Modern American Poetry

Late Poems: Places, Common and Other 243

expatriates yet retain under their cosmopolitanism a deep Spanishness—the
sense ‘that in the service of love and imagination nothing can be too lavish,
too sublime or too festive; yet that all this passion is a caprice, a farce, a
contortion, a comedy of illusions.’”^13 The passage is especially interesting
because of the combination, sometimes strange to an Anglo-Saxon mode of
behavior, of entire devotion and seriousness with complete comic grace. It is
serious play, Spanish style, and Stevens, from the beginning, liked to take on
what Cervantes calls “the syle of a Don.”
The Spaniard’s last appearance is in 1954 in Farewell without a Guitar
(OP98):

Spring’s bright paradise has come to this.

Now the thousand-leaved green falls to the ground.

Farewell, my days.

This short poem, of great poignancy, speaks quietly back over Stevens’ whole
life.
Some of Stevens’ late poems become clearer from a knowledge of his
earlier work, for example, Study of Images II:

The frequency of images of the moon

Is more or less. The pearly women that drop

From heaven and float in air, like animals

Of ether, exceed the excelling witches, whence

They came. But, brown, the ice-bear sleeping in ice-month

In his cave, remains dismissed without a dream,

As if the centre of images had its

Congenial mannequins, alert to please,

Beings of other beings manifold—

The shadowless moon wholly composed of shade,

Women with other lives in their live hair,

Rose—women as half-fishes of salt shine,

As if, as if, as if the disparate halves

Of things were waiting in a betrothal known

To none, awaiting espousal to the sound