This is irony, all right, imprisoned in its own shell of bitterness, escaped when Stevens resorted to exhortation; e.g.:

Unreal, give back to us what once you gave,
The imagination that we spurned and crave.

Stevens likewise entered the modality of resonant, magisterial sincerity in the apostrophe to the poetic imagination which precedes his otherwise entirely mischievous “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”–resonant and similar, but since implicitly dismissive, not wholly liberated from the puzzling torn rinds, knots amd broken shells that encapsulate our nature:

And for what, except for you, do I feel love?
Do I press the extremest book of the wisest man
Close to me, hidden in me day and night?
In the uncertain light of single, certain truth,
Equal in living changingness to the light
In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest,

For a moment in the central of our being,
The vivid transparence that you bring is peace.

In the poem itself, irony and playful insolence take over, eventuating in rousing praise for poetry’s breathlessness, inspiration and execution, sarcastic if not tantamount to physical assault:

Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my nigh
You are familiar yet an aberration.
Civil, madam, I am, but underneath a tree,
This unprovoked sensation requires
That I should name you flatly, waste no words,
Check your evasions, hold you to yourself.

This is also irony, poetry vigorously disclosing its contamination by unbridled, adoring, disrespectful desire, teeth-gritting and impure. What’s remarkable, in this regard, is that our English’s mother-lode of exhortation, the psalms of David Hashmolean, were compiled by a murderous traitor, adulterous seducer, homosexual cattle-rustler, and onetime mercenary general in the Philistine army, able to express savage indifference to the magic of childhood without polluting, in my view, his wellspring of inventive sincerity; e.g:

O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed;
happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as though hath
served us.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth
thy little ones against the stones.

Psalm #137, and Babylon, whose willows and rivers the psalm invokes, is Iraq, which in Arabic means land of water. Something has come full circle. To complete this reflective whirl and placate Lord Haw-Haw’s appetites and ilk, one can return to Pablo Neruda’s “Melancholy Inside Families”, Wright-Bly translation:

I keep a blue bottle.
Inside it an ear and a portrait.
When the night dominates
the feathers of the owl,
when the hoarse cherry tree
rips out its lips and makes menacing gestures
with rinds which the ocean wind often perforates–

then I know that there are immense expanses hidden from us,
quartz in slugs,
ooze,
blue waters for a battle,
much silence, many ore-veins
of withdrawals and camphor,
fallen things, medallions, kindnesses,
parachutes, kisses.

How opaque, how like cognition’s collision with a stained-glass window of the empirical. or a chick’s emergence into reality stained by the facts of its nutritious ooze and imprisoning rinds. Yet how wholly present in circumstance, how devoid of sub-text or ulterior agenda.

It is only the passage of one day to another,
a single bottle moving over the seas,
and a dining room where roses arrive,
a dining room deserted
as a fish-bone; I am speaking of
a smashed cup, a curtain, at the end
of a deserted room through which a river passes
dragging along the stones. It is a house
set on the foundations of the rain,
a house of two floors with the required number of windows,
and climbing vines faithful in every particular.

This is Neruda’s query, his implicit supplication: how is it that this voice, evidently all ears and identity (a child retentive of its dubious treasure, a blue bottle with an ear and portrait) is located in a household adrift on its own inexplicably wretched floods, though it has the right number of floors and windows, and clinging vegetation.

I walk through afternoons, I arrive
full of mud and death,
dragging along the earth and its roots,
and its indistinct stomach in which corpses
are sleeping with wheat,
metals, and pushed-over elephants.
But above all there is a terrifying,
a terrifying deserted dining room,
with its broken olive oil cruets,
and vinegar running under its chairs,
one ray of moonlight tied down,

something dark, and I look
for a comparison inside myself:
perhaps it is a grocery store surrounded by the sea
and torn clothing from which sea water is dripping.

How childishly prescient and touching, this confession of method, the spiritual practice of poetry, this looking inside oneself for metaphor, that assertion of the apposite, conjunctive identity of opposite things, and his explanation for life at home being such a incomprehensible mess: we live in a grocery store!

It is only a deserted dining room,
and around it there are expanses,
sunken factories, pieces of timber
which I alone know,
because I am sad, and because I travel,
and I know the earth, and I am sad.

How gratifying, such stunning, un-ironical, imaginative fury and force unscathed by those soul-diminishing appetites, vices and resentments so often woven into the lyric’s fabric, this demonstration that spiritual work, poetic practice, not anger and desire, for which poetry is the antidote not the product, are the requisites for the achieved poem’s consummate splendor–what Stevens called poetry’s essential gaudiness, the pathos of its decoration of our impoverished cemetery. If we lived in the ruined grocery store of Iraq, our distributor would be the coalition of the willing, the U.S. Army, and the Halliburton Company.