Eulalia

Eulalia is a character in Stevens' "Certain Phenomena of Sound". Her name appears in three places:
*"Eulalia, I lounged on the hospital porch" (iii.1)
*"So seeing, I beheld you walking, white,/ Gold-shined by the sun, percieving as I saw/ That of that light Eulalia was the name" (iii.6-8).
*"You are that white Eulalia of the name" (iii.16)
==Who is Eulalia?==
The origin of Eulalia's name is difficult to parse. Eulalia is the name of a species of butterfly, a variety of grass, as well as of two Spanish martyrs, a town in Rio, and a township in Pennsylvania. Likely, none of these is especially important to Stevens, except that Edward Ragg, in Wallace Stevens and the Poetics of Abstraction , does note that Stevens may well have appropriated the idea of Eulalia as saint in order that she might serve to "represent... an article of pious devotion" (142). Additionally, Ragg also notes Stevens' appreciation for the eulalia grass (142). Nevertheless, it seems equally, of not more, plausible (see below) that Stevens was attracted to the literal meaning of the name Eulalia, which translates from the Greek as "well-spoken."
==What is Eulalia Doing in This Poem?==
Ragg's reading of Eulalia's function in "Certain Phenomena" is compelling. He notes that Stevens has associated Eulalia with both light and the sun, and argues that this further associates the character with the ding an sich, or thing in itself--often linked to sunlight in Stevens' work (142). Ragg also points out that Eulalia is never directly perceived in the poem; like the sun, one cannot look at her full on (Ragg 142). Rather, Stevens' poet-narrator percieves her indirectly, looking at her light through the blank interior space created by his parasol, a space which acts as a symbol for subjective consciousness and which, as it encounters the world through the senses, also constructs the world, rendering the world intelligible through language (Ragg 142). As Stevens puts it:  "So seeing, I beheld you... percieving as I saw that of that light Eulalia was the name" (iii.6-8). Eulalia, then, is doubly symbolic, acting as a metaphor for the obejctive world, and for the transformation of the objective world as it is apprehended by the human mind. Moreover, given that Eulalia means "well-spoken," one might also draw the conclusion that she represents the height of what human consciousness and art are capable of (at least as understood through the lens of Romanticism): that is, an imaginative metamorphosis that fuses subject and object and in so doing transforms them into something new.