Wallace Stevens, poet

Odilon Redon, Woman with
a Vase of Flowers

This morning on Facebook, poet Mark Doty remarked, "I don't think I ever read 'Woman Looking at a Vase of Flowers' until today, and I'm thrilled to discover it. Somehow it feels perfect for this moment. Maybe because it concerns a solitary person finding a sense of connection to the world, a sense of meaningful relation between self, the physical world, and the world of ideas. It also reminds me of the complexity great artists often present. Stevens was not, in some clear ways, an admirable man, and capable of being an awful one. I know that's true, just as I know this poem is saturated with a deep sympathy for human experience, and understanding of how it is to look through this woman's eyes as she feels her way toward a—well, a sustainable relationship with reality?" I love Mark Doty—his own poetry (as here, here, and here) and his teaching wisdom. His remarks on FB this morning sent me looking for

Woman Looking at a Vase of Flowers

It was as if thunder took form upon
The piano, that time: the time when the crude
And jealous grandeurs of sun and sky
Scattered themselves in the garden, like
The wind dissolving into birds,
The clouds becoming braided girls.
It was like the sea poured out again
In east wind beating the shutters at night.

Hoot, little owl within her, how
High blue became particular
In the leaf and bud and how the red,
Flicked into pieces, points of air,
Became--how the central, essential red
Escaped its large abstraction, became,
First, summer, then a lesser time,
Then the sides of peaches, of dusky pears.
Hoot how the inhuman colors fell
Into place beside her, where she was,
Like human conciliations, more like
A profounder reconciling, an act,
An affirmation free from doubt.
The crude and jealous formlessness
Became the form and the fragrance of things
Without clairvoyance, close to her.


It is not an easy poem. But it is one that I've gotten more from each time I've read it. It requires multiple readings. It gets at what it is to be alive and sentient and feeling and trying to understand what it is to be alive. It does do that. I think.

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I forgot to post the Covid-19 numbers yesterday, which keep on going up up up. Today they stand (for Monterey County) at 1,642 confirmed cases—up 37 since yesterday, up 94 since Sunday; hospitalizations are at 130, up 8 and 9 respectively; and deaths have risen to 15, up 1 and 2 respectively. Dr. Fauci today said if we don't start behaving seriously about this virus, we could be seeing 100,000 infections a day. And as if coronavirus isn't bad enough, now there's a new H1N1 virus in China (similar to the 1918 influenza and the 2009 swine flu).

Stay safe.