Man Carrying Thing

Wallace Stevens

The poem must resist the intelligence

Almost successfully. Illustration:

A brune figure in winter evening resists

Identity. The thing he carries resists

The most necessitous sense. Accept them, then,

As secondary (parts not quite perceived

Of the obvious whole, uncertain particles

Of the certain solid, the primary free from doubt,

Things floating like the first hundred flakes of snow

Out of a storm we must endure all night,

Out of a storm of secondary things),

A horror of thoughts that suddenly are real.

We must endure our thoughts all night, until

The bright obvious stands motionless in cold.

From The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens. Copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and renewed in 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

Poems by This Author

Anecdote of the Jar by Wallace Stevens
I placed a jar in Tennessee,

Bantams in Pine-Woods by Wallace Stevens
Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan

Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock by Wallace Stevens
The houses are haunted

Earthy Anecdote by Wallace Stevens
Every time the bucks went clattering

Fabliau of Florida by Wallace Stevens
Barque of phosphor

Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour by Wallace Stevens
Light the first ligh of evening, as in a room

Le Monocle de Mon Oncle by Wallace Stevens
Mother of heaven, regina of the clouds

Lunar Paraphrase by Wallace Stevens
The moon is the mother of pathos and pity

Metaphors of a Magnifico by Wallace Stevens
Twenty men crossing a bridge,

Nomad Exquisite by Wallace Stevens
As the immense dew of Florida

Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself by Wallace Stevens
At the earliest ending of winter

Of the Surface of Things by Wallace Stevens
In my room, the world is beyond my understanding

Poetry Is a Destructive Force by Wallace Stevens
That's what misery is

Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late

Tea at the Palaz of Hoon by Wallace Stevens
Not less because in purple I descended

The Emperor of Ice-Cream by Wallace Stevens
Call the roller of big cigars,

The High-Toned Old Christian Woman by Wallace Stevens
Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.

The Idea of Order at Key West by Wallace Stevens
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.

The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage by Wallace Stevens
But not on a shell, she starts

The Plain Sense of Things by Wallace Stevens
After the leaves have fallen, we return

The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens
One must have a mind of winter

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens
Among twenty snowy mountains,

To the Roaring Wind by Wallace Stevens
What syllable are you seeking

Man Carrying Thing

Wallace Stevens

Poems by This Author

Further Reading