A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts (1937)
The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur
There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
And August the most peaceful month.
To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
Without that monument of cat,
The cat forgotten in the moon;
And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;
Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;
And east rushes west and west rushes down,
No matter. The grass is full
And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,
The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A self that touches all edges,
You become a self that fills the four corners of night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you are humped high, humped up,
You are humped higher and higher, black as stone
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.
Brief bio of the Hartford, CT resident and NYC lawyer here.
From a recent review: Wallace Stevens Wrote a Handful of Beautiful Poems and a Lot of Tosh - Review: Wallace Stevens, ‘The Collected Poems: The Corrected Edition’:
Stevens was, if anything, too smart for his own good. Readers of his essays and correspondence know that he thought at length about the essence and purpose of poetry. Stevens was an Emersonian mystic for whom poetry was a substitute, and a fit one, for belief in God, which, for reasons he was usually vague about, was impossible for those of us living in the 20th century. The highest life to which man could aspire was one of exhaustive, all-consuming self invention. Like Eliot, he wrote the poems that fit his own extensive critical criteria to a T. I underlined the word “self” 46 times in my copy of the new Collected Poems.
