1. Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale
  2. From Blossoms
  3. Wild Geese
  4. The Peace of Wild Things
  5. My Gift to You
  6. Departing Spring
  7. The Skylark
  8. What a Strange Thing!
  9. Although The Wind …
  10. The Old Pond
  11. Spring Is Like A Perhaps Hand
  12. Hast thou 2 loaves of bread …
  13. Youth and Age
  14. A Postcard From the Volcano
  15. The Kraken
  16. He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
  17. There Is a Solitude of Space
  18. Because I Could Not Stop for Death
  19. Mad Song
  20. Answer July
  21. Success Is Counted Sweetest
  22. Hope Is the Thing with Feathers
  23. The Bluebird
  24. A Vision of the End
  25. The Crying of Water
  26. A Rose Has Thorns As Well As Honey
  27. Winter
  28. The Dark Cavalier
  29. There is no Life or Death
  30. Sheep in Winter
  31. To a Snowflake
  32. Sextain
  33. A Crocodile
  34. Sea Fever
  35. The Giant Cactus of Arizona
  36. The Coming of Night Scheduled for 2nd April 2024

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 the gold of the opulent sun.

Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955) was an American modernist poet and an extraordinary stylist.


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