The Look of Things

Wallace Stevens was brought up on a few occasions today. I was first introduced to him in this class, when Dr. Sexson read part of  A Postcard from the Volcano. Something about that poem, or maybe it was the day or the way it was read, something, made me remember the name.  I searched for it casually, always coming up just a few bucks too short, always getting something else instead:

A travel guide for Peru

A Tom McGuane book

Expensive coffee.

It took me until three weeks or so ago to realize what a mistake I had made. Then it happened. I walked into Salvation Army, and there it was, with the binding disintegrating off the yellow pages.  I only saw the WS, and I thought..hmmm…Shakespeare? No. Wallace Stevens.  25cents.  And now that I’m thinking about that poem again, and I think, damn! Why didn’t I use the first lines of this for my paper…? Agony.

A POSTCARD FROM THE VOLCANO

Children picking up our bones

Will never know that these were once

As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes

Made sharp air sharper by their smell

These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones

We left much more, left what still is

The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow

Above the shuttered mansion-house,

Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.

We knew for long the mansion’s look

And what we said of it became

A part of what it is . . . Children,

Still weaving budded aureoles,

Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems

As if he that lived there left behind

A spirit storming in blank walls,

A dirty house in a gutted world,

A tatter of shadows peaked to white,

Smeared with gold of the opulent sun.