according to Beverly Maeder, who credits her with pointing the way. Meaning or semantics is fundamentally about word-world relationships, which are particularly problematic in Stevens' poetry. His syntactical innovations are employed to frustrate simple answers about the relationship between language and reality. For instance, his use of the verb seem gives priority to appearances or aspects: "Let be be finale of seem". Also orienting the poems away from certainties about an unproblematically given world are similes with like or as, the hypothetical as if, the modal might, the conditional, sentence fragments, optatives, questions and protean usage of the verb to be (as when an observer beholds "Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is". Stevens' symbolism is in aid of a polarity between "things as they are" and "things imagined". This is at least often the true subject of his poetry. However, as the exchange between Joan Richarson and Helen Vendler attests, the true subject of a poem can be a matter of some controversy. For one thing, it can look 'up' to the ideas about imagination/reality, or it can look 'down' to the problems or pathologies of Stevens' life. Up for grabs is whether "things as they are" are to be understood in naturalistic terms (a tree is a tree) or in idealist or perspectival terms (a tree reduces to the various tree-perspectives) or Kantian terms (there is something, whatever it is, that is responsible for the tree, or the various tree-perspectives: Kant's ding-an-sich). The tree in "Of the Surface of Things" poses an interesting test of such philosophical interpretations. Also there is a moment in Stevens' poetic development when he realizes that the polarity of things as they are and things imagined is not safe, when red bleeds into blue in "Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks", Stevens' brutal encounter with Berserk. (See also "The Cuban Doctor" for a comparable encounter with the Indian.) With an emphatic warning about the danger of depending on mechanical symbol mapping to understand Stevens' poems, one can propose that imagination, order and the ideal are often symbolized by blue, the moon, the polar north, winter, music, poetry, and art. Actuality and disorder are often represented by yellow, the sun, the tropic south, summer, physical nature. For instance, sun and moon represent this duality in Harmoniums "The Comedian as the letter C", in which the protagonist, Crispin, conceives his voyage of