Wallace Stevens Love Poems

This brings me next to Wallace Stevens. Wow, he's amazed me for a long time now... it's even difficult for me to explain my fascination with this poet. His work is cryptic; that's the thing, and he's had a big influence on my work. I like poets that structure loosely like this. It reminds me of jazz music. The writing is so open to interpretation, and, that's a good thing, and, imho, that's the reason why we write the words out in a poem rather than making an essay. I don't think poems are supposed to have a literal meaning, and, with love poems, how could there be a simple meaning? First, let me add a Stevens' quotation that I like a lot:

"Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake."

Isn't that fantastic? That's just the sort of brilliant, border-line thing that I really appreciate! In the poem I'm going to run below, I think you may agree that we have a unique approach to the love poem...Wallace Stevens style............

Wallace Stevens

 

Final Soliloquoy Of The Interior Paramour

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
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.