Ursula

Ursula is the titular character in “Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et Les Unze Mille Vierges,” a poem first published in Rogue magazine in 1915 and later collected in Harmonium (1923). Stevens has in mind a reference to Saint Ursula, the patron saint of virgins, who according to legend was beheaded or shot (along with her 11,000 virgin handmaidens) by the Huns. This happened sometime between the third and sevenths centuries A.D. The feast day for Saint Ursula is October 21st.
==A Female Cain==
This early poem is unusually obvious for Stevens. Contrary to the title, his portrait of Saint Ursula removes both the 11,000 virgins and everyone’s martyrdom. (Unless it’s a martyrdom of Ursula’s maidenhead; an erotic impulse underlies God’s response to Ursula’s offering of radishes and flowers.) According to the poem, Ursula has typically offered fancy flowers to God in public but, in private, she offers Him simply radishes and flowers. She worries that God would not accept her gift. Stevens does not tell us explicitly how God does react—although, knowing Stevens, probably not well. God certainly did not respond with “heavenly love” or “pity.”
Stevens’s portrait of Ursula bears a strange similarity to the story of Cain; Cain, too, had offered a gift to God which God rejected. In the Cain story, however, that rejection causes him to murder his brother Abel. In punishment, God exiles Cain to east of Eden, leaving his “mark” upon him as a measure of mercy, so that no one would further punish him. If an erotic impulse does indeed underlie Stevens’s poem, God’s “mark” upon the female Ursula would be altogether more unsavory