A sunny day's complete Poussiniana
Divide it from itself. It is this or that
And it is not.
By metaphor you paint
A thing. Thus, the pineapple was a leather fruit,
A fruit for pewter, thorned and palmed and blue,
To be served by men of ice.
The senses paint
By metaphor. The juice was fragranter
Than wettest cinnamon. It was cribled pears
Dripping a morning sap.
The truth must be
That you do not see, you experience, you feel,
That the buxom eye brings merely its element
To the total thing, a shapeless giant forced
Upward.
Green were the curls upon that head.
This poem makes the unreal, the weirdness, exoticness of the pineapple TRUE. The idea of 'men of ice' serving pineapple. The northerners who have something out of context, otherworldly, brings home the strange fruit. A metaphor for war weapons? Grenades, perhaps.. dunno. But this poem makes me think. Hard.
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem
that is really a pineapple he was talking about