Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, AN ORDINARY EVENING IN NEW HAVEN, by WALLACE STEVENS


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

AN ORDINARY EVENING IN NEW HAVEN, by         Recitation by Author         Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: The eye's plain version is a thing apart
Variant Title(s): An Ordinary Evening In New Haven, Selection
Subject(s): New Haven, Connecticut


Only the rich remember the past,
The strawberries once in the Apennines,
Philadelphia that the spiders ate.
There they sit, holding their eyes in their hands.
Queer, in this Vallombrosa of ears.
That they never hear the past. To see.
To hear, to touch, to taste, to smell, that's now,
That's this. Do they touch the thing they see.
Feel the wind of it, smell the dust of it?
They do not touch it. Sounds never rise
Out of what they see. They polish their eyes
In their hands. The lilacs came long after.
But the town and the fragrance were never one.
Though the blue bushes bloomed- and bloom.
Still bloom in the agate eyes, red blue.
Red purple, never quite red itself.
The tongue, the fingers, and the nose
Are comic trash, the ears are dirt.
But the eyes are men in the palm of the hand.
This? A man must be very poor
With a single sense, though he smells clouds.
Or to see the sea on Sunday, or
To touch a woman cadaverous.
Of poorness as an earth, to taste
Dry seconds and insipid thirds,
To hear himself and not to speak.
The strawberries once in the Apennines . . .
They seem a little painted, now.
The mountains are scratched and used, clear fakes.





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