This poem was inspired by something Stevens saw in Elizabeth Park. In a letter to a friend, he wrote, “Until quite lately a group of nuns came [to Elizabeth Park] each morning to paint water colors especially of the water lilies” (L 610). In this poem he imagines the nuns’ thoughts. As they paint, they ponder the miraculous beauty of life which seems to them “supernatural” in origin. This experience awakens in them a refreshing clarity of mind and spirit. They feel that this is a “special day” and that they themselves are an integral part of it. There were several French orders of nuns in the Hartford area, which explains all the French terms in the poem.
Nuns Painting Water-Lilies
by Wallace Stevens
These pods are part of the growth of life within life:
Part of the unpredictable sproutings, as of
The youngest, the still fuzz-eyed, odd fleurettes,
That could come in a slight lurching of the scene,
A swerving, a tilting, a little lengthening,
A few hours more of day, the unravelling
Of a ruddier summer, a birth that fetched along
The supernatural of its origin.
Inside our queer chapeaux, we seem, on this bank,
To be part of a tissue, a clearness of the air,
That matches, today, a clearness of the mind.
It is a special day. We mumble the words
Of saints not heard until now, unnamed,
In aureoles that are over-dazzling crests. . .
We are part of a fraicheur, inaccessible
Or accessible only in the most furtive fiction.
Glossary
fleurettes: French for flowers
chapeaux: French for hats
aureoles: haloes
fraicheur: French for freshness
furtive: secretive, not open or direct
Nuns Painting Water-Lilies" from OPUS POSTHUMOUS by Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1957 by Elsie Stevens and Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. First appeared in The Dial, Volume 75, November 1923.