Madame la Fleurie
Wallace Stevens 1879 (Reading) – 1955 (Hartford)
Weight him down, O side-stars, with the great weightings of
the end.
Seal him there. He looked in a glass of the earth and thought
he lived in it.
Now, he brings all that he saw into the earth, to the waiting
parent.
His crisp knowledge is devoured by her, beneath a dew.
Weight him, weight, weight him with the sleepiness of the
moon.
It was only a glass because he looked in it. It was nothing he
could be told.
It was a language he spoke, because he must, yet did not know.
It was a page he had found in the handbook of heartbreak.
The black fugatos are strumming the blackness of black...
The thick strings stutter the finial gutturals.
He does not lie there remembering the blue-jay, say the jay.
His grief is that his mother should feed on him, himself and
what he saw,
In that distant chamber, a bearded queen, wicked in her dead
light.
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 48 sec read
- 181 Views
Quick analysis:
Scheme | XXXXXXX XXXXXX XAXXAXX |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 841 |
Words | 162 |
Stanzas | 3 |
Stanza Lengths | 7, 6, 7 |
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"Madame la Fleurie" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 5 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/37897/madame-la-fleurie>.
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