Diaries are very futile. I must be all dream or all deed. It is quite impossible for me to express any of the beauty I feel to half the degree I feel it; and yet it is a great pleasure to seize an impression and lock it up in words: you feel as if you… Continue reading Wallace Stevens
Peter Quince at the Clavier I Just as my fingers on these keys Make music, so the selfsame sounds On my spirit make a music, too. Music is feeling, then, not sound; And thus it is that what I feel, Here in this room, desiring you, Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk, Is music. It… Continue reading Wallace Stevens
It was her voice that made The sky acutest at its vanishing. She measured to the hour its solitude. She was the single artificer of the world In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea, Whatever self it had, became the self That was her song, for she… Continue reading Wallace Stevens
A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts The difficulty to think at the end of day, When the shapeless shadow covers the sun And nothing is left except light on your fur— There was the cat slopping its milk all day, Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk And August… Continue reading Wallace Stevens
Each false thing ends. The bouquet of summer Turns blue and on its empty table It is stale and the water is discolored. True autumn stands then in the doorway. — Wallace Stevens, from section XVI of “Examination of the Hero in a Time of War,” The Collected Poems (Vintage Books, 1990)
The Motive for Metaphor You like it under the trees in autumn, Because everything is half dead. The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves And repeats words without meaning. In the same way, you were happy in spring, With the half colors of quarter-things, The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds, The single… Continue reading Wallace Stevens
Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor. ― Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. (Vintage February 12, 1965) Originally published 1951.
