I really enjoy poetry, can you tell?

So I thought I had the all encompassing poem figured out, but no, not at all. While researching Wallace Stevens (because I like the poem How to Live, What to Do) I found some other very good, possibly better, poems. Here is one entitled

"The Well Dressed Man With A Beard"

After the final no there comes a yes

And on that yes the future world depends.

No was the night. Yes is this present sun.

If the rejected things, the things denied,

Slid over the western cataract, yet one,

One only, one thing that was firm, even

No greater than a cricket's horn, no more

Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech

Of the self that must sustain itself on speech,

One thing remaining, infallible, would be

Enough. Ah! douce campagna of that thing!

Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart,

Green in the body, out of a petty phrase,

Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:

The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,

The aureole above the humming house...

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

I really like this poem. It goes right back to a previous blog on Derrida. Every negative needs a positive. This allows it to be explained. Without one the other cannot exist. A yes needs a no and a night needs a sun. All things and all thoughts must be illuminated. As Conrad says in Heart of Darkness, "the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside,enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine." Stevens and Conrad are explaining the same thing, an epiphany. A moment of assurance, of yes, that the entire world depends. Isn't that similar to an epiphany? When you realize you've experienced an instance of perfection and suddenly the sun shines, a light bulb is turned on, you look up towards the sky.

These thoughts keep piling out of Stevens pen. Like he says, the mind can never be satisfied. Constantly we are learning or entertaining the mind, even when we sleep the mind still works. Sleep is contained with thoughts constantly busying the mind and vibrating the pillow. If everything left us, Stevens says we would only need the mind giving us thoughts. We need an unsatisfied mind to sustain. Although, it is tiring to constantly be thinking and thinking and dreaming (like now) there is no greater ability and no bigger exhaustion. The act of thought gives us a place in this world.