Note: Voragine is the figure dressed in gold, second to the left of Jesus.
Voragine appears in the opening line of "Colloquy with a Polish Aunt":
"How is it that my saints from Voragine/ In their embroidered slippers, touch your spleen?"
Who was Voragine?[]
Jacobus de Voragine (c.1230-1298) was an Italian Chronicler and Archbishop of Genoa. He is the author, or rather the editor/compiler of The Legenda Aurea (aka The Golden Legend), a collection of the lives of the greater saints and one of the most popular religious texts of the Middle Ages ("Jacobus de Voragine," Wikipedia).
What is Voragine Doing in this Poem?[]
The reference to Voragine's Legenda Aurea in the opening helps Stevens' to further establish a religious frame for the conversation between the Aunt and the narrator, building as it does upon the religious connotations of the word colloquy in the title (a colloquy is literally a conversation, but may also refer to a meeting to settle issues of faith and doctrine). Understood within this framework, the poem becomes something of a catechism, as the Aunt questions the narrator regarding his emotional responses to the tales of the Saints. It's important to note that the narrator's response is ambiguous. The Aunt's assertion that the tales "touch [the narrator's] spleen" is key to this ambiguity, as the spleen was identified--in the Middle Ages--as the seat of a range of emotions, including courage, mirth, peevishness, melancholy, and spite ("Spleen," Dictionary.Com). Thus the poem becomes emblematic of the power of imagination to color our perception: as the narrator's oblique response ("Old pantaloons, duenna [mistress] of Spring!" (7)) can be read any number of ways. The Aunt herself underscores this reading in the final stanza when she says "imagination is the will of things" (9).
As a side note, it's interesting that Stevens' felt his allusion to Voragine's Legenda would be easily accessible to readers. In fact, he seems to have been quite annoyed that reviewers pegged the reference, and the poem, as obscure. As he wrote to Harriett Monroe, editor of Poetry magazine:
"Voragine may warrant a charge of obscurantism on my part or of stupidity on the other fellow's part, as the wind blows.... the Legenda Aurea... as the best known book of the Middle Ages... not to mention the fact that it is obtainable in any book-store and is constantly in catalogues, ought to be fairly well known, even to book reviewers...." ("Letters of Wallace Stevens" 216)