Harmonium (poetry Collection) - A Particular Comic Quality

A Particular Comic Quality

Stevens the ironist should not be overlooked. Irony (arguably) suffuses "The Ordinary Women", "Invective Against Swans", "Nuances of a Theme by Williams", and other poems in Harmonium. Also a sense of humor is a significant characteristic of the collection, as indicated by many of the poem titles and in some cases by the content as well. Both title and content of "Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et Les Unze Mille Vierges" testify to this lighter side. Samuel French Morse, who categorized the years 1914-1930 as the Harmonium years, wrote that nothing Stevens was to write later would achieve "the particular comic quality of these early exercises" in Harmonium, though the tone of the poetry would deepen. Even Stevens's experimentation with perspective, coolly executed in "The Snow Man", is presented with bawdy humor in a poem like "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman". One vein of Stevens's poetic humour expresses his reaction against the conventions of the Victorian tradition. Depression Before Spring for instance refuses to gush about spring as a season of renewal; it compares a fair maiden's flaxen hair to cow spit; and it introduces such "unpoetic" lines as "Ho! Ho!" and

But ki-ki-ri-ki
Briings no rou-cou
No rou-cou-cou.

Another aspect of Stevens's sense of humor is the cleverness of such poems as "Anecdote of Canna" and "Hymn From a Watermelon Pavilion", which subtly exploit within-a-dream scenarios.

Stevens seems to have attempted to achieve a balance between somber and light in the Harmonium collection. For instance, though most of the fourteen poems introduced in the second (1931) edition, like "Sea Surface full of Clouds", are somber, "The Revolutionists stop for Orangeade" is light.