Poetry Sunday

I hereby designate Sunday as the day on which I'll post favorite poems -- with or without commentary.

Fittingly, we begin these Poetry Sunday posts with Wallace Stevens, a poet likely to be the primary focus of my upcoming Ph.D. dissertation (and a poet whose famous first line of "Sunday Morning" is responsible for the title of this blog).

This little-known, rarely-commented-upon poem comes from The Rock, Stevens's final volume of poetry, first published in 1954 as the concluding section of his Collected Poems. As in The Rock as a whole, Stevens in this poem is at his most meditative, the luxuriant gusto of early Stevens transmuted into a more sober investigation of liminal spiritual yearning -- late in his poetic enterprise, Stevens's poetic imagination fluctuates at the edge, ready to plunge into an intermediate space in which poetic figuration and ontological mystery merge. In other words, the Stevens of The Rock engages in a Bachelardian meditation upon the matter of metaphor and the metaphor of matter, revealing that the ultimate satisfactions of poetry are satisfactions of the spirit.

Here is the poem, followed by an image I tracked down of the Cliffs of Moher. Enjoy.

THE IRISH CLIFFS OF MOHER

Who is my father in this world, in this house,

At the spirit's base?

My father's father, his father's father, his--

Shadows like winds

Go back to a parent before thought, before speech,

At the head of the past.

They go to the cliffs of Moher rising out of the mist,

Above the real,

Rising out of present time and place, above

The wet, green grass.

This is not landscape, full of the somnambulations

Of poetry

And the sea. This is my father or, maybe,

It is as he was,

A likeness, one of the race of fathers: earth

And sea and air.