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

A pronouncement that wants to become a lullaby

The passage sets out to make Crispin’s life sound like a law of nature: a grand pronunciamento carried on portentous syllables and a music that keeps coming to accord. But the poem’s central claim is slipperier than that grand tone suggests: whatever Crispin “deduces” about the world gets immediately revised—softened, crowded, and half-undone—by the domestic fact of children and by the speaker’s later doubt about whether the whole account is even true. Stevens begins by inflating Crispin’s voice into something quasi-prophetic—sound that “bubbles” into “unison”—and then pushes that prophecy into a cramped cabin where it has to share space with curls, botches, sugar, noise, and time.

The tone is both ceremonious and teasing. Words like seraphic proclamations and deluging onwardness offer a mock-epic halo, while phrases such as jigging, bluet-eyed and blasphemously pink puncture it with cartoon brightness. The poem admires Crispin’s desire to speak the world into clarity, but it keeps showing how that clarity gets smudged by living.

The cabin: from amulet to nursery to shrine

Crispin’s “return to social nature” doesn’t come as a simple settling-down; it arrives as a confused motion—anabasis or slump, ascent or chute. The cabin, which might have been the practical outpost of an Effective colonizer, becomes a series of unexpected rooms in one: first a phylactery (an amulet, a protection), then a place of vexing palankeens (carried, swaying burdens), then a haunt of children nibbling at the sugared void. That last phrase is a small masterpiece of ambivalence: sugar implies delight, but “void” implies hunger that never quite gets fed. The domestic scene isn’t sentimental; it’s busy, pressurized, and slightly unreal, as if the sweetness itself were a kind of emptiness the children worry with their teeth.

Even the women are described in a language that refuses simple innocence. They are unbraided femes and green crammers of the world’s green fruits: beginners who are also ravenous, taking in life as something to be consumed and bid for, bidders and biders for ecstasy. The cabin becomes a “halidom,” a sanctuary, but it’s sanctified by appetite as much as by purity. Crispin’s “clay”—his earthliness, his made-ness—fathers daughters who are at once natural and strangely commercial, both born and bargaining.

Four daughters as four versions of being alive

The poem narrows its lens to the daughters one by one, and the tone briefly turns tender without losing its strangeness. The first is the goldenest demoiselle, delicately blushing, an inhabitant of a country of capuchins; she seems monkish and modest, humbly eyed, attentive to a coronal of things that are secret and singular. The second is almost the same—but sleepier, not yet awake except to the motherly footstep, sometimes amazed by shaken sleep. The third is flaxen in the light, a creeping plant under jaunty leaves, later “lettering herself” as a pearly poetess and “peaked for rhapsody.” The fourth is pure comic energy: first all din and gobble, later a digit curious, the inquisitive finger itself.

What matters is not a realistic portrait of four children but a set of temperaments—four angles on consciousness. Stevens then generalizes them into a dazzling list: four blithe instruments, four mirrors blue that should be silver, four accustomed seeds “hinting incredible hues.” The tension is built into those lines: the mirrors are the wrong color; the “accustomed” seeds hint at the incredible. Ordinary life produces deviations, and those deviations become the poem’s evidence that the world never stays “solved.” The daughters are “intimate as buffo” (comic opera), suggesting that even intimacy is a kind of performance—and yet they are also “questioners” and “sure answerers,” as if the household were a miniature philosophy school that never stops talking.

Colonizer stopped by his own “bloom”

Early on, Crispin is framed as a maker of systems: an “Effective colonizer” bringing something overseas and establishing a new order. Yet he is sharply stopped in his own dooryard by his capacious bloom. The phrase makes domestic growth sound like vegetation and like body: reproduction as a luxuriant plant that blocks the threshold. This is one of the poem’s key contradictions: Crispin’s original drive is outward—conquest, doctrine, “devise”—but the force that arrests him is inward and proliferating, the family as a literal swelling of his life.

And still, Stevens won’t let the family become a simple moral lesson. The “bloom” grows “riper,” showing nibs of eventual roundness and puerile tints of spiced and weathery rouges. Childishness and ripening sit together; “puerile” and “weathery” share the same cheeks. The “stopper” to Crispin’s fatalism—what interrupts his resigned acceptance—turns out to be unforeseen not because children are pure, but because they are complex: they ripen into difference.

The “turnip” world: realism, purple, and the same lump again

Crispin tries to convert this rout—noise, growth, four temperaments—into “doctrine.” The poem’s most blunt parable follows: the world was a turnip once, readily plucked, carried overseas, its ancient purple daubed out, pruned, and sown again by the stiffest realist. The result? It comes back in purple anyway, in “family font,” as the same insoluble lump. That “insoluble” is the key. Realism—here imagined as pruning, stripping color, replanting—can’t finally simplify the world. The world returns with its old dye, and now it returns through family, through inheritance, through “font” (a word that hints at baptism as well as typeface, a family script).

The fatalist in Crispin responds almost comically: he dropped the chuckling down his craw, swallowing the lesson without “grace or grumble.” The tone is resigned but also satisfied; there’s a dark comfort in admitting you can’t dissolve the lump. Yet the poem does not rest there, because it immediately questions the status of the whole narrative.

When the poem doubts itself: “Or if the music sticks”

The hinge arrives when Stevens calls the story an anecdote invented for its pith, “not doctrinal in form,” even if “in design” it follows Crispin’s will. That admission opens the trapdoor: what we’re reading is a “disguised pronunciamento,” a summary that wants to sound like “Autumn’s compendium”—a season of rounding-off and taking stock. For a moment, the poem claims that the syllables and sounds naturally come to accord upon Crispin’s law, like an inherent sphere.

Then the speaker abruptly loosens the screws: Or if the music sticks, if the anecdote / Is false, if Crispin is profitless, if he begins with green brag and ends faded, if he is fickle and fumbling. The tone turns sharply skeptical, almost irritated with its own baroque confidence. Even Crispin’s gift—“illuminating…plain and common things”—is framed as a distortion, after-shining flicks from a fancy gorged / By apparition. In other words: maybe the whole law is just a man’s appetite for vision, and the brightness is only a cosmetic glaze over a messy year.

A sharpened question the poem can’t escape

If Crispin’s “doctrine” ends by proving what he proves / Is nothing, why does the poem spend so much energy making his nothingness sing—giving it capuchins, orioles, rouge, sugared void, purple turnips? The poem seems to suspect that even calling something nothing is a kind of style, another “pronunciamento,” another way of taking possession.

Clipped relations and the mercy of ending

The closing lines offer a strange consolation: what can all this matter since / The relation comes…to its end? “Relation” means both story and human connection; it is the narrative and the bond. The word benignly is startling here—ending as gentleness, as a natural stopping rather than a catastrophe. And yet the final sentence—So may the relation of each man be clipped—reintroduces pressure: clipped like a hedge, cut short, edited down. The poem leaves us with an uneasy balance between relief and diminishment.

So the passage finally reads less like Crispin’s triumphant philosophy than like a portrait of philosophy being domesticated and then doubted. The cabin fills with four living counterarguments, the world returns purple no matter how “realist” the pruning, and the poem itself admits it may be only an anecdote—music that sometimes “sticks.” What survives is not a clean doctrine but a human pattern: a person tries to make a law, life multiplies, and the story ends—clipped, yes, but for that very reason tellable.