This year’s National Poetry Month promotional art quotes from this poem.
“Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”
by Wallace Stevens
Light the first light of evening
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.
This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:
Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.
Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.
Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one.
How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.
For some reason my mind is juxtaposing the strange weightlessness of this poem with the heavy voices of the mining engineers on the news show broadcasting behind me, explaining what they’re trying to do to get down there.
Well, some of us are vulgar, and some are eloquent, some shallow, some deep. Are you saying something else?
Interesting blog, btw.
Thanks!
I was unclear: I didn’t mean “heavy” in a pejorative way–I meant heavy with grief.