The Plain Sense Of Things - Analysis

Introduction and overall impression

The poem presents a sober, reflective mood as it moves from loss into a stripped-down apprehension of reality. Tone is resigned and quietly bleak, with a subtle intellectual calm rather than melodrama. There is a mild shift from describing external decay to considering the mental work of imagining that decay, ending in an acceptance framed as necessity.

Contextual considerations

Wallace Stevens, an early twentieth-century American modernist, often explored imagination versus reality; this background helps read the poem as a meditation on the limits of poetic imagination. The poem's plain diction and domestic details reflect modernist attention to ordinary life rather than grand Romantic transcendence.

Main theme: Loss of imagination

The poem repeatedly contrasts an imaginative past with its disappearance: lines like "We had come to an end of the imagination" and "Yet the absence of the imagination had / Itself to be imagined" show imagination both gone and paradoxically still operative as an object of thought. The language makes the loss feel like a conceptual fact rather than an emotional outcry, emphasizing intellectual recognition over trauma.

Main theme: Decay and domestic collapse

Concrete images—"The chimney is fifty years old and slants," "The greenhouse never so badly needed paint," "No turban walks across the lessened floors"—anchor decay in the everyday. These domestic details turn grand "structure" into a "minor house," showing diminishment from grandeur to ordinary deterioration and suggesting mortality and the erosion of aesthetic enchantment.

Main theme: Silence and emptiness

Repeated references to blankness and silence—"this blank cold," "silence / Of a sort"—create a pervasive emptiness. The pond image, "water like dirty glass," conveys reflective absence: reflections are gone, leaving a surface that records nothing, which mirrors the absent imagination and the poem's stripped perception.

Symbols and vivid images

The pond functions as a central symbol: once potentially reflective and alive with lilies, it is now "dirty glass" and a "waste of the lilies," symbolizing lost beauty and the replacement of lived image with factual recognition. The "turban" and "greenhouse" are vestiges of exotic or cultivated imagination now absent; they register what has been diminished. The paradox that the absence "had / Itself to be imagined" raises an open question: does imagining absence prolong the imaginative faculty even as it describes its end?

Conclusion and final insight

Stevens's poem stages a calm reckoning: imagination recedes, leaving a plain, factual world of decay that nonetheless must be apprehended by the mind. The result is not despair but an austere acceptance—the "inevitable knowledge" required by necessity—suggesting that even the end of imagination becomes material for thought.