"Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is"

(Euston Station, rush hour)



Wallace Stevens is one of my favourite poets.

Here is one of his poems:



The Snow Man 

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. 

 from Harmonium , 1923 

I love its theme of immersion and its mysterious evocation of the power of nature. 

Pat Righelato says:
This is not a grandiose claim for the infinite extent of consciousness,
but it is nevertheless a heroic effort of perception, a Modernist
reassessment of Transcendentalist vision, a revision of Emerson’s
ecstatic merging in the more sustained awareness of the separation
of consciousness and nature. Stevens is trying to make ‘a new
intelligence prevail’, an intelligence which understands the strategies
of consciousness as fictions rather than religious truths.

(From Righelato, Pat, "Wallace Stevens." In American Poetry: The
Modernist Ideal. Ed. Clive Bloom and Brian Docherty. New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1995. Ó 1995 The Editorial Board Lumiere
(Cooperative Press) Ltd.)

So now you know.