In the Carolinas by Wallace Stevens

'"In the Carolinas", the third poem in Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium, experiments with a dramatic shift from languid meditation to a startling image of an aspic nipple, the aspish nipple of mother nature, and joltingly italicized first-person expressions of subjective response. Eleanor Cook notes that the Carolinas are a fertile part of the Earth, and that the Timeless mother, presumably mother nature, is not always welcoming. In structural terms, she sees "a quatrain, then a tercet, then a couplet, all unrhymed, [and] cast as a short dialogue." She suggests an allusion to the asp or aspic that Cleopatra laid on her breasts. She finds the concluding couplet "cryptic" but takes the answerer to be the timeless mother. She notes that, although these lines answers the question "How?" in instrumental terms, by reference to sweetening and beautifying, they do not answer the associated "Why?" question, writing that Stevens leaves open the possibility that the reply is also a refusal to answer this question.