The Plain Sense of Things - Wallace Stevens #2
Wallace Stevens was always an outsider to the world of poetry. He worked as a journalist, graduated from New York Law School, and served as the vice-president of both the Equitable Surety Company and the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. Later in life, his work struggles to place itself against the accomplishments of his earlier writing; in a moment of wondering whether he can replicate the voice of his earlier works, Stevens penned The Plain Sense of Things.
Full text of the poem:
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 lillies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.
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