"Fabliau of Florida" is a poem in

Wallace Stevens Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance compa ...

's first book of poetry, '' Harmonium''.

Interpretation

In a letter written in 1939, Stevens says that he has always liked this poem, not because of its sense, "because it does not have a great deal of sense", but because of "the feeling of the words and the reaction and images that the words create". Mark Strand asserts that the poem, though seemingly about the

liminal Liminal is an English adjective meaning "on the threshold", from Latin ''līmen'', plural ''limina''. Liminal or Liminality may refer to: Anthropology and religion * Liminality, the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle ...

space between sea and shore, is really about the liminal space between poem and reality. He suggests that this becomes clear once one appreciates the pun on the first and last words of the poem, namely "barque" and "surf". The poem may be compared to "

Infanta Marina "Infanta Marina" is one of a group of collected poems in Wallace Stevens' '' Harmonium'', in this poem dealing with a seaside princess. Interpretation Helen Vendler (in ''Words Chosen Out of Desire'') presents the poem as a "double scherzo" on ...

", which similarly explores dissolution of boundaries in nature. Here the boundaries are beach and heaven, foam and cloud.

Notes

References

* Stevens, Holly (ed.). ''Letters of Wallace Stevens''. 1966: University of California Press. {{Wallace Stevens 1919 poems American poems Poetry by Wallace Stevens