Infanta Marina
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Infanta Marina is a poem in Wallace Stevens' Harmonium about a seaside princess. Helen Vendler (in Words Chosen Out Of Desire) presents the poem as a "double scherzo" on 'her' in the possessive sense and on 'of' in its partitive and possessive sense.
| Infanta Marina
Her terrace was the sand She made of the motions of her wrist The rumpling of the plumes And thus she roamed |
of the motions
of her wrist
of her thought
of the plumes
of this creature
of this evening
of sails
of her fan
of the sea
of the evening
The litany of "of's" shows syntactically what the poem states semantically, Vendler proposes: the interpenetration of mind and nature, the denial of "significant difference" among the objects of the various of-clauses. This semantics may be read as a naturalistic denial of metaphysical dualism between mind and matter, a natural twin to the reading of "Invective Against Swans" as mocking the dualistic soul and its dubious journey to a realm that transcends nature.
The princess of the sea in this poem may be compared to "donna" who is "sequestered over the sea" in "O Florida, Venereal Soil".
