Tags: Poem.
Two Figures in Dense Violet Night is a poem from Wallace Stevens’s first book of poetry Harmonium. It was first published in 1923 so it is still under copyright. Only its first stanza is quoted here.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’.