Continual Conversation With A Silent Man
Wallace Stevens 1879 (Reading) – 1955 (Hartford)
The old brown hen and the old blue sky,
Between the two we live and die--
The broken cartwheel on the hill.
As if, in the presence of the sea,
We dried our nets and mended sail
And talked of never-ending things,
Of the never-ending storm of will,
One will and many wills, and the wind,
Of many meanings in the leaves,
Brought down to one below the eaves,
Link, of that tempest, to the farm,
The chain of the turquoise hen and sky
And the wheel that broke as the cart went by.
It is not a voice that is under the eaves.
It is not speech, the sound we hear
In this conversation, but the sound
Of things and their motion: the other man,
A turquoise monster moving round.
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 39 sec read
- 68 Views
Quick analysis:
Scheme | AAB XXX BXC CXA ACX DXD |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 658 |
Words | 133 |
Stanzas | 6 |
Stanza Lengths | 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3 |
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"Continual Conversation With A Silent Man" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 23 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/37884/continual-conversation-with-a-silent-man>.
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