A troupe of grave-worms speaks from the first line with the ceremony of an escort: “Out of the tomb, we bring Badroulbadour, / Within our bellies, we her chariot.” The name Badroulbadour, from the Arabian Nights, summons a princess of fabled beauty; the worms, buried with her, have not come to mourn. They have eaten her body, and they present that fact as a kind of transport. Their bellies are her chariot, so the gruesome act of decomposition becomes a courtly procession. From the outset the poem holds two attitudes in tension: the worms are both destroyers and bearers, grave-creatures and heralds.
After that opening, the poem becomes a pageant of pieces. “Here is an eye. And here are, one by one, / The lashes of that eye and its white lid.” The repeated “Here is,” “Here are” turns the body into an exhibit, but also into a litany, as if each part were being restored to view rather than consumed. The phrase “white lid” has a porcelain delicacy, and “the cheek on which that lid declined” turns death into something almost like sleep or a courtly bow. The body is not described as rotting; it is described as a sequence of treasures. Even the word “genius,” in “the genius of that cheek,” reaches back toward an older meaning of a spirit or presiding presence, so the hand becomes the cheek’s attendant rather than mere flesh.
That collision of language continues in the next lines. “Here are the lips, / The bundle of the body and the feet.” After the slow, tender inventory, “bundle” is deliberately blunt. It reduces the princess to something tied and carried, a parcel of matter. The list that began with an eye and lashes ends in a tangle of body and feet. Yet the worms still speak as though they are performing a rite, not merely feeding. Their horror is quiet because their language remains so composed.
The structure deepens that effect. The poem’s unrhymed lines hover around ten syllables, but the stresses are loose enough to sound like solemn speech rather than a metronome. “Finger after finger” slows the line with its own patient rhythm, while the final line repeats the first almost exactly, though the comma after “tomb” disappears: “Out of the tomb we bring Badroulbadour.” The poem circles back like a chant, as if the procession could begin again. The title adds another layer: “The Worms at Heaven’s Gate” places these creatures at the threshold of transcendence. They do not enter paradise; they gather at its edge, carrying a dead princess in their bellies.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal of ordinary consolation. There is no soul ascending, no heavenly reunion. What rises from the tomb is a body in fragments, carried by the least glamorous of creatures. But the language rises too. Stevens often pressed the imagination against hard physical fact, and here the hard fact is the grave. The worms cannot resurrect Badroulbadour, but they can name her parts with eerie reverence, and that naming becomes its own strange ceremony. Beauty is not saved from decay; it is taken apart, passed through other bodies, and turned into a procession. That is a dark, witty, and finally moving vision of what survives at the edge of heaven.