The soul, he said, is composed

 Of the external world.

There are men of the East, he said,

Who are the East.

There are men of a province

Who are that province.

There are men of a valley

Who are that valley.

There are men whose words

Are as natural sounds

Of their places

As the cackle of toucans

In the place of toucans.

The mandoline is the instrument

Of a place.

Are there mandolines of western mountains?

Are there mandolines of northern moonlight?

The dress of a woman of Lhassa,

In its place,

Is an invisible element of that place

Made visible.

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Interpretation

Stevens recognized that his poems were a visible expression of (an invisible element of) his North American place. This would remain true even if the poet were to succeed in overcoming locality, as Crispin attempts to do in "The Comedian as the Letter C". The opening stanza is a dramatic statement about the soul's being composed of the external world, an idea approached philosophically by American philosophers like Charles Sanders Peirce.^[1] Compare Theory.

The next lines in the poem are anticipatory assertions, and then two leading questions, and finally a blossoming of the poem's idea in the image of a woman of Lhassa. That interpretation overlooks that the "idea" is expressed as reported speech, however, and fails to identify who "he" is (it is naively assumed to be the poet).

Notes

References

• Peirce, C.S. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols. 7–8, Arthur Burks (ed.). 1958: Harvard University Press.