On The Manner Of Addressing Clouds - Analysis

Introduction

This poem addresses the figure of the cloud-evoker—grammarians, philosophers, ponderers—and registers a solemn, almost elegiac tone that mixes reverence with mild irony. The mood is steady and contemplative, with small shifts from admiration of language's power to a recognition of transience and solitude. The diction is elevated and ceremonial, which reinforces the poem’s meditation on how speech and ritual meet mortality.

Contextual Note

Wallace Stevens, an American modernist poet, often explored imagination, consciousness, and the role of language in shaping reality. Understanding Stevens’s preoccupation with the interplay between thought and perception helps explain the poem’s focus on verbal ceremony as a mode of confronting the world’s mysteries.

Main Themes

Language as ritual: The poem treats speech as a ceremonial force—“pomps” and “processionals”—that both sustains and elevates experience. Words are compared to music and ritual gestures that give shape to mortality: speech is not mere description but an act that responds to and orders existence.

Resignation and accompaniment: Phrases like “meet resignation” and “to be accompanied by more / Than mute bare splendors” suggest acceptance rather than defeat; language provides company amid a drifting, indifferent world. The poem links resignation with a dignified, responsive speech that answers seasons and loss.

Isolation and consolation: While the poem acknowledges solitude—“the drifting waste,” “mute bare splendors of the sun and moon”—it emphasizes consolation through human-made ritual and language, implying that poetic or philosophical speech can fill or soften that isolation.

Symbols and Imagery

Clouds function as both subject and metaphor: they are the locus of evocation and a symbol of transience, obscuring and revealing by turns. The recurrent image of music—“music so profound,” “music of meet resignation”—casts speech as an audible yet "exaltation without sound," suggesting a power beyond literal utterance. The sun and moon represent the indifferent, mute splendors of nature; their muteness makes human speech more necessary as a companion and interpreter.

A possible reading: the clouds and their ceremonial speech imply that meaning is constructed through communal or ritual language rather than discovered in solitary nature. An open question remains whether the poem gently satirizes its ceremonious language even as it endorses language’s consolations.

Conclusion

The poem ultimately spotlights the restorative and ritualized capacity of language to meet mortality and solitude. Through elevated diction, cloud imagery, and the frame of procession and music, Stevens presents speech as both a dignified response to and a companion within the temporary, mysterious conditions of life.