The Idea of Order at Key West
July 6, 2023Tattoo
July 6, 2023The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) was an American modernist poet who explored complex philosophical and aesthetic questions through his poetry. His most famous works include "The Idea of Order at Key West" and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Stevens won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1955, shortly before his death.