Piano Practice At The Academy of the Holy Angels
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From "Opus Posthumous"
The time will come for these children, seated before their long
black instruments, to strike the themes of love--
All of them, darkened by time, moved by they know not what,
amending the airs they play to fulfil themselves;
Seated before these shining forms, like the duskiest glass, re-
flecting the piebald of roses or what you will.
Blanche, the blonde, whose eyes are not wholly straight, in a
room of lustres, shed by turquoise falling,
Whose heart will murmur with the music that will be a voice for
her, speaking the dreaded change of speech;
And Rosa, the muslin dreamer of satin and cowry-kin, disdaining
the empty keys; and the young infanta,
Jocunda, who will arrange the roses and rearrange, letting the
leaves lie on the water-like lacquer;
And that confident one, Marie, the wearer of cheap stones, who
will have grown still and restless;
And Crispine, the blade, reddened by some touch, demanding
the most from the phrases
Of the well-thumbed, infinite pages of her masters, who will seem
old to her, requiting less and less her feeling:
In the days when the mood of love will be swarming for solace
and sink deeply into the thin stuff of being,
And these long, black instruments will be so little to them that
will be needing so much, seeking so much in their music.
- in·fan·ta
Pronunciation: in-'fan-t&, -'fän-
Function: noun
Etymology: Spanish & Portuguese, feminine of infante
: a daughter of a Spanish or Portuguese monarch
For Stevens, the "infanta" is the personification of youth, creativity, and vitality. See the poem titled Infanta Marina, for instance, in which the motion and gestures of a woman steal the limelight from the sea.
See also Long Sluggish Lines, in which a diminutive fly, "comic infanta", figures among the "--escent---issant pre-personae" that contradict the "aged trees that "have a look as if they bore sad names / And kept saying over and over one same, same thing". - jocund \JOCK-und; JOE-kund\, adjective:
Full of or expressing high-spirited merriment; light-hearted; pleasant, cheering, delightful. Jocund is from Old French jocond, from Latin jucundus, pleasant, agreeable, delightful, from juvo, juvare, to please, to delight.
(Dictionary.com)
"But, fat Jocundus, worrying /About what stands here in the centre, not the glass, / But in the centre of our lives, this time, this day... " - The Glass of Water
In Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, the tone of jocundity is linked to the activity of the poet who strives "To compound the imagination's Latin with / The lingua franca et jocundissima."
