Wallace Stevens

Jasmine's Beautiful Thoughts Underneath the Willow

Jasmine's Beautiful Thoughts Underneath the Willow - meaning Summary

Private Music of Love

Stevens presents a private, musical imagination of love that rejects conventional, ostentatious expression. The speaker values idiosyncratic, interior experiences—"titillations" without footnotes—over posed souvenirs or theatrical display. Love is pictured as submerged bliss, an inner ocean where fugues and chorals rock beneath surface appearances. The poem contrasts outward forms with a deeper, eccentric rapture rooted in personal perception and creative feeling.

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My titillations have no foot-notes And their memorials are the phrases Of idiosyncratic music. The love that will not be transported In an old, frizzled, flambeaud manner, But muses on its eccentricity, Is like a vivid apprehension Of bliss beyond the mutes of plaster, Or paper souvenirs of rapture, Of bliss submerged beneath appearance, In an interior ocean's rocking Of long, capricious fugues and chorals.

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