Showing posts with label Wallace Stevens Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wallace Stevens Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself. Show all posts

Thursday, June 11, 2009

At the earliest ending of winter, In March, a scrawny cry from outside Seemed like a sound in his mind.

Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself

by Wallace Stevens

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird’s cry at daylight or before,
In the early March wind

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow . . .
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep’s faded papier mâché . . .
The sun was coming from outside.

That scrawny cry—it was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.