Man Carrying Thing
The poem must resist the intelligence Almost successfully. Illustration: A brune figure in winter evening resists Identity. The thing he carries resists The most necessitous sense. Accept them, then, As secondary (parts not quite perceived Of the obvious whole, uncertain particles Of the certain solid, the primary free from doubt, Things floating like the first hundred flakes of snow Out of a storm we must endure all night, Out of a storm of secondary things), A horror of thoughts that suddenly are real. We must endure our thoughts all night, until The bright obvious stands motionless in cold.
Credit
From The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens. Copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and renewed in 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Date Published
01/01/1980