From a feminist viewpoint, the jar represents the male ego placed firmly in a female environment, Mother Nature, causing mayhem and possible destruction.
"[4] Vendler asks, shall the poet use language imported from Europe ("of a port in air", to "give of"), or as Marianne Moore puts it, "plain American that cats and dogs can read", like "The jar was round upon the ground"?
[4] She argues that the poem is a palinode, retracting the Keatsian conceits of "Sunday Morning" and vowing "to stop imitating Keats and seek a native American language that will not take the wild out of the wilderness.
"[5] According to Brogan, however (writing in 1994), the poem can be approached: Brogan concludes, "When the [student] debate gets particularly intense, I introduce Roy Harvey Pearce [de]'s discovery of the Dominion canning jars (a picture of which is then passed around),"[7][8] a reference to that late, celebrated Wallace Stevens scholar and historiographer of literature's[9] published association of the poem with a specific item of physical Americana.
writing in 2023, presents the poem in the context of Stevens' work as a surety bond claimsman tied to the industrial clearcutting of the last remnant of the great Appalachian forest in East Tennessee in 1918.