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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Wallace Stevens

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

Of the Manner of Addressing Clouds

Wallace Stevens

From “Sur Ma Guzzla Gracile”

GLOOMY grammarians in golden gowns,

Meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous,

Eliciting the still sustaining pomps

Of speech which are like music so profound

They seem an exaltation without sound.

Funest philosophers and ponderers,

Their evocations are the speech of clouds.

So speech of your processionals returns

In the casual evocations of your tread

Across the stale, mysterious seasons. These

Are the music of meet resignation; these

The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you

To magnify, if in that drifting waste

You are to be accompanied by more

Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.