Colloquy with a Polish Aunt

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"Colloquy with a Polish Aunt" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1919, so it is in the public domain.^[1]

Colloquy with a Polish Aunt Elle savait toutes les légendes du Paradis et tous les contes de la Pologne. Revue des Deux Mondes  She  How is it that my saints from Voragaine,  In their embroidered slippers, touch your spleen?  He  Old pantaloons, duenna of the spring!  She  Imagination is the will of things....  Thus, on the basis of the common drudge,  You dream of women, swathed in indigo,  Holding their books toward the nearer stars,  To read, in secret, their burning secrecies....

Why is he angered by her saints from Voragaine? The reference is presumably to Varagine (today Varazze), on the Ligurian coast between Savona and Genova. It has no evident connection, poetical or otherwise, to Poland, and his reference to old pantaloons doesn't clear things up.

Her assertion about imagination presumably gets to what Stevens wants to say. The poet brings out the otherwise inscrutable telos of things, purposes that lay dormant till evoked in his dream.^[2] So the common drudge becomes transformed into women reading books containing burning secrecies, by starlight.

The poem is inscrutable from beginning to end, a fine expression of the Wilson effect that one often encounters when reading Stevens. (Edmund Wilson: "Even when you do not know what he is saying, you know that he is saying it well."[[2]]

Leading interpreters of Harmonium give the poem a wide berth. Buttel omits it from his index catalog of the collection's poems. Bates steers clear of it similarly.

An affinity with Schopenhauer's philosophy is detectable. Imagination is more fundamental than reason. (See the reference to square-hatted rationalists in "Six Significant Landscapes".) The poet's imagination particularly contributes to an aesthetic relationship to nature that is more profound than a scientific or religious one, a case that's famously made, specifically with reference to religion, in Sunday Morning.

Perhaps she explains to him the source of his anger?

[edit] Notes

1. ^ See Librivox.[1]
2. ^ For the poet as dreamer, see for example Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock

[edit] References

• Bates, Milton J. Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self. 1985: University of California Press.
• Buttel, Robert. Wallace Stevens: The Making of Harmonium. 1967: Princeton University Press.