In Wallace Stevens’s “The Plot against the Giant,” three girls rehearse an ambush, but their weapons are perfume, dyed cloth, and whispered syllables. The giant they mean to stop is introduced as a “yokel” who comes “maundering” and “whetting his hacker,” a figure of clumsy, threatening rural force. The girls never attack him; instead each says “I shall run before him,” placing herself in his path with something refined enough to stop him. The poem’s central idea is a small allegory of soft power: refinement, art, and the civilizing senses can check and even undo what is huge, coarse, and apparently stronger.
Stevens arranges the poem as three miniature dramatic monologues, each with its own speaker and a final prediction: “It will check him,” “The threads / Will abash him,” “It will undo him.” The repetition of “I shall run before him” gives the scheme a ritual order, and the verbs escalate from checking to abashing to undoing. The rhythm is free, but the endings land like verdicts, often on short lines. The poem moves deliberately through the senses: first smell, then sight, then sound. The first girl will diffuse “the civilest odors / Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.” The phrase “unsmelled flowers” is a small paradox—flowers whose fragrance belongs to imagination rather than experience. She is not stopping the giant with a physical barrier but with an ideal fragrance, something so civil it will check him in his tracks.
The second girl turns to visual art. She runs before him “arching cloths besprinkled with colors / As small as fish-eggs.” The simile is precise and slightly strange: the color spots are tiny, granular, delicate, almost alive. Her threads, not blows, “will abash him,” suggesting embarrassment rather than destruction. The giant is to be undone by the sheer smallness and organization of patterned textiles, the craft of exact color. The third girl’s plan is the most intimate. Her “curious puffing” and the exclamation “Oh, la ... le pauvre!” introduce breath and a mock-pitying French phrase before she whispers “heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.” Labials are sounds made with the lips, soft consonants such as m and b; gutturals are harsh throat sounds. The world around the giant is guttural, and her whispered lip-sounds are the counter-weapon. “It will undo him”: not kill him, but unmake his threatening unity.
The language quietly enacts the contrast it describes. The giant arrives among hard consonants—“yokel,” “whetting,” “hacker”—while the girls’ plans slide into sibilants and liquids: “civilest odors,” “geraniums,” “unsmelled flowers.” Even the phrase “heavenly labials” sits lightly in the mouth; “gutturals” catches in the throat. The poem does not only define its contest; it lets the reader feel the two kinds of sound as they meet. The entire action also stays in the future tense, a scheme rehearsed before the giant appears. That incompleteness is part of the point: the plot exists in imagination, where it can be perfect.
The giant never speaks, and the girls never engage him directly; they run before him like figures in a courtly game or a fairy tale. The tone is mischievous, even condescending. Calling him “le pauvre” frames him as a poor brute whose size is no protection against civility. Yet the girls’ plot is not cruel; it is aesthetic. Each one creates a small, ordered sensory event and thinks it can stop a giant. Stevens treats that belief with an almost comic seriousness. The poem’s significance lies in this compressed comedy of scale: the enormous is not conquered by force but unsettled by perfume, color, and the softest possible speech. At the same time, the word “plot” makes the girls conspirators, and their repeated plans suggest that civilization itself might be such a plot—a delicate arrangement of smells, fabrics, and syllables designed to keep the crude and the huge at bay.