Contrary Theses (II)
Wallace Stevens 1879 (Reading) – 1955 (Hartford)
One chemical afternoon in mid-autumn,
When the grand mechanics of earth and sky were near;
Even the leaves of the locust were yellow then,
He walked with his year-old boy on his shoulder.
The sun shone and the dog barked and the baby slept.
The leaves, even of the locust, the green locust.
He wanted and looked for a final refuge,
From the bombastic intimations of winter
And the martyrs a la mode. He walked toward
An abstract, of which the sun, the dog, the boy
Were contours. Cold was chilling the wide-moving swans.
The leaves were falling like notes from a piano.
The abstract was suddenly there and gone again.
The negroes were playing football in the park.
The abstract that he saw, like the locust-leaves, plainly:
The premiss from which all things were conclusions,
The noble, Alexandrine verve. The flies
And the bees still sought the chrysanthemums’ odor.
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 45 sec read
- 110 Views
Quick analysis:
Scheme | XXA BXX XBX XXX AXX XXB |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic hexameter |
Characters | 877 |
Words | 152 |
Stanzas | 6 |
Stanza Lengths | 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3 |
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"Contrary Theses (II)" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 13 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/37885/contrary-theses-(ii)>.
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