Contrary Theses II
Contrary Theses II - context Summary
Published in 1950 Collection
"Contrary Theses II" appears in Wallace Stevens's late collection The Auroras of Autumn, published in 1950. The poem pairs ordinary autumnal images—a father with his child, a barking dog, falling leaves—with a sudden philosophical "abstract," reflecting Stevens's mature interest in tension between concrete perception and conceptual order. Its placement in the 1950 volume situates it among Stevens's late-career meditations on imagination, reality, and poetic synthesis.
Read Complete AnalysesOne 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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