Poems tend to be inappropriate venues for lover’s quarrels. The surface is too transparent, the levels underneath are too obscure. “Depression Before Spring” from 1918 broaches this topic with lightness and joviality, but still it captures the sadness of separate worlds. Here is the poem:
The cock crows
But no queen rises.
The hair of my blonde
Is dazzling,
As the spittle of cows
Threading the wind.
Ho! Ho!
But ki-ki-ri-ki
Brings no rou-cou,
No rou-cou-cou.
But no queen comesIn Pennsylvania, where Stevens came from, they say there are four seasons:
In slipper green.
- Winter,
- Still Winter,
- Hunting, and
- Construction.
Something of this sense comes through here, the frustration at the lack of doves and the fringe “slippers” of short green grass that signal spring. The roosters are calling but the spring, personified as a female queen, refuses to cooperate.
That level of meaning – appropriately poetic – works very nicely with the more explicit meaning between the speaker and the unnamed blonde "queen." The first stanza sets the tone with cock –prototypical male – aroused but failing to arouse the queen – prototypical female. This is a familiar early morning event in most bedrooms, with the ironic implication that upon the rooster’s announcement of morning one should “rise and (see next stanza) shine.” At a further layer, the cock is doing the speaking (“crow”), in an aggressive way, but the queen does not “rise” to the bait, or challenge.
The second stanza seems to affect an abrupt shift, a random and strange comparison between blond hair and cow spit. If one views this as a continuation of the previous stanza, however, it makes sense: the woman still asleep in the bed with the sunlight bearing down on her hair appears unpleasant, or at least the man who is trying to rouse her would offer such a comparison to get her “goat.”
The third stanza, “Ho! Ho!” thus becomes a triumphant gotcha interjection, the perfect metaphor of gamesmanship.
But, alas, this doesn’t do any good either. The sound of one (ki-ki-ri-ki) brings no response (rou-cou) from the other. A friend from Slovenia once asked me what roosters sound like in English. I replied, sheepishly, “cock-a-doodle doo.” He said “you know what they sound like in Slovenia? Ri-ki-ri-ki-ri-ki!” and he proceeded to laugh uncontrollably. I think what Stevens is getting at here is a better mimicking of what a rooster actually sounds like than what English customarily permits. The “rou-cou” similarly, is the sound a mourning dove makes, which enlongates into three syllables to mimic rococo, a playful but ornate Late Baroque style of art that (according to Wikipedia) “made strong usage of creamy, pastel-like colours, asymmetrical designs, curves and gold.” This is a nice trick: the supposed sadness of the dove merging into a luscious and awesome beauty, all of it suggesting that, for whatever reason, the female will not come out to play, depriving the speaker of her beauty and sadness. For all the pain of arguing, the alternative to the back and forth is silence. This strutting cock has met his match.
The concluding stanza ends with no queen, no “slipper green.” There are nuances of a rebirth, awakening, even the creation of life deferred, hence the depression. There’s also a touch of Cinderella and her slipper; the prince has been chasing an imaginary thing, and must confront the real. As Stevens wrote: “"Perhaps, it is best, too, that one should have only glimpses of reality - and get the rest from the fairy-tales, from pictures, and music, and books"* The queen is more there for being absent.
* quoted from George Lensing, Wallace Stevens: A Poets Growth, p. 64.
