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by Wallace Stevens (1879 - 1955)

Floral Decorations for Bananas
Language: English 
Choose for Diff
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.

Text Authorship:

  • by Wallace Stevens (1879 - 1955) [author's text not yet checked against a primary source]

Musical settings (art songs, Lieder, mélodies, (etc.), choral pieces, and other vocal works set to this text), listed by composer (not necessarily exhaustive):

  • by Lee Hoiby (1926 - 2011), "Floral Decorations for Bananas", op. 39 no. 1, published 1983, from O Florida, no. 1 [sung text not yet checked]

Researcher for this text: Emily Ezust [Administrator]

This text was added to the website: 2005-12-07
Line count: 26
Word count: 135

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