"Gubbinal" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923).
[1] It can be read as one of his "poems of epistemology", as B. J. Leggett styles it in his Nietzschean reading of Stevens' perspectivism,[2] a minimalistic statement of his interest in the relationship between imagination and the world.
The term 'gubbinal' may derive from 'gubbin', slang for a dullard, referring here to someone who takes the world to be ugly and the people sad.
That tuft of jungle feathers, That animal eye, Is just what you say.
This article related to a poem from the 1920s is a stub.