The Plot Against the Giant by Wallace Stevens

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.

"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 in the United States.

Commentary

Stevens was called "the Giant" in his Harvard days, and he confessed in an interview a year before his death that "[i]n my younger days I liked girls. But let's not stress that. I have a wife."[1] 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 Pointilists in the "cloths besprinkled with colors / As small as fish eggs."

References

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