Pastor Caballero, the

“The Pastor Caballero” appears in the 1947 collection Transport to Summer. It has the honor to precede “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” perhaps the single best poem Stevens had ever written, and “Pastor” operates as a link between “Notes” and all the previous hero poems in the collection. According to James Longenbach, “The Pastor Caballero” poem may have been aptly renamed “The Dismissal [or retirement] of the Hero in a Time of Peace” (247).
==Unlocking the Poem==
Two pieces of information are particularly necessary in order to grasp the poem. 
First, a “caballero” is not a person but a class of individual. In Spanish, a caballero is a knight or a gentleman, somewhat higher than a hidalgo. (Don Quixote, we should recall, was a hidalgo.)
Secondly, the opening lines read, “The importance of its hat to a form becomes / More definite.” Stevens frequently uses the metaphor of a hat to indicate the way we pinpoint or pin down concepts through language. The hat of our particular pastor just happens to be a sombrero.
In the Letters, Stevens notes that unlike rabbis, whom he associates with scholarship, Protestant pastors and priests are “almost exclusively religious figures” (751). Thus, typically, pastors are—for Stevens—figures of disapprobation.
Longenbach, James. Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. Web. 28 Feb 2014.