This poem describes a simple arrangement of pink and white carnations in a white bowl. Perhaps this image was based on an actual centerpiece that Stevens’s wife, Elsie, had placed on their dining room table. As the poet contemplates this centerpiece, his attention focuses on its striking simplicity.
Sometimes our lives can be so complicated that we are happy to escape into a simpler, more perfect world like this one of “white and snowy scents.” But such an artificial perfection can never satisfy us for long. We get bored: “one desires / So much more than that.” Unlike the world of art (the carefully arranged flowers), the real world is messy and ever-changing; in that sense, the mixed-up world we live in is perfectly suited to our restless minds. “The imperfect is our paradise.”
For Stevens, this human taste for imperfection explains his own delight in what the poem calls “flawed words and stubborn sounds.” He once wrote, “Personally, I like words to sound wrong” and “many lines exist because I enjoy their clickety-clack in contrast with the more decorous pom-pom-pom that people expect” (L 340, 485). Can you find examples of such “stubborn sounds” in other poems? (Try, for instance, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” or “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock.”) How do these odd-sounding phrases make you feel?
The Poems of Our Climate
by Wallace Stevens
I
Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations–one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there.
II
Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one’s torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.
III
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.
“The Poems of Our Climate.” Copyright 1942 by Wallace Stevens, copyright © renewed 1970 by 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.