Homunculus et la Belle Etoile

Homunculus et la Belle Etoile  In the sea, Biscayne, there prinks  The young emerald, evening star,  Good light for drunkards, poets, widows,  And ladies soon to be married.  By this light the salty fishes  Arch in the sea like tree-branches,  Going in many directions  Up and down.  This light conducts  The thoughts of drunkards, the feelings  Of widows and trembling ladies,  The movements of fishes.  How pleasant an existence it is  That this emerald charms philosophers,  Until they become thoughtlessly willing  To bathe their hearts in later moonlight,  Knowing that they can bring back thought  In the night that is still to be silent,  Reflecting this thing and that,  Before they sleep!  It is better that, as scholars,  They should think hard in the dark cuffs  Of voluminous cloaks,  And shave their heads and bodies.  It might well be that their mistress  Is no gaunt fugitive phantom.  She might, after all, be a wanton,  Abundantly beautiful, eager,  Fecund,  From whose being by starlight, on sea-coast,  The innermost good of their seeking  Might come in the simplest of speech.  It is a good light, then, for those  That know the ultimate Plato,  Tranquillizing with this jewel  The torments of confusion.

Poems by Wallace Stevens

• Anecdote of Canna
• Anecdote of the Jar
• Anecdote of Men by the Thousands
• Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks
• Banal Sojourn
• The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws
• Colloquy with a Polish Aunt
• The Cuban Doctor
• The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician
• The Emperor of Ice Cream
• Fabliau of Florida
• Gubbinal
• A High-Toned Old Christian Woman
• Homunculus et la Belle Etoile
• Of the Surface of Things
• Peter Quince at the Clavier
• The Place of the Solitaires
• Ploughing on Sunday
• The Snow Man
• Stars at Tallapoosa
• Sunday Morning
• Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
• The Weeping Burgher

Homunculus et la Belle Etoile is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in October 1919, and is therefore in the public domain in the United States, according to Librivox.

Commentary

The poem pursues a contrast between poetic imagination and philosophical reasoning, the latter understood as abstract system-building associated with the rationalist tradition going back to Plato. Stevens implicitly contrasts the philosophers' Plato with `the ultimate Plato'. Both seek the supreme good, but Plato and the other philosophers look for it in something abstract like Plato's `Forms'— a gaunt fugitive phantom. The poet finds the highest good in the sensuous lived experience of an evening in Biscayne, where the good light of Venus, the Evening Star, reveals it to the poet as wanton, abundantly beautiful, eager, fecund. Plato's supreme good is accessible only to a very few intelligent people who have been trained for many years to disregard the senses. The ultimate Plato by contrast is accessible not only to the poet but also the drunkard, widows, and ladies soon to be married. Stevens may be invoking some American populism on behalf of the imagination. (For comparison see On the Manner of Addressing Clouds and Six Significant Landscapes.)

References

• Buttel, Robert. William Stevens: The Making of Harmonium. 1967: Princeton University Press.