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Last Looks at the Lilacs

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Last Looks at the Lilacs" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1923 (in Secession 4, January[1]).

Last Looks at the Lilacs

To what good, in the alleys of the lilacs,
O caliper, do you scratch your buttocks
And tell the divine ingenue, your companion,
That this bloom is the bloom of soap
And this fragrance the fragrance of vegetal?

Do you suppose that she cares a tick,
In this hymeneal air, what it is
That marries her innocence thus,
So that her nakedness is near,
Or that she will pause at scurrilous words?

Poor buffo! Look at the lavender
And look your last and look steadily,
And say how it comes that you see
Nothing but trash and that you no longer feel
Her body quivering in the Floréal

Toward the cool night and its fantastic star,
Prime paramour and belted paragon,
Well-booted, rugged, arrogantly male,
Patron and imager of the gold Don John,
Who will embrace her before summer comes.

Robert Buttel compares this poem to "The Plot Against the Giant" as concerning the humorous disparity between gauche male and suave female.[2] Robert A. Wilson makes a surprisingly plausible case (in a single-page article in The Wallace Stevens Journal, complete with an image of the label from a bottle of "Lilac Vegetal" after-shave lotion) for a connection between the poem and Stevens's experience at a barber shop.[3]

Caliper'd reason, measuring everything but appreciating nothing, is contrasted unfavorably with well-booted imagination, as in Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom'd" or indeed the very poem under discussion. Lilacs can be connected to the fragrance of vegetal or to a cool night's fantastic star, but Stevens favors the latter and the final stanza shows why. Cook reports that "lilacs do not make Stevens happy" and reads the poem as blunt and atypical, comparing it to some of the more strained effects in The Comedian as the Letter C.[4]

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Transcription

[music] Marjorie Peronto: My name is Marjorie Peronto and I'm with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension. Today we're going to learn how to prune a lilac. It's important to prune your lilac yearly to keep it healthy and flowering profusely. If you leave a lilac neglected for several years it becomes very congested in the center, which makes it more subject to diseases and it also becomes too tall so that the blossoms are way above your head and harder for you to enjoy. So, in pruning our lilac today we have three objectives. One, we want to keep the shrub open so that sunlight and air can circulate into the center of the shrub. Two, we want to stimulate growth of young, vigorous shoots. Those will be the ones that will bear lots of flowers in the future. Three, we want to keep the shrub at a reasonable height. It's easiest to prune a lilac and any other deciduous tree or shrub -- that is, those that drop their leaves in the winter -- in the late winter or early spring. That would be in March in Maine. The reason for this is, it's not actively growing and there are no leaves on the plant to block our view, so we can really see what we're doing. The disadvantage to this is that the flower buds for this year have already formed. They formed last year. When I remove wood from this shrub now, I'm also decreasing this coming spring's flower display. So, the other option is waiting until it flowers and going in immediately after the flowers fade and doing your pruning, but for demonstration purposes we're doing it without the leaves so you can really see what's going on. So, there's three tools that you need when you're pruning a lilac that's been allowed to get as large as this one. The first one is a pruning saw and a seven inch blade is plenty to get into tight corners. I really like the folding saws because, when you're done, you can just stick it in your pocket and keep it clean. The second is a pair of loppers. These loppers are made to cut branches between an inch and an inch and a half thick. OK? The saw is for larger cuts. Then the third is a pair of hand pruners and these are made for pruning pencil-sized branches or smaller. OK? So, you're fully equipped if you have those three. Make sure you keep your tools sharp so that you get nice, clean cuts. If your tools are dull, you will tear or shred or crush the branches, leaving uneven wounds that take a lot longer to heal. There's a couple of approaches we can take when pruning a lilac if it's old and it's been left neglected for a number of years and it's a tangled mess of stems with very few flowers. You might want to cut the whole thing down to within a foot of the ground. That will stimulate it to send up new shoots but it won't start to flower for several years and it won't look very good. So, it will go through an ugly phase. A less dramatic approach is to do this to renovate the shrub over time, taking a little bit out over a period of several years, which is what I'm going to demonstrate today. Now, I've already gone in and removed a few branches beforehand for the purpose of this demonstration, so we can more clearly see what we're looking for. So, the first thing to look for are the oldest, thickest stems in the shrub. You want to find those and remove up to one third of them. This will do two things. It will open up the center of the shrub and it will also bring the height of the shrub down, because the oldest stems also tend to be the tallest. You want to remove them as close to the ground as possible. You may need to take them out in stages, to avoid wounding other branches in the shrub. The bark on young lilac shoots is very thin and fragile, so it's very easy to create wounds, so we want to be careful and make very precise cuts. The second thing to look for after you've removed a few of the oldest, thickest stems, is what is called the three Ds. That's dead, damaged and diseased wood. Dead wood is brittle and has no plumb buds on it. It's easy to see and that should come out at any time. Damaged and diseased wood should be cut back to healthy wood or removed entirely. The third thing to look for is crossing, rubbing branches. When two branches are crossing and rubbing, as they grow they get thicker and thicker and they create a wound there, at that surface, which is an entry place for disease organisms. So, we want to alleviate that problem. Then we look for any drooping branches that are hanging down too low and cut those off to a healthy side shoot. Lastly we take out pencil-thin suckers that are coming up from the base or twiggy growth that is cluttering the base of the plant and then if there's anything that's growing outside the boundaries of the plant, where you want it to grow, that should be removed as well. Most or all of the cuts that you make on your lilac are thinning cuts. Those are cuts where you remove an entire branch or an entire stem at its point of origin to open up that plant. Here we have the finished product for this year. We have removed a lot of large stems from the center, I've taken out some crossing rubbing branches, a lot of the dead wood... All the dead wood I could find, drooping branches, little spindly things coming up from the bottom and what is left behind are some nice, young shoots with nice, fat flower buds. Those will grow into larger stems that will continue to produce flowers for a number of years. I still have some taller shoots, although I did reduce the height quite a bit. These taller ones will probably come out next year. I just didn't want to take it all out at once so that the shrub still looks intact. As you can see the center is wide open, we'll have good air circulation in there, good sun penetration and we still have a lot of flower buds left to give us a lovely display this year. [music]

Notes

  1. ^ Cook, p. 52.
  2. ^ Buttel, p. 24.
  3. ^ "I would like to posit the theory that the source of these terms and associations stem from Stevens’ getting a haircut. I can recall as a child seeing an astringent called “Lilac Vegetal” on barbers’ shelves. The unusual name of the label always stuck with me, but I never came across the term vegetal again until I read Stevens’ poem. Could he have recalled this label in writing a poem invoking the fragrance of lilacs? Could the “bloom of soap” be a figurative transformation of shaving lather? A most intriguing mystery. Below is a label from one of these bottles." (Wilson, p. 182)
  4. ^ Cook, p. 52.

References

  • Buttel, R. Wallace Stevens: The Making of Harmonium. 1968: Princeton University Press.
  • Bates, Milton. Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self. 1985: University of California Press.
  • Cook, Eleanor. A Reader's Guide to Wallace Stevens. 2007: Princeton University Press.
  • Wilson, Robert A. "A Note on 'Last Looks at the Lilacs'". The Wallace Stevens Journal. Volume 16 Number 2 (Fall 1992)
This page was last edited on 22 December 2020, at 05:30
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