As the sun comes up so does Anna from behind the bushes, or, in the symbolic nature of the brush, what the travelers think of as a curtain. I thought of it as a displaced campfire tale, those good ones that come to life and we hear about them but never seem to witness.
"First Traveler:......
Just as the young gentleman
Was alone without her:
Three beggars, you see,
Begging for one another. (The two negros and the three travelers jump to their feet when a corpse hanging from a branch is revealed)
The young gentleman of the ballad.
Third Chinese:
And the end of the ballad.
Take away the bushes.
Second Chinese:
Death, the hermit,
Needs no candle
In his hermitage. (candles and lanterns are extinguished as the bushes are removed)
Second Chinese:
Is that you, Anna?"
(Stevens 610-11)
With their collective imaginative power the song comes to life--reality and imagination are indistinguishable for a time, and even Anna says, "It will soon be sunrise" (612) even though through my first read of this play I thought the sun had already come up.
But did it, to which sun is she referring? Or is Anna's sun the sun of her story? Or is Anna part of the Travelers' world?
Wallace Stevens is obsessed with this idea of light, light from the sun and candles and lanterns and even the color gold, and the idea of light is experimented with throughout the course of his three plays in our Bible.
Some last explanatory words from Stevens found in "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction":
"There is a project for the sun. The sun
Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be
In the difficulty of what it is to be." (330)
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