Queen of Fact, the

The Queen of Fact is the consort of the Ruler of Reality, and both appear in stanza XXVII of the late long poem, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.” Stevens said about the poem that
my interest is to try to get as close to the ordinary, the commonplace and the ugly as it is possible for a poet to get. It is not a question of grim reality but of plain reality. The object is of course to purge oneself of anything false. (Letters 636)
Within the poem, both these figures are discussed by an unidentified scholar, whose discussions only survive in his notes.
==Queenly Facts about the Character==
The Queen of Fact cannot be understood in isolation from the Ruler of Reality. We might sense Stevens’s disapproval of the Queen, since immutable “facts” do not enjoy a high prestige in his poetry, and we might think the same of the Ruler. After all, Stevens often critiques those who seek—and believe they have found—any underlying and superior reality beneath the veil of appearances. 
Yet such an understanding of “reality” would be to misunderstand the Ruler. The scholar in XXVII says
". . . The Ruler of Reality,
If more unreal than New Haven, is not 
A real ruler, but rules what is unreal.”
Thus the Ruler of Reality rules the world of appearances and imagination, not the world of noumena. (I.e., appearances are reality.) The stanza’s imagery bears out this interpretation. “Sunrise” is the hem of the Ruler’s garment, and he is also the “theorist of life, not death.”
In contrast, “sunset” is the hem of the Queen’s garment. By implication she is the theorist of death. Yet the Queen of Fact and the Ruler of Reality are wedded, and the marriage appears to be not only necessary but happy:
“He has thought it out, he thinks it out,
As he has been and is and, with the Queen 
Of Fact, lies at his ease beside the sea.”