‘Bouquet of Belle Scavoir’ - poem

Bouquet of Belle Scavoir

It is she alone that matters. 

She made it. It is easy to say 

The figures of speech, as why she chose 

This dark, particular rose. 

Everything in it is herself. 

Yet the freshness of the leaves, the burn 

Of the colors, are tinsel changes, 

Out of the changes of both light and dew 

How often had he walked 

Beneath summer and the sky 

To receive her shadow into his mind… 

Miserable that it was not she. 

The sky is too blue, the earth too wide. 

The thought of her takes her away. 

The form of her in something else 

Is not enough.

The reflection of her here, and then there, 

Is another shadow, another evasion, 

Another denial. If she is everywhere, 

She is nowhere, to him.

But this she has made. If it is 

Another image, it is one she has made. 

It is she that he wants, to look at directly, 

Someone before him to see and to know.

                                 Wallace Stevens (1879 - 1955)*

*Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pensylvania and educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and then spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems in 1955.

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