Of Mere Being
The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze distance.
A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.
You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.
The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.
~Wallace Stevens, 1954~
9 comments
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June 3, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Dave Crocco
The key is the seventh and eighth lines. When you have transcended the world you understand, in a way that was not previously possible, that nothing in the world “makes us happy or unhappy”; there is no “it” from which we derive happiness or its opposite. Happiness wells up from within.
His greatest poem.
June 3, 2009 at 3:12 pm
Dan
Thank you, Dave. A beautiful explanation. Best to you.
June 21, 2009 at 7:38 pm
Oscar
According to the comments of the editor (Holly Stevens) in the Stevens’ anthology, “The Palm at the End of the Mind,” the word “distance” in line 3 was a mistake in an earlier published version, and the word should be “decor.”
It’s possible that this is not universally accepted.
June 21, 2009 at 8:20 pm
Dan
Oscar
Yes, I know the revised version and do not want to seem disrespectful to the poet. Yet I grew up with the “distance” version and have a fondness for it. When I decided to use the poem as an inspiration for this blog, I intentionally chose the mistaken version.
June 22, 2009 at 8:45 pm
Oscar
I understand. The first version I read used decor. If later I had found out that “distance” was correct I might well have reacted similarly.
One thinks of Auden, who deliberately changed his poems. I prefer his original elegy for Yeats, but then the original version was the one that I read first. Would I feel differently if that were reversed? I do not know.
June 22, 2009 at 9:07 pm
DKO
Ah yes, thank you for that, Oscar. Poems become part of us and, treasured memories, our intimacy with them determines a preference…
September 18, 2009 at 6:37 am
josephine
i love this poem it is the best one of his that i read so far
October 24, 2009 at 1:23 pm
c holland
i love stevens but i would never try to reduce his poems to an “explanation.” i think he wrote to go beyond explanation and reason, to penetrate the wall that language throws up between us and reality. there’s that “old sailor, drunk and asleep in his boots, [who] dreams of tiger in red weather.” you yield to him, you don’t reduce him to meaning.
October 28, 2009 at 11:15 am
Harry B. Williams
Poets, by the nature of the work, seem to demand an intellectual explanation of the meaning of what they write. However, Stevens seems more like the Zen poet who points at the moon to “explain” the moon.
When the tiger devours us, no intellectual explanation will be adequate.
Stevens points with words that talk about what Yeats called “the thing that was before the world was made.”