"Infanta Marina" is one of a group of collected poems 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 ...

' '' 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 ''her'' in the

possessive A possessive or ktetic form (abbreviated or ; from la, possessivus; grc, κτητικός, translit=ktētikós) is a word or grammatical construction used to indicate a relationship of possession in a broad sense. This can include strict owne ...

sense and on ''of'' in its partitive and possessive sense. The long sequence of possessive phrases Vendler refers to may be enumerated as: 'of the motions', 'of her wrist', 'of her thought', 'of the plumes', 'of this creature', 'of this evening', 'of sails', 'of her fan', 'of the sea', and 'of the evening'. This litany in sequence using the possessive form involving repeated ''of''s shows syntactically what the poem states semantically, Vendler proposes: the interpenetration of mind and nature, the denial of "significant difference" among the objects of the various of-clauses. This semantics may be read as a naturalistic denial of metaphysical dualism between mind and matter, a natural twin to the reading of " Invective Against Swans" as mocking the dualistic soul and its dubious journey to a realm that transcends nature. The princess of the sea in this poem may be compared to "donna" who is "sequestered over the sea" in " O Florida, Venereal Soil", and to " Fabliau of Florida", which in parallel fashion explores dissolution of boundaries in nature.

References

* Vendler. H. ''Words Chosen Out Of Desire''. 1984: University of Tennessee Press. {{Wallace Stevens 1921 poems American poems Poetry by Wallace Stevens