Vallombrosa

Vallombrosa  is a mountain that belongs to the Apennines and is in Tuscany. Wallace Stevens references Vallombrosa in "Aracades of Philadelpia the Past," published in Parts of a World (1942). "There they sit, holding their eyes in their hands. / Queer, in this Vallombrosa of ears, / That they never hear the past" (4-6). [1] In A Reader's Guide to Wallace Stevens, Eleanor Cook states that in these lines Stevens is "alluding to Milton's famous simile on Satan's fallen legions, 'thick as Autumnal Leaves . . . / In Vallombrosa' (I.302-3)." The phrase, Cook continues, "[implies] that the past also falls on deaf ears" (149). [2]
==Notes==
1. Stevens in Kermode and Richardson 207.
2. Cook 149.
==References==
Cook, Eleanor. A Reader's Guide to Wallace Stevens. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007. Print.
Stevens, Wallace. "Arcades of Philadelphia the Past." Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997. 207. Print.