Poems from Harmonium: “Floral Decorations for Bananas” and “The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade”
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PREFATORY NOTE: The transcript of this first seminar, which took place on June 20, 2017, in Bogliasco, Italy, uses the following abbreviations: BE (Bart Eeckhout, University of Antwerp & Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study), MM (Maureen N. McLane, New York University), CA (Charles Altieri, University of California, Berkeley), MB (Massimo Bacigalupo, University of Genoa), LG (Lisa Goldfarb, Gallatin School, New York University), GH (Gül Bilge Han, Stockholm University), GM (Glen MacLeod, University of Connecticut), RM (Rachel Malkin, University of Oxford), ER (Edward Ragg, Beijing), TS (Tony Sharpe, Lancaster University), LS (Laura Slatkin, Gallatin School, New York University), JU (Juliette Utard, Sorbonne University & CNRS). The transcript was heavily edited for readability and circulated among participants for fine-tuning; it thus reproduces the dynamic of exchange without in any way striving to be literal. Readers who come upon this material outside the special issue to which it belongs are advised to read the editorial introduction for an account of the rationale behind the following discussion.
Dramatic Monologue or Jazz Poem?
Since Tony said “Give me ‘Floral Decorations’ anytime,” we will start our first seminar with that poem and then move to “The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade.” Before Maureen and I float a few ideas for discussion, let’s start by reading out “Floral Decorations for Bananas”: [End Page 8]
Well, nuncle, this plainly won’t do.These insolent, linear peelsAnd sullen, hurricane shapesWon’t do with your eglantine.They require something serpentine.Blunt yellow in such a room!
You should have had plums tonight,In an eighteenth-century dish,And pettifogging buds,For the women of primrose and purl,Each one in her decent curl.Good God! What a precious light!
But bananas hacked and hunched . . .The table was set by an ogre,His eye on an outdoor gloomAnd a stiff and noxious place.Pile the bananas on planks.The women will be all shanksAnd bangles and slatted eyes.
And deck the bananas in leavesPlucked from the Carib trees,Fibrous and dangling down,Oozing cantankerous gumOut of their purple maws,Darting out of their purple crawsTheir musky and tingling tongues.
So what do we know about this poem? It was first published in April 1923 in Measure and then a few months later included in the first edition of Harmonium. Stevens, as you know, shuffled poems around when he put that volume together, and he decided to place this poem somewhere in the middle. It follows “The Apostrophe to Vincentine,” which also plays conspicuously with sound—in particular, the assonance in “lean,” “clean,” “green,” and “Vincentine” (CPP 42–43). At first blush, “Floral Decorations” is a poem that sets up an ensemble for a painterly still life, or at least we can connect it to Stevens’s many still-life poems, though the scene also seems to involve a preparation for an actual gathering of women. In other words, it’s not just an ekphrastic poem describing a painting: the setting or décor is being organized for people who are expected to visit. If we extend from this, it’s fair to say that this is a poem about the aesthetic requirements of constructing an art work in a modern world. Stevens seems [End Page 9] to come at this topic by exploring the foreign or exotic. One of the associations I had was with Goethe’s Mignon-Lieder: “Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn?” (“Do you know the land where the lemons grow?”). The poem recalls that quintessentially romantic longing for the alien and exotic place, the distant elsewhere. Obviously, at this stage in Stevens’s life we connect this most to Florida. A typically Stevensian paradox of the poem is that, while it seems to reject the visual dissonance between the bananas and the rest of the room, it enacts this dissonance all the time, whether at the...
