The Plain Sense of Things by Wallace Stevens
I’m back from spending Thanksgiving with my poetry pals and have quite a few poems to share. I’m posting this one first because it seems fitting as it’s finally gotten cold in Texas, and I loved the line: this blank cold, this sadness without cause. It was also really neat that one of my poetry pals has actually seen Stevens’s house and confirmed the images described in the poem.
The Plain Sense of Things
By Wallace Stevens
After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.
It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.
The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.
Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence
Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.
Current Tea: ginger lime rooibos
