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

Quick analysis:

Scheme XXXXXXX XXXXXX XAXXAXX
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 841
Words 162
Stanzas 3
Stanza Lengths 7, 6, 7

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. more…

All Wallace Stevens poems | Wallace Stevens Books

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