Silver Plough-Boy, the

Stevens' poem "The Silver Plough-Boy" (Harmonium) extends the idea of natural existence as defiant of categorization. Here, the silver plough-boy is a "black figure in a black field," a figuration less of race than the suggestion of nullity and the unfathomable, which, mixed with the landscape imagery, codifies nature and man as unseeable in their most basic essence. The plough-boy then picks up a silver sheet, which has been placed there "as if" by human intention, and wraps himself in it and continues plowing. The silver of the sheet works against the natural imagery and suggests a quality of fabrication, of human constructions attempting to engulf and define the "black figure" of the natural man. Though the plough-boy continues plowing:
 How soon the silver fades in the dust! How soon the black
 figure slips from the wrinkled sheet! How softly the
 sheet falls to the ground!
Stevens, though seemingly flirting with imagism in this short poem, evokes a symbolic relationship between natural processes (plowing/plowboy/field) and our desire and attempts to contain it. The silver plough-boy, then, constitutes man and mystery together, an involvement which proves untenable in this construction. Nature will slip our definitions and man-made constructions and continue doing its work with or without our understanding. This adds a level of complexity (mystification) to the "real" that Stevens sees as the "base" of our human involvement with the world.