I've always considered these lines as reflecting something of the sense of Stevens' smeared with the gold of the opulent son, in the following way. Everything in our world is engendered through the sun's radiant energy. And I think the earth itself is thought to be congealed outpourings of solar matter. (really need to check this!) Thus the little scissors are rather trivially a synthesis of the sun, as everything else on earth is. It's dazzling because it's shiny but more because of the long improbable chain of events that link scissor and star. Star might just be a redundancy to fill out the line, i.e., the sun is a star, although admittedly, this reads very awkwardly. More likely star stands for human consciousness and imagination as in the star, meaning greatest achievement, of solar synthesis. This gives that the little scissor are a dazzling synthesis of solar energy and man's imagination, which reads well, semantically, I think; but which I'll admit is difficult to come-to.

Synthetically yours,

–GSL

On Aug 26, 2010, at 6:45 AM, Alexey Sklyarenko wrote:

Matt Roth: In Canto Two, Shade describes his "little scissors" (183) as a "synthesis of sun and star." I have never understood this image. I've looked at my own nail scissors in an attempt to see what Shade was seeing, alas to no avail. Help!

It seems that Matt's query of several years ago was never answered.

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