Lulu Gay - Analysis

A song that turns bodies into sound

In Lulu Gay, Wallace Stevens stages a charged little performance in which erotic contact is displaced into language and noise. Lulu is surrounded by men who cannot, or do not, fully touch her in the way her story describes: eunuchs who listen, and barbarians who grab. The poem’s central drama is that Lulu’s singing becomes a kind of power: she converts physical appetite into an audience’s compulsive response, making desire audible rather than consummated. Yet the poem never lets that power feel clean or safe; Lulu’s agency is tangled with the fact that she is also a spectacle being appraised, sniffed, and handled.

Orchid praise and heavy hands

The opening is blunt about how Lulu is treated. The gobs call her orchidean—a compliment that turns her into a rare flower, an object for display and scent. Immediately the poem makes that metaphor bodily: they sniffed her and slapped heavy hands upon her. The word heavy matters: it’s not flirtation but ownership, a tactile claim. Even the fancy-sounding orchidean is made crude by context, as if refinement is just another way of consuming her. This is one of the poem’s key contradictions: Lulu is praised as delicate and exotic, but handled as if she were durable property.

Eunuchs as an audience who can only answer with ululation

Against the barbarians’ physicality, the eunuchs are defined almost entirely by sound. Lulu made the eunuchs ululate, and when they listen it is continual ululation—a sustained, involuntary chorus. The repetition makes their response feel automatic, like a bodily reflex in the throat. Lulu doesn’t merely sing to them; she produces them as an instrument, an echo chamber. That suggests a different kind of intimacy: not touch, but vibration; not possession, but vocal surrender. Still, there’s something unsettling here too. The eunuchs’ role is narrowed to a single noise, as if their identities have been reduced the way their bodies have been altered.

The “manners” of barbarians and the obscenity of thumbs

Lulu’s content is framed as instruction: she described for them the manners of the barbarians, including what they did with their thumbs. Calling it manners is sly—what follows is clearly sexual, and possibly obscene, but the poem dresses it in the language of etiquette, as if she’s giving a cultural lecture. The detail about thumbs is pointed precisely because Stevens won’t specify further; the poem relies on the audience’s imagination to supply what the “thumbs” do. That is another tension the poem exploits: Lulu seems to expose barbarism, but the act of describing it becomes its own erotic stimulation, proven by the eunuchs’ nonstop cries.

“Wide mouths” and the sticky truth of gum

When Lulu describes being kissed, the poem leans into animal physicality: the barbarians kiss her with wide mouths and breaths that are true as the gum of the gum-tree. That simile is both sensual and faintly repellent. Gum is fragrant, natural, and adhesive; it clings. So the barbarians’ “truth” is not moral honesty but bodily fact—heat, saliva, stickiness, inevitability. The poem’s tone here is half-lush, half-wry, as if it knows the romance of “true breath” is immediately undercut by comparing it to resin. Lulu’s story makes the body undeniable, but it also makes it comic in its sheer materiality.

When language collapses into a chant

The ending pushes the eunuchs’ response past words into pure syllables: “Olu” and “Ululalu”. It’s the poem’s turn from description to incantation, as if Lulu’s narrative has overwhelmed meaning and left only sound—desire reduced to a mouth-shape. That final chorus can be heard as applause, arousal, or a kind of ritual. Either way, it completes the poem’s exchange: Lulu offers the barbarian body in story-form, and the eunuchs pay back not with touch but with a vocal spasm. The poem leaves us in that uneasy space where performance looks like control, yet everyone—including Lulu—has been converted into appetites and noises.