WALLACE STEVENS' CARIBBEAN DREAM


 To him, ruins look more Romantic in moonlight. Bishop has visions in the
light of day:

 I can tell what I saw next; it was not a miracle.
 A beautiful villa stood in the sun
 and from its doors came the smell of hot coffee.
 In front, a baroque white plaster balcony
 added by birds, who nest along the river,
 -I saw it with one eye close to the crumb-46

Repeating the same end-words in every stanza, "tomorrow's bread" is
transformed not by Christ, but by the poet's eye.
 Nevertheless, Stevens' curiosity was aroused by his brief foray to such an
extent that he boarded the Kroonland in New York in October of 1923 for a
Caribbean cruise with his wife, visiting Cuba, passing through the Panama
Canal, and finally docking in California. This was a more glamorous
undertaking in those days, more limited to the well-off than today's mass-
marketed Caribbean cruises. Just as Wordsworth had used the journals of
his sister Dorothy to create some of his most famous poems, such as "I
Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," so Stevens used his wife's.47 Every stanza of
"Sea Surface Full of Clouds" begins with the same line:

 In that November off Tehuantepec,
 The slopping of the sea grew still one night
 And in the morning summer hued the deck
 And made one think of rosy chocolate
 And gilt umbrellas. Paradisal green
 Gave suavity to the perplexed machine.

 Baudelaire had addressed his black mistress Jeanne Duval in "L'lnvitation
au voyage, "Mon enfant, ma soeur,/ Songe A la douceur,/ D'aller lA-bas vivre
ensemble!/.. .LA, tout n'est qu' ordre et beauty,/ Luxe, came et volupte." ("My
child, my sister, / dream of the sweetness,/ to go out there to live
together!...There, all is only order and beauty,/ Luxury, calm and voluptuous-
ness.").A8 Baudelaire did not leave his Paris apartment, but Stevens' dream
had come true. When he said,

 Who, then, evolved the sea-blooms from the clouds
 Diffusing balm in the Pacific calm?
 C'6tait mon enfant. Mon bijou, mon dme. (11.10-12)

46 The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 (NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1983) 11.25-30.
Celeste Goodridge, "Elizabeth Bishop and Wallace Stevens: Sustaining the Eye/I,"
Wallace Stevens Journal 19.2 (Fall 1995): 40-41.
47 Lensing, A Poet's Growth 119.
48 (Euvres completes (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1980, 1999) 39.11.1-3. 13-14. Michel Benamou,
Wallace Stevens and the Symbolist Imagination (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972).