Analysis of The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm

Wallace Stevens 1879 (Reading) – 1955 (Hartford)



The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.


Scheme Ax bA bc dx xd xc xe ex
Poetic Form
Metre 0111000111 01001010101 1101010101 0111000111 01010111111 01101010101 101110111 01011111111 010111001011 01110011111 0101110101101 011010101 00111010011 01111101001 11011100101 10101010101
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 707
Words 142
Sentences 9
Stanzas 8
Stanza Lengths 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2
Lines Amount 16
Letters per line (avg) 35
Words per line (avg) 9
Letters per stanza (avg) 70
Words per stanza (avg) 18
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 23, 2023

42 sec read
106

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. more…

All Wallace Stevens poems | Wallace Stevens Books

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