Floral Decorations for Bananas

"Floral Decorations for Bananas" is the first song in Lee Hoiby's song cycle O Florida of 1983. The cycle is for voice and piano.

Date: 1983Composer: Lee HoibyText: Wallace StevensSong Collection: O Florida

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Text

Floral Decorations for Bananas
by Wallace Stevens

Well, nuncle, this plainly won’t do.
These insolent, linear peels
And sullen, hurricane shapes
Won’t do with your eglantine.
They require something serpentine.
Blunt yellow in such a room!

You should have had plums tonight,
In an eighteenth-century dish,
And pettifogging buds,
For the women of primrose and purl,
Each one in her decent curl.
Good God! What a precious light!

But bananas hacked and hunched…
The table was set by an ogre,
His eye on an outdoor gloom
And a stiff and noxious place.
Pile the bananas on planks.
The women will be all shanks
And bangles and slatted eyes.

And deck the bananas in leaves
Plucked from the Carib trees,
Fibrous and dangling down,
Oozing cantankerous gum
Out of their purple maws,
Darting out of their purple craws
Their musky and tingling tongues.

–Wallace Stevens: The Collected Poems, pp. 53-54

Sheet Music

O Florida

Composer(s): Lee Hoiby

Voice Type: Medium

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