Man Carrying Thing

Man Carrying Thing


The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully. Illustration:

A brune figure in winter evening resists
Identity. The thing he carries resists

The most necessitous sense.
Accept them, then,
As secondary (parts not quite perceived

Of the obvious whole,
uncertain particles
Of the certain solid,
the primary free from doubt,

Things floating like the first
hundred flakes of snow
Out of a storm we must endure all night,

Out of a storm of secondary things),
A horror of thoughts
that suddenly are real.

We must endure our thoughts all night,
until the bright obvious
stands motionless in cold.


Wallace Stevens

Posted over on Poets.Org

From The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens.
Copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens