RATIONALISTS, WEARING SQUARE HATS.

February 12, 2008 by 4 Comments

The last of the Six Significant Landscapes by Wallace Stevens:

          VI
Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses—
As for example, the ellipse of the half-moon—
Rationalists would wear sombreros.

Early Stevens is irresistible.

Comments

  1. zhoen says
    February 13, 2008 at 11:47 am

    Looking at the whole poem, I changed all the masculine words with feminine, and feminine with masculine, and found it works, adding a surreal twistiness. I do get tired of being an embodiment of darkness and emblematic of dualism in men’s poetry.

  2. language hat says
    February 13, 2008 at 2:35 pm

    Yeah, and the problem is a lot worse with Symbolist poetry, where every fucking thing is represented by some Dark/Unknown/Beautiful Lady or other.

  3. Matt says
    February 15, 2008 at 7:08 am

    And don’t let’s even get fucking started about Goddamn Shakespeare and his miserable arsing sonnets.

  4. Graham Asher says
    February 17, 2008 at 4:07 pm

    Luckily I missed all these nuances and rather liked the poem.

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