Explore "Floral Decorations for Bananas" by Wallace Stevens on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Well, nuncle, this plainly won't do. / These insolent, linear peels / And sullen, hurricane shapes / Won't do with your eglantine. / They require something serpentine. / Blunt yellow in such a room!
You should have had plums tonight, / In an eighteenth-century dish, / And pettifogging buds, / For the women of primrose and purl, / Each one in her decent curl. / Good God! What a precious light!
But bananas hacked and hunched... / The table was set by an ogre, / His eye on an outdoor gloom / And a stiff and noxious place. / Pile the bananas on planks. / The women will be all shanks / And bangles and slatted eyes.
And deck the bananas in leaves / Plucked from the Carib trees, / Fibrous and dangling down, / Oozing cantankerous gum / Out of their purple maws, / Darting out of their purple craws / Their musky and tingling tongues.