens," The Achievement of Wallace Stevens,
eds. Ashley Brown and Robert S. Haller: (Philadelphia: J.P. Lippincott, 1962) 137-
138.
40 The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961) 385.
41 "Emerson and Wallace Stevens," Literary Review 7.1 (Autumn 1963): 51-71.