I have also read this poem in terms of seasons – the spring giving way to summer. Did Aphrodite emerge at a specific time of year, I wonder?

“From WordNet (r) 1.7:
spick
adj : completely neat and clean; “the apartment was immaculate”; “in her immaculate white uniform”; “a spick-and-span kitchen”; “their spic red-visored caps” [syn: immaculate, speckless, spick-and-span, spicic-and-span, spic, spotless]

It still seems unlikely to me, though, that Stevens wasn’t aware of the possible negative connotations of the word, especially from someone so sensitive to words.

Still, there’s another poem, which I like much and found at the Academy of American Poets — Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird — that has strongly racial overtones:

I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds
It was a small part of the pantomime.

Doesn’t this sound like the black lynchings?

Following from this, and other poems, could Wallace have subtly been talking about the Mexican people as servant to the upper class? “Scullion of fate”, “Across the spick torrent, ceaselessly upon her irretrievable way”.

It just seemed to me there is subtle issues of race in all of Wallace’s poems, at least those at the Academy. But then, when one looks with a certain frame of mind, perhaps you see things that don’t exist.