Vincentine

“The Apostrophe to Vincentine” is a love poem that appeared in Harmonium (1923). No explanation is offered for the name “Vincentine”; it appears to be simply what the speaker calls his lover. We do know that an apostrophe is a poetic aside to someone not present.
Thus the “you” of the poem seems to be the speaker’s lover, but through the power of imagination, she turns into a “heavenly” image—“Turned heavenly, heavenly Vincentine.” Thus the speaker both directly addresses his lover and his lover who, because imagination has transformed her into Heavenly Vincentine , is not there. The lover is simultaneously present and lacking. Stevens's appreciation of Vincentine seems strange, since he generally does not approve of "heavenly" things.
Helen Vendler considers this poem as an example of the Stevens's "brutality of style" in his early poems. Vincentine initially appears to the speaker intially as an naked image "between / Monotonous earth and dark blue sky." Then Vincentine physically approaches the poet, and he increasingly allows her human qualities (such as walking and talking). This hardly seems like an improvement, though—he views her scientifically, like an animal being observed by a behaviorist, "depriving her of all interiority and humanness and exterior garments," a fundamentally aesthetic exercise" (16). Nonetheless, a transformatory rhetoric applies in the fourth stanza. The "white animal" (hardly a Romantic image!) turns into "heavenly Vincentine."  According to Vendler, "Brutality and apotheosis end in a stalement" (18).
VENDLER, Helen. Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire. Knoxville, TN: U of Tennessee P, 1984. Print.