The change of color is likely and a difference a very little difference is prepared. Sugar is not a vegetable.

Callous is something that hardening leaves behind what will be soft if there is a genuine interest in there being present as many girls as men. Does this change. It shows that dirt is clean when there is a volume.
A cushion has that cover. Supposing you do not like to change, supposing it is very clean that there is no change in appearance, supposing that there is regularity and a costume is that any the worse than an oyster and an exchange. Come to season that is there any extreme use in feather and cotton. Is there not much more joy in a table and more chairs and very likely roundness and a place to put them.

Set up

These are the first few stanzas of Stein's prose poem "A Substance In A Cushion," which was included in the volume Tender Buttons. If you look at "Avant-garde" in the dictionary, you see a picture of Tender Buttons… or, rather, if you Google "Avant-garde," Tender Buttons comes right up in the first Goodreads list.

Pssssssh. Your guess is as good as ours. We give up. Shmoop out.

Nah, Shmoopers. We wouldn't do that to you, especially not with a poem as nutso as "A Substance in A Cushion."

The first thing to realize here is that Gertrude Stein was way, way into multiple meanings. This is a woman who said "A rose is a rose is a rose." 

What she's doing when she says something hyper-cryptic like this is not just repeating one word over and over (she's also doing that, yeah) but cueing you in to multiple meanings of the same word: a rose (noun: flower) is a rose (noun: color) is a rose (adjective: the smell of a rose). Words vary, and as you consider the myriad meanings of any one word, the world expands. The world becomes new and strange.

Boom: newness was what the Avant-garde was all about.

But let's get back to this weird little prose poem.

What Stein is playing with here, first and foremost, is the idea of "cover." Now, you know that when Stein says one word, you really should be thinking of all the words that sound like that word. A "cover" in this poem is multiple things: covering of a cushion, and to protect and seal, and to hide from view or screen.

Stein's getting deep here: her concept of cover is both about things as mundane as cushions, and also about what language does to our world. Language both explains our world ("Look, a rose!") and obscures it ("Hold up. Which "rose" do you mean?").

Check out this line: "The change of color is likely and a difference a very little difference is prepared." The "change" is a change in understanding: when we use imperfect language to refer to anything, it's very likely that meaning will be lost. Meaning can be lost over a "very little difference" in understanding.

Think about text messages, for example. How many times do you either write "k," meaning to be pleasant, and have people understand it as being rude? Or worse?

Stein thinks that there's a new, better way to use language: playfully, the way she does.

Stein is calling out people who think she's playing around with language too much. When she writes, "Supposing you do not like to change, supposing it is very clean that there is no change in appearance, supposing that there is regularity and a costume is that any the worse than an oyster and an exchange," she's being kind of a snarkmonster. How?

Well, she compares conventional language to being "very clean" (a.k.a. sterile) and "no(t) chang(ing) in appearance" (a.k.a. boring) and "a costume." Yowch.

But she's also giving them a choice: trade in the old way of using language for her new way. She'll even throw in a free oyster with the exchange.