Floral Decorations for Bananas

"Floral Decorations for Bananas" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923). It was first published Measure 26 (Apr. 1923) and is therefore under copyright, however it is quoted here as justified by fair use in order to facilitate scholarly commentary.

The poem's speaker is unhappy about the choice of bananas as a table decoration, complaining that they don't match well with the eglantine. Recommended instead are plums in an eighteenth-century dish, centering a room in which there would be women delicately embroidering. If bananas must be considered, then the mood and decor are shifted entirely. Rather than a single clumsy bunch, a massive branch of the fruit should be carried in on planks, surrounded (or borne?) by exotic women "of shanks and bangles," leading further to a fantasy of tropic sensuality. A demented, campy interior decorator is evoked.

Well, nuncle, this plainly won't do. These insolent, linear peels And sullen, hurricane shapes Won't do with your eglantine. They require something serpentine. Blunt yellow in such a room!

You should have had plums tonight, In an eighteenth-century dish, And pettifogging buds, For the women of primrose and purl Each one in her decent curl. Good God! What a precious light!

But bananas hacked and hunched.... The table was set by an ogre, His eye on an outdoor gloom And a stiff and noxious place. Pile the bananas on planks. The women will be all shanks And bangles and slatted eyes.

And deck the bananas in leaves Plucked from the Carib trees Fibrous and dangling down, Oozing cantankerous gum Out of their purple maws, Darting out of their purple craws Their musky and tingling tongues.