Wallace Stevens

Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour - meaning Summary

Imagination as Communal Light

Stevens presents a quiet meditation on imagination as the light that gathers separate selves into a shared, sustaining presence. Evening imagery frames a voluntary rendezvous in which individuals forget isolation and find warmth, order, and knowledge within a single mental space. The poem argues that naming this experience God or imagination is interchangeable; togetherness created by the central mind is enough to make a dwelling in the world.

Read Complete Analyses

Light the first light of evening In which we rest and, for small reason, think The world imagined is the ultimate good. This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous. It is in that thought that we collect ourselves, Out of all the indifferences, into one thing: Within a single thing, a single shawl Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth, A light, a power, the miraculous influence. Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves. We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole, A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous. Within its vital boundary, in the mind. We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark. Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough.

default user
PoetryVerse just now

Feel free to be first to leave comment.

8/2200 - 0