A Postcard From The Volcano

Wallace Stevens 1879 (Reading) – 1955 (Hartford)



Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion's look
And what we said of it became

A part of what it is ... Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,

A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on May 02, 2023

50 sec read
169

Quick analysis:

Scheme AXX XXX AXX BXX XXX CAB XXX XXC
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 862
Words 166
Stanzas 8
Stanza Lengths 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. more…

All Wallace Stevens poems | Wallace Stevens Books

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