The Jack-Rabbit
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Jack-Rabbit is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923). It was first published in that collection[1], so it is still under copyright, but it is quoted here as justified by fair use in order to facilitate scholarly commentary.
| The Jack-Rabbit
In the morning, |
The jack-rabbit's joyful jig contrasts with the prospect of its demise, anticipated by the black man who invokes a symbol of death that applies both to his grandmother and her burial garment, and to the dancing jack-rabbit. For the dichotomy of life and death this poem bears comparison to ``The Emperor of Ice-Cream (specifically on Helen Vendler's interpretation). If that is the subject of the poetry, then the poetry of the subject is the word play, swinging from carolling in caracoles and "feat sandbars" to a rural idiolect.
Buttel views the the black man's words as a fusion of the native folk tradition with the motif of sewing and embroidering from Jules Laforgue, a french symbolist poet who was influenced by Walt Whitman and in turn influenced Stevens (as well as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound). Buttel notes that the buzzard appears frequently in native folk and humorous literature, and that Stevens uses it several times in his poems, "along with bantams, grackles, and turkey-cocks."[2]
[edit] Notes
[edit] References
- Buttel, R. Wallace Stevens: The Making of Harmonium. 1968: Princeton University Press.
