Reference to the nursery rhyme characters. In Stevens’s poem, they are encouraged to dance. First recorded use is in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Love’s Labor Lost.
Stevens’s Poems:[]
Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery, line 76: “Clog, therefore, purple Jack and crimson Jill”
This poem contemplates aging and death in contrast to youthful exuberance. Lensing explains that in this poem, Stevens “must first denounce Whitman’s chants of death and absorption in self” (162). Bloom writes that in this poem, Stevens “figures as the opposite of the superb and exuberant manfestation of the chanting Whitman, anti-apocalyptic bard of the joyful and loudly shouting sun” (105). Bloom views this poem as a failure of Ideas of Order and feels that “[i]t will not be until he writes the Blue Guitar that Stevens discovers how to reconcile his defensive resort to disjunctiveness with the demands for continuity (however illusive) of a long poem” (107).
References:[]
- Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate. New York: Cornell UP, 1980. Google Books. Web.
- Jack and Jill
- Lensing, George S.Wallace Stevens and the Seasons. Baton Rouge: Louisiana UP, 2001.
