WALLACE STEVENS' CARIBBEAN DREAM


world is not the church but the world itself: mysterious callings of Nature
and our responses."42 Many critics discuss the opening of "Sunday Morning"
as a brightly sketched interior by Matisse.43 Like Stevens, Matisse began his
artistic career rather late, after practicing law.

 Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
 Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
 And the green freedom of a cockatoo
 Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
 The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
 She dreams a little,...

 The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
 Seem things in some procession of the dead,
 Winding across wide water, without sound. (II, II1. 1-6, 9-11)

Real domestic objects of modern civilization allow his imagination to establish
contact with the elemental. Stevens comes close to pantheism when he
reasons:

 Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
 In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
 In any balm or beauty of the earth,
 Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven? (11.19-22)

Few could have predicted his conversion to Roman Catholicism upon his
death bed.
 The poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" is a series of haiku-
like images, part of the collection Harmonium, like the preceding one. Part
VII reads:

 O thin men of Haddam,
 Why do you imagine golden birds?
 Do you not see how the blackbird
 Walks around the feet
 Of the women about you?

 Richard Allen Blessing thinks the golden birds derive from Yeats'
"Byzantium."44 Rousseau's bird of paradise is more likely. The "thin men"
could be Quixotes, a favorite character of Stevens. "Haddam" is a small
town in Connecticut. The common, mundane blackbird encircles women who
are attainable, and observation of a real blackbird at different moments yields

42 Souvenirs and Prophecies 104.
43 Lensing, A Poet's Growth 100 -101.
44 Wallace Stevens' "Whole Harmonium" (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1970) 31.