The Plot Against the Giant - Misplaced Pages

Poem by Wallace Stevens

"The Plot Against the Giant" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1917, so it is in the public domain.

The Plot Against the Giant

First Girl
When this yokel comes maundering,
Whetting his hacker,
I shall run before him,
Diffusing the civilest odors
Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.
It will check him.
Second Girl
I shall run before him,
Arching cloths besprinkled with colors
As small as fish-eggs.
The threads
Will abash him.
Third Girl
Oh, la...le pauvre!
I shall run before him,
With a curious puffing.
He will bend his ear then.
I shall whisper
Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.
It will undo him.

Stevens was called "the Giant" in his Harvard days, and he confessed in an interview a year before his death that "n my younger days I liked girls. But let's not stress that. I have a wife." The mumbling giant, perhaps a lumberjack sharpening his axe, may be compared to the bucks whose course is changed by the firecat poet in "Earthy Anecdote", here replaced by three girls. The poet challenges and changes the ordinary. The yokel may be checked, abashed, and undone. Maybe he is changed.

The poem's theme of beguiling female and bumbling male can be compared to "Last Looks at the Lilacs" and "Two Figures in Dense Violet Night".

Buttel detects a hint of the work of the Pointillists in the "cloths besprinkled with colors / As small as fish eggs."

Notes

Buttel, p. 159
">Talk With Mr. Stevens". www.nytimes.com.

References

Buttel, R. Wallace Stevens: The Making of Harmonium. 1967: Princeton University Press.

v t e Harmonium by Wallace Stevens
"Earthy Anecdote" "Invective Against Swans" "The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage" "The Plot Against the Giant" "Infanta Marina" "Domination of Black" "The Snow Man" "The Ordinary Women" "The Load Of Sugar-Cane" "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle" "Nuances of a Theme by Williams" "Metaphors of a Magnifico" "Ploughing on Sunday" "Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et Les Unze Mille Vierges" "Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores" "Fabliau of Florida" "Doctor of Geneva" "Homunculus et la Belle Etoile" "The Comedian as the Letter C" "From the Misery of Don Joost" "O Florida, Venereal Soil" "Last Looks at the Lilacs" "The Worms at Heaven's Gate" "The Jack-Rabbit" "Valley Candle" "Anecdote of Men by the Thousand" "The Apostrophe to Vincentine" "Floral Decorations for Bananas" "Anecdote of Canna" "On the Manner of Addressing Clouds" "Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb " "Of the Surface of Things" "Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks" "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman" "The Place of the Solitaires" "The Weeping Burgher" "The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician" "Banal Sojourn" "Depression Before Spring" "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" "The Cuban Doctor" "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon" "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" "Sunday Morning" "The Virgin Carrying a Lantern" "Stars at Tallapoosa" "Explanation" "Six Significant Landscapes" "Bantam in Pine-Woods" "Anecdote of the Jar" "Palace of the Babies" "Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs" "Jasmine's Beautiful Thoughts Underneath The Willow" "Cortège for Rosenbloom" "Tattoo" "The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws" "Life Is Motion" "The Wind Shifts" "Colloquy with a Polish Aunt" "Gubbinal" "Two Figures in Dense Violet Night" "Theory" "To the One of Fictive Music" "Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion" "Peter Quince at the Clavier" "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" "Nomad Exquisite" "The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad" "The Death of a Soldier" "Negation" "The Surprises of the Superhuman" "Sea Surface Full of Clouds" "The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade" "Lunar Paraphrase" "Anatomy of Monotony" "The Public Square" "Indian River" "Tea"

Harmonium by Wallace Stevens

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