WALLACE STEVENS' CARIBBEAN DREAM


Bloom considers this poem the apotheosis of the celebratory state of mind
associated with Stevens' sojourns in Florida and Cuba (194).
 The painter Henri Rousseau was mentioned by Stevens in a letter of January
23, 1947. Upon acquiring a painting by Bombois, he wrote to his French agent
Paule Vidal, "But Bombois, obviously, is a Rousseau who has never visited
Mexico, that is to say, a Rousseau without imagination. He is a contemporary
primitive and I have no way of knowing as yet what relations a picture of this
sort will form with the other pictures in my very small collection." (545).
Stevens believed that the imagination must be based on reality.
 He sent Rodriquez Feo a copy of his book The Auroras of Autumn in 1950.
Within that collection, "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" had been read
to the Connecticut Academy of Arts in 1949. Section XXIX satirizes the ob-
tuseness of Northerners scarcely affected by the Spanish-speaking tropics
so endlessly fascinating to Stevens:

 In the land of the lemon trees, yellow and yellow were
 Yellow-blue, yellow-green, pungent with citron-sap,
 Dangling and spangling, the mic-mac of mocking birds.

 They rolled their r's, there in the land of the citrons.
 In the land of big mariners, the words they spoke
 Were mere brown clods, mere catching weeds of talk,

 When the mariners came to the land of the lemon trees,
 At last, in that blond atmosphere, bronzed hard,
 They said, "We are back once more in the land of the lemon trees,

 But folded over, turned around." It was the same,
 Except for the adjectives, an alteration
 Of words that was a change of nature, more
 Than the difference that clouds make over a town. (11.1-3, 7-9)

 The last image in Stevens'mind, written shortly before his death in 1955,
according to his friend and first editor of Opus Posthumous, Samuel French
Morse, was the poem of "Of Mere Being:"

 The palm at the end of the mind,
 Beyond the last thought, rises
 In the bronze decor,

 A gold-feathered bird
 Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
 Without human feelings, a foreign song.

 You know then that it is not the reason
 That makes us happy or unhappy.
 The bird sings. Its feathers shine.