Anecdote of Canna

"Anecdote of Canna" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, "Harmonium" (1923). [It was first published prior to 1923 and is therefore in the public domain according to [http://librivox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4077 Librivox.] ]

In the poem's legerdemain the cryptic middle stanza conceals the sleight of hand. Poor X wakes in his sleep ("Now day-break comes") and consequently his eye clings to the canna forever. ["Canna", according to the 1913 "Webster:" A genus of tropical plants, with large leaves and often with showy flowers. The Indian shot ("Canna Indica") is found in gardens of the northern United States.] The cleverness of the poem links it to "The Worms at Heaven's Gate". The poetic conceit here may be contrasted with Descartes' philosophical proposition that a person must always be thinking when asleep, on pain of ceasing to exist. Day-dreaming, sleep-walking, catatonic X is fixated upon the showy canna that fill the terrace of his capitol, his consciousness.

Buttel forgoes this interpretation in favor of the idea that the poem celebrates the poetic counterpart of a painter's "primitive eye". Such poets would achieve what Monet and the Impressionists desired, recovering from blindness and seeing the world "with utmost clarity, without preconceptions." [Buttel, p. 155] "They would be like X in Stevens' `Anecdote of Canna'," Buttel writes, "who at daybreak `Observes the Canna with a clinging eye,' as though for the first time." [Buttel, p. 155]

Notes

References

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