Of Modern Poetry
The poem of the mind in the act of
What will suffice.
It has not always
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what Was in the script.
Then the theatre was
To something else.
Its past was a souvenir.
It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet The women of the time.
It has to think about
And it has to find what will suffice.
It
To construct a new stage.
It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself,
In an emotion as of two people, as of
Emotions becoming one.
The actor isA metaphysician in the dark, twanging An instrument, twanging a wiry string that
Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses,
Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.
It
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a
Combing.
The poem of the act of the mind.
Wallace Stevens
Другие работы автора
Phases
I There’s a little square in Paris, Waiting until we pass They sit idly there,
The Planet On The Table
Ariel was glad he had written his poems They were of a remembered Or of something seen that he liked Other makings of the
The Death of a Soldier
Life contracts and death is expected, As in season of autumn The soldier falls He does not become a three-days personage
The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain
There it was, word for word, The poem that took the place of a mountain He breathed its oxygen, Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table
