Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself
Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself - context Summary
Late-life Culmination
Written near the end of Stevens's life (1954; published 1957), this brief poem stages a late meditation on imagination and reality. A sparse March bird cry and the rising sun shift from mental projection to affirmed presence. The speaker moves from interior ventriloquy to an encounter with the external world, experiencing the sensory scene as "a new knowledge of reality," a culmination of Stevens's ongoing themes.
Read Complete AnalysesAt 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-mache... The sun was coming from the 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.
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