Le Monocle de Mon Oncle

"Le Monocle de Mon Oncle" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry,Harmonium. It was first published in 1918.

 Like a dull scholar, I behold, in love,
 An ancient aspect touching a new mind.
 It comes, it
blooms, it bears its fruit and dies.
 This trivial trope
reveals a way of truth.
 Our bloom is gone. We are the fruits
thereof.
 Two golden gourds distended on our vines,
 Into the autumn weather, splashed with frost,
 Distorted by hale fatness, turned grotesque.
 We hang like warty squashes, streaked and rayed,
 The laughing sky will see the two of us
 Washed into rinds by rotting winter rains.

Quoted here is the eighth canto. (The whole poem can be found elsewhere.) Canto I includes the line "I wish that I might be a thinking stone."

Harold Bloom regaled his students with an off-beat interpretation of Canto II's line, "Shall I uncrumple this much-crumpled thing?", as alluding to an inactive sexual relationship to Elsie ("you", the Other).

Canto IV includes the verse,

This luscious and impeccable fruit of life
Falls, it appears, of its own weight to earth.
When you were Eve, its acrid juice was sweet,
Untasted, in its heavenly, orchard
air.

Canto XI includes the verse,

 If sex were all, then every trembling hand
Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.

And in canto XII the poem concludes with the verse,

Like a rose rabbi, later, I pursued,
And still pursue, the origin and course
Of love, but until now I never knew
That fluttering things have so distinct a shade.

Holly Stevens quotes a letter of her father in which he writes, "I had in mind simply a man fairly well along in life, looking back and talking in a more or less personal way about life." This is widely regarded as reticence about the poem's commentary on his domestic life, or, as Helen Vendler phrases it, the poem is "about Stevens' failed marriage", "about [his] middle age and romantic disillusion". She defends herself against the accusation of biographical reduction, which elsewhere she directs against Joan Richardson's psychobiography of

Stevens, as follows.

It has been objected that a criticism

suggesting that poems spring from life is reductive, that is to say that "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle" is about Stevens' failed marriage is somehow injurious to the poem. It seems to me normal to begin with the life-occasion as we deduce it from the poem; it is only an error when one ends there. To tether Stevens' poems to human feeling is at least to remove him from the "world of ghosts" where he is so often located, and to insist that he is a poet of more than epistemological questions

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Wikipedia