The Comedian As The Letter C 06 And Daughters With Curls - Analysis

Overall impression

The poem reads as a richly musical and somewhat whimsical meditation on procreation, creativity, and the human tendency to narrativize life. Its tone shifts between celebratory exuberance and ironic distance: Stevens alternates lush, sensuous description with skeptical commentary that deflates grandiose meaning. The final lines move toward a benignant acceptance that individual stories conclude and are subject to trimming or revision.

Context and authorial stance

Wallace Stevens, an early 20th-century American modernist, often explored how imagination shapes reality; this poem exemplifies that project by dramatizing a figure, Crispin, who invents doctrine and meaning from familial and lyrical life. The poem’s playful high diction and theatrical flourishes reflect Stevens’s interest in the poet as maker and impostor alike.

Main theme: Creation and procreation

One dominant theme is literal and figurative creation. The poem charts Crispin’s progeny—“True daughters both of Crispin and his clay”—and treats childbirth as both domestic labor (“midwifery so dense”) and artistic generation (music, syllables, proclamations). Images of nursery, cabin and “children nibbling at the sugared void” fuse bodily reproduction with confectionary, poetic production.

Main theme: Artifice versus authenticity

Stevens interrogates the tension between sincere creation and contrived doctrine. Crispin “concocted doctrine” and issues a “pronunciamento,” presenting his life as an ordered anecdote. Yet the speaker repeatedly raises doubt—“if the anecdote / Is false” or Crispin merely “glozing his life”—so artifice is both necessary for meaning-making and subject to skepticism.

Main theme: The limits of narrative and consolation

The poem ends by acknowledging narrative’s finite comfort: even if Crispin’s system is spurious, the relation of a life “comes, benignly, to its end.” That concluding acceptance—“So may the relation of each man be clipped”—suggests both mercy in closure and recognition that stories are pruned versions of messy reality.

Recurring images and symbols

Music and speech recurs as a symbol of creative ordering: “syllables,” “sounds of music coming to accord,” and “seraphic proclamations” equate poetic utterance with divine harmony. The daughters function as mirrored instruments or personae—“four voices several,” “four mirrors blue”—symbolizing multiplicity of the self and roles a maker projects onto his work. The cabin alternately serves as phylactery, haunt, and temple, symbolizing a private locus where domestic life becomes sacred or performative. An open interpretive question: are these daughters autonomous beings or extensions of Crispin’s imaginative authority?

Conclusion: significance of the poem

Stevens uses lavish imagery and ironic commentary to explore how humans manufacture meaning through progeny, art, and narrative. The poem both celebrates the fecundity of imagination and tempers that celebration with doubt, concluding in a gentle, almost bureaucratic mercy that stories may be neatly clipped—sufficient consolation whether or not the tale is wholly true.