Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself, poem by Wallace Stevens

NOT IDEAS ABOUT THE THING BUT THE THING ITSELF
by Wallace Stevens

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird’s cry at daylight or before,
In the early March wind

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow . . .
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep’s faded papier mâché . . .
The sun was coming from outside.

That scrawny cry—it was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.

SOURCE: “Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself” appears in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (Alfred A. Knopf, 1954).

IMAGE: Sunrise on the roof top” by Nomad Art and Design. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems in 1955. (SOURCE: wikipedia.org.)