Wallace Stevens

Infanta Marina

Infanta Marina - meaning Summary

Gesture Becomes Seascape

The poem presents a graceful female figure—an Infanta—whose small physical movements transform into vast, imagined seascapes. Her terrace is sand and twilight; the motions of her wrist and fan become “sleights of sails” and plumes rippling like waves. Stevens links inner imagination to external landscape, showing how gesture and perception coalesce so the sea and evening are both experienced and enacted, their sounds and motions subsiding into a unified impression.

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Her terrace was the sand And the palms and the twilight. She made of the motions of her wrist The grandiose gestures Of her thought. The rumpling of the plumes Of this creature of the evening Came to be sleights of sails Over the sea. And thus she roamed In the roamings of her fan, Partaking of the sea, And of the evening, As they flowed around And uttered their subsiding sound.

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