Two Figures in Dense Violet Night is a poem from Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar",...

's first book of poetry, Harmonium

Harmonium (poetry collection)

Harmonium is a book of poetry by U.S. poet Wallace Stevens. His first book, it was published in 1923 by Knopf in an edition of 1500 copies. He was in middle age at that time, forty-four years old. The collection comprises 85 poems, ranging in length from just a few lines to several hundred...

. It was first published in 1923., so it is still under copyright. Only its first stanza is quoted here.

Two Figures in Dense Violet Night I had as lief be embraced by the porter at the hotel As to get no more from the moonlight Than your moist hand. . . . .

Buttel reads the poem as about the "humorous disparity between gauche male and suave female". But it can also be read as neither humorous nor gender-specific, but rather as a meditation on the lover's otherness or `alterity'. The former assimilates it to such poems as Plot Against The Giant

The Plot Against the Giant

"The Plot Against the Giant" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1917, so it is in the public domain....

, the latter to such as Le Monocle De Mon Oncle

Le Monocle de Mon Oncle

"Le Monocle de Mon Oncle" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry,Harmonium. It was first published in 1918.Quoted here is the eighth canto...

. Related to the latter reading is the suggestion that the poem addresses the relationship of a poet to the reader, who is enjoined to match the poet's imaginative response to the world.

Stevens endows the poem with pace by use of the imperative mood.