The Jack-Rabbit

The Jack-Rabbit is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first bookof poetry,"Harmonium" (1923). It was first published in that collection [Buttel, p. 19] , so it is still under copyright, but it is quoted here as justified by fair use in order to facilitate scholarly commentary.

Overview

The jack-rabbit's joyful jig contrasts with the prospect of itsdemise, anticipated by the black man who invokes a symbol of deaththat applies both to his grandmother and her burial garment, and to the dancing jack-rabbit. For the dichotomy of life and death thispoem bears comparison to ``The Emperor of Ice-Cream"(specifically on Helen Vendler's interpretation). If that is thesubject of the poetry, then the poetry of the subject is the wordplay, swinging from carolling in caracoles and "feat sandbars" to arural 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." [Buttel, p. 199]

Notes

References

• Buttel, R. "Wallace Stevens: The Making of Harmonium". 1968: Princeton University Press.