Cy est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et les Unze Mille Vierge is a poem in Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1915 in the magazine Rogue, so it is in the public domain. Butell characterizes it as one of the first two poems (the other is "Tea") to "successfully combine wit and elegance". They are the earliest poems to be collected later in Harmonium.
The poem describes a woman and her prayer ceremony in ...
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Cy est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et les Unze Mille Vierge is a poem in Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1915 in the magazine Rogue, so it is in the public domain. Butell characterizes it as one of the first two poems (the other is "Tea") to "successfully combine wit and elegance". They are the earliest poems to be collected later in Harmonium.
The poem describes a woman and her prayer ceremony in a garden, and the Lord's religiously unorthodox response. If the "true subject" of the poem is an erotic moment, the "poetry of the subject" is a delicate poetic bouquet.(For more on this distinction see Le Monocle de Mon Oncle.) Or one might follow Joan Richardson in viewing it as a record of Stevens's relationship with his wife, Elsie, disguised as a mock-medieval legend to "throw anyone who might be curious completely off the scent." Elsie did not like the poem's "mocking spirit", and one editor, Harriet Monroe, wrote a rejection letter to...
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