21 pages • 42 minutes read

A Carafe, that is a Blind Glass

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1914

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

Gertrude Stein’s “A carafe, that is a blind glass” is in the form of a prose poem. It’s a poem in the shape of prose paragraphs, so it looks like text in a novel, an essay, or a news website. Since the poem is in paragraph format, it has no line breaks, stanzas, or identifiable meter like iambic pentameter. One of the first prose poets, the French poet Charles Baudelaire, discusses the advantages of the prose form in Louise Varese’s translation of Paris Spleen (New Directions, 1970). For Baudelaire, the prose poem could “adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jibes of conscience.” With a prose poem, the speaker determines the meter. The speaker in Stein’s poem sets the pace based on the "impulses" of their conscience and thoughts. The repetition of words like “a” and “not,” alliteration, and the unique punctuation help Stein establish her meter, or “undulations,” in the prose poem form.

Another way to view the form is through the lens of Cubism. Practiced by painters like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, Cubist artists presented objects through a topsy-turvy arrangement of geometric shapes—for example, Braque's Still Life with Banderillas (1911). Stein bought Cubist paintings, and she and Picasso were good friends. She also applied the form of Cubism to her poem, as each sentence or clause can be seen as a geometric shape arranged to distort and complicate the portrait of the carafe.

Alliteration

Alliteration is a literary device that helps establish the sound of the poem. With alliteration, a poet places words that sound alike or start with the same letter next to one another or nearby. Using alliteration, Stein creates a mellifluous sound in “A carafe, that is a blind glass.” The alliteration starts in the title with “blind” and continues in Line 1 with “kind,” “cousin,” and “color.” In Lines 2-3, the alliteration relates to sound at the end of the words since “pointing,” “ordinary,” “resembling,” and “spreading” each makes the long “e” sound.

The presence of alliteration reinforces the speaker’s claim that the poem is “not unordered” (Line 2). The similarity of sounds indicates a carefully plotted poem and a deliberate “arrangement in a system” (Line 2). More so, alliteration connects Stein’s Modernist poem to the poetic conventions of the past. Although Modernists like Stein aimed to change how literature looked and read, they still maintained some of the concerns of previous literature—that is, they continued to care about how their works sounded and were received on the page.

Narrative Voice

In the poem, the narrative voice is the speaker. This literary device separates the poem from the poem's author and allows the poem to take on an individual character. The narrative voice in “A carafe, that is a blind glass” is authoritative and confident as they issue a series of declarations about the carafe and its traits. As the alliteration demonstrates, the narrative voice is also deliberate—it’s intentionally oblique and puzzling since the speaker’s goal isn’t to narrate an “ordinary” (Line 2) representation of the carafe.

While it’s important to keep the narrative voice and the author separate, it’s not out of bounds to analyze the similarities between the narrative voice and Gertrude Stein. The speaker in “A carafe, that is a blind glass” sounds like the speaker in the other poems in Tender Buttons and the voice in many of Stein’s works. These speakers also rely on repetition, unique syntax, and puzzling diction. More so, the speaker in “A carafe, that is a blind glass” shares Stein’s distaste for commas. In “Poetry and Grammar,” Stein says she wants “nothing to do with them.” She says, “I have refused them so often and left them out so much.” Of course, in “A carafe, that is a blind glass,” Stein refuses or leaves out the comma between “nothing strange” and “a single hurt color.” The example of the banished comma conveys the author’s influence on the narrative voice and the speaker.