poetry texts, poem archive at plagiarist.com

The last two lines are pure Hopkins. I never thought of the two poets as being connected in any way. Can anyone find other instances of Hopkins influence on Stevens?

It is worthwhile to compare this lyric with Elizabeth Bishop's "Florida", a poem that shows a strong Stevensian influence. Not only are both poems set in the swamps of Florida but the final stanzas of both poems feature symbolically significant crocodiles. Both poems illustrate the savagery and struggle of the natural world. We see in Stevens' poem zoomorphic 'big-finned palms' and the aggression of a a spreading vine 'angering for life'. Here Stevens presents a Darwinian struggle for survival in nature and contrasts it with this with Romantic perspectives on nature that find in it rather a transcendental sublime, 'the immense dew of Florida/ Brings forth hymn and hymn/ From the beholder.' Stevens refuses to attach himself to any one perspective. On the contrary his imagery resists any reductions of the incredible variety of nature. He illustrates the difficulty of even trying to capture definitively the colors of this world, referring to its 'lightning colors' and 'green sides/ And gold sides of green sides.' The poem questions the ability of any human beholder to perceive the reduce the world of nature to a single, fixed meaning.