Oak Leaves Are Hands
Oak Leaves Are Hands - meaning Summary
Mutable Identity Through Imagination
Wallace Stevens' poem sketches a mythical woman, Lady Lowzen, whose identity continually shifts through imaginative transformation. The speaker presents her as various figures—Flora, Mac Mort, a many‑armed ancestral being—suggesting metamorphosis across time. Imagery of brooding acorns and shells links personal change to memory and latent potential. Through a few words Stevens shows imagination as creative force that invents and reinvigorates selves, blending past and future into a chromatic, protean persona.
Read Complete AnalysesIn Hydaspia, by Howzen Lived a lady, Lady Lowzen, For whom what is was other things. Flora she was once. She was florid A bachelor of feen masquerie, Evasive and metamorphorid. Mac Mort she had been, ago, Twelve-legged in her ancestral hells, Weaving and weaving many arms. Even now, the centre of something else, Merely by putting hand to brow, Brooding on centuries like shells. As the acorn broods on former oaks In memorials of Northern sound, Skims the real for its unreal, So she in Hydaspia created Out of the movement of few words, Flora Lowzen invigorated Archaic and future happenings, In glittering seven-colored changes, By Howzen, the chromatic Lowzen.
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