Last Looks at the Lilacs

"Last Looks at the Lilacs" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1923 (in Secession 4, January[1]).

To what good, in the alleys of the lilacs,
O caliper, do you scratch your buttocks
And tell the divine ingenue, your companion,
That this bloom is the bloom of soap
And this fragrance the fragrance of vegetal?

Do you suppose that she cares a tick,
In this hymeneal air, what it is
That marries her innocence thus,
So that her nakedness is near,
Or that she will pause at scurrilous words?

Poor buffo! Look at the lavender
And look your last and look steadily,
And say how it comes that you see
Nothing but trash and that you no longer feel
Her body quivering in the Floréal

Toward the cool night and its fantastic star,
Prime paramour and belted paragon,
Well-booted, rugged, arrogantly male,
Patron and imager of the gold Don John,
Who will embrace her before summer comes.

Robert Buttel compares this poem to "The Plot Against the Giant" as concerning the humorous disparity between gauche male and suave female.[2] Robert A. Wilson makes a surprisingly plausible case (in a single-page article in The Wallace Stevens Journal, complete with an image of the label from a bottle of "Lilac Vegetal" after-shave lotion) for a connection between the poem and Stevens's experience at a barber shop.[3]

Caliper'd reason, measuring everything but appreciating nothing, is contrasted unfavorably with well-booted imagination, as in Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom'd" or indeed the very poem under discussion. Lilacs can be connected to the fragrance of vegetal or to a cool night's fantastic star, but Stevens favors the latter and the final stanza shows why. Cook reports that "lilacs do not make Stevens happy" and reads the poem as blunt and atypical, comparing it to some of the more strained effects in The Comedian as the Letter C.[4]

Notes

Cook, p. 52.
Buttel, p. 24.
"I would like to posit the theory that the source of these terms and associations stem from Stevens’ getting a haircut. I can recall as a child seeing an astringent called “Lilac Vegetal” on barbers’ shelves. The unusual name of the label always stuck with me, but I never came across the term vegetal again until I read Stevens’ poem. Could he have recalled this label in writing a poem invoking the fragrance of lilacs? Could the “bloom of soap” be a figurative transformation of shaving lather? A most intriguing mystery. Below is a label from one of these bottles." (Wilson, p. 182)
Cook, p. 52.

gollark: OH APIOBEEMETICS

gollark: ~play currents - a flag to wave

gollark: ~np

gollark: ~skip

gollark: ~play bleed from within - pathfinder

References

Buttel, R. Wallace Stevens: The Making of Harmonium. 1968: Princeton University Press.
Bates, Milton. Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self. 1985: University of California Press.
Cook, Eleanor. A Reader's Guide to Wallace Stevens. 2007: Princeton University Press.
Wilson, Robert A. "A Note on 'Last Looks at the Lilacs'". The Wallace Stevens Journal. Volume 16 Number 2 (Fall 1992)

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[1] Cook, p. 52.

[2] Buttel, p. 24.

[3] "I would like to posit the theory that the source of these terms and associations stem from Stevens’ getting a haircut. I can recall as a child seeing an astringent called “Lilac Vegetal” on barbers’ shelves. The unusual name of the label always stuck with me, but I never came across the term vegetal again until I read Stevens’ poem. Could he have recalled this label in writing a poem invoking the fragrance of lilacs? Could the “bloom of soap” be a figurative transformation of shaving lather? A most intriguing mystery. Below is a label from one of these bottles." (Wilson, p. 182)

[4] Cook, p. 52.