Pensee

The word pensee appears only once in Stevens' ouvre, in the opening lines of the poem "Architecture: "What manner of building shall we build?/ Let us design a chastel de chastete./ De pensee..." (i.1-3).
==What does Pensee Mean?==
Pensee (pronounced, pahn-say), is the French word for thought, more specifically a single thought cast into literary or aphoristic form. 
Intriguingly, Pensees is also the title of the posthumous collections of aphorisms written by the 17th century French scientist and philosopher Blaise Pascal ("Pensee").
==What does Pensee Mean in this Poem?==
"What sort of building should we build," Stevens wants to know. He answers himself as follows, translated from the French: "a castle of chastity. Of aphorism...." 
Stevens himself is guilty of the aphoristic turn, as he is of buiding poems out of conjoined aphorisms; moreover, he is the philosopher poet par excellence; with this in mind, it becomes possible to read "Architecture" as a self-reflexive meditation on Stevens' own poetic practices. What interests in this poem, though, is the comical disdain with which Stevens treats his imagined "castle of thought:" deriding it as inadequate to sublime reality ("How shall we hew the sun... How carve the violet moon?" (v.1-4)) and attacking it on the basis of its merely decorative, ancillary relaltionship to everyday life ("...the pointings of our ediface... shall tuft the commonplace" (iv.4-6)). Here, as elsewhere, Stevens upbraids the hubris of the artist and warns against an aesthetic that severs itself from the "base", i.e. the real. One might note, then, that Stevens' use of French signals precisely the kind of artistic pretention that the poem both embraces and satirizes.