That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.
The world is ugly,
The sun is a recurring symbol of power and generativity in Wallace Stevens' poetry. It also stands for the center of reality itself, to which the poet is always deviating from and returning through the work of imagination. Here he calls it a “flower,” but elsewhere in his poetry he tries to see it for exactly what it is–to do the poetic equivalent of staring at it without going blind: 
 
 Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky Without evasion by a single metaphor. 
 (“Credences of Summer”) 
 

Gubbinal