| The Plain Sense of Things |
|
by
Wallace Stevens |
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| After the leaves have fallen, we return | |
| To a plain sense of things. It is as if | |
| We had come to an end of the imagination, | |
| Inanimate in an inert savoir. | |
| It is difficult even to choose the adjective | 5 |
| For this blank cold, this sadness without cause. | |
| The great structure has become a minor house. | |
| No turban walks across the lessened floors. | |
| The greenhouse never so badly needed paint. | |
| The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side. | 10 |
A
fantastic effort has failed, a repetition |
|
| In a repetitiousness of men and flies. | |
| Yet the absence of the imagination had | |
| Itself to be imagined. The great pond, | |
| The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves, | 15 |
| Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence | |
| Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see, | |
| The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this | |
| Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge, | |
| Required, as a necessity requires. | 20 |
| savoir — French for to know | |