Poem Help by Wallace Stevens?
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 savior.
It is difficult even to choose the adjective
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.
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,
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 necessity requires.
(I just need a brief summary because I’m completely clueless.)
Favorite Answer
In my view it’s an intensely personal statement by Stevens of a state of mind and feeling that he experienced in later life. Because of its personal nature it’s hard to be sure exactly what he means by some of the images.
What is clear is that he is struggling to understand the source of his poetic inspiration and its apparent absence or deterioration. From this perspective the entire poem is a paradox because it seems to despair about a lack of imagination yet at the same time it embodies an intensely poetic and imaginative expression of that idea. So based on the evidence of the poem’s existence, there is no failure of imagination. Yet it seems to say that there is.
http://www.khas.edu.tr/bukalemun/chl_number4-3-2.html
