The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain
The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain Lyrics
There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.
He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.
It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction,
How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,
For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:
The exact rock where his inexactnesses
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,
Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.
The poem that took the place of a mountain.
He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.
It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction,
How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,
For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:
The exact rock where his inexactnesses
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,
Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.
About
Genius Annotation
Wallace Stevens does what he does best in this poem: explores the relationship between his language and the physical world.
Stevens takes a physical mountain, and recomposes it into language, hence the title, The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain. He’s trying to find the perfect perspective.
There could be a correlation between the seven couplets and the seven days it took God to create the world in the Christian creation story (more on this in the annotations). The speaker is essentially playing God, but with language.
Professor Langdon Hammer of Yale University has a great lecture on this poem online, which you can find here.
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