COLLOQUY WITH A POLISH AUNT / Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

Elle savait toutes les legends

du Paradis et tous les contes

de la Pologne.

REVUE DES DEUX MONDES

SHE

How is it that my saints from Voragine,

In their embroidered slippers, touch your spleen?

HE

Old pantaloons, duenna of the spring!

SHE

Imagination is the will of things. . . .

Thus, on the basis of the common drudge,

You dream of women, swathed in indigo,

Holding their books toward the nearer stars,

To read, in secret, burning secrecies. . . .

NOTE:  The epigraph from Review of the Two Worlds means “She knew all the legends

of Paradise and all the stories of Poland .”  Jacopo de Voragine (or Viraggio, the present-day

Varazze, near Genoa in Italy ), who lived from about 1230 to about 1298, wrote a book of

legendary lives of the saints, popularly known as The Golden Legend.  Henry Wadsworth

Longfellow’s “The Golden Legend” (Part II of “Christus: A Mystery”) is indebted to it.