Woman in Sunshine, the

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"The Woman in Sunshine" appears in Steven's volume The Auroras of Autumn and functions around the idea of a disembodied female presence existing in the experience of sunshine. For the speaker of the poem "this warmth and movement are like/ The warmth and movement of a woman." But the simile quickly turns anthropomorphic as this presence becomes a "woman in threadless gold/ Burn[ing] us with brushings of her dress," an annunciation of an "abundance of being" that is "more definite" than the mere image of a woman in the air that the speaker rejects. This disembodied woman brings "odors of the summer fields" and is the confessor of "the taciturn and yet indifferent,/ Invisibly clear, the only love."
Steven's accomplishes several things with this conceit. He essentializes femininity as the existence of "abundance" and the activator of natural processes. He reverses the historically male reading of the sun as progenitor and relocates it into a feminine trope. But within this feminine conception for Stevens is also the existence of passiveness ("taciturn") and, surprisingly, unconcern ("indifferent")--which are both finally collapsed in a definition of "love" which contextualized among these other attributes reaches beyond the merely romantic to something much more universal. "Love," then, might be seen in this poem as the act of giving and sacrifice, an impersonal force giving freely the basic processes of life, the "real" to which Steven's credits a fundamental presence in the world.