The poem of the mind in the act of finding <br />What will suffice. It has not always had <br />To find: the scene was set; it repeated what <br />Was in the script. <br />Then the theatre was changed <br />To something else. Its past was a souvenir. <br /> <br />It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place. <br />It has to face the men of the time and to meet <br />The women of the time. It has to think about war <br />And it has to find what will suffice. It has <br />To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage, <br />And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and <br />With meditation, speak words that in the ear, <br />In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat, <br />Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound <br />Of which, an invisible audience listens, <br />Not to the play, but to itself, expressed <br />In an emotion as of two people, as of two <br />Emotions becoming one. The actor is <br />A metaphysician in the dark, twanging <br />An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives <br />Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly <br />Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend, <br />Beyond which it has no will to rise. <br />It must <br />Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may <br />Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman <br />Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.<br /><br />Wallace Stevens<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/of-modern-poetry/
