"The Course of a Particular" [by Wallace Stevens]

Wallace Stevens (1952)

The Course of a Particular

Today the leaves cry, hanging on branches swept by wind,
Yet the nothingness of winter becomes a little less.
It is still full of icy shades and shapen snow.

The leaves cry . . . One holds off and merely hears the cry.
It is a busy cry, concerning someone else.
And though one says that one is part of everything,

There is a conflict, there is a resistance involved;
And being part is an exertion that declines:
One feels the life of that which gives life as it is.

The leaves cry. It is not a cry of divine attention,
Nor the smoke-drift of puffed-out heroes, nor human cry.
It is the cry of leaves that do not transcend themselves,

In the absence of fantasia, without meaning more
Than they are in the final finding of the ear, in the thing
Itself, until, at last, the cry concerns no one at all.

– Wallace Stevens

Comments

[Ingram]

what does this poem mean?

[Steven Wallace]

The poem means what the poem says, but what the poem says depends on the poem's affirmations of nobility, than which nothing is more difficult or more necessary. There is no element more conspicuously absent from contemporary poetry than nobility.

[joejoe]

same

[George Konetsky]

The poem is about the transience of our lives. It’s captivating because
we all hear stories about people we’ve never met that have passed.
And no matter how interesting their lives may have been, they feel
like just another story- a busy story concerning someone else.
Eventually the stories are forgotten. It’s melancholy but the urgency is implied:
Make your life count to someone.