Wallace Stevens (Уоллес Стивенс)

Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself

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-m^ach’e...
The sun was coming from the outside.

That scrawny cry&mdasp;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.

Wallace Stevens’s other poems:

  1. Valley Candle
  2. The Plot against the Giant
  3. The Plain Sense of Things
  4. The River of Rivers in Connecticut
  5. Sunday Morning




To the dedicated English version of this website