Wallace Stevens (1952)
The Course of a Particular
Today the leaves cry, hanging on branches swept by wind,
Yet the nothingness of winter becomes a little less.
It is still full of icy shades and shapen snow.
The leaves cry . . . One holds off and merely hears the cry.
It is a busy cry, concerning someone else.
And though one says that one is part of everything,
There is a conflict, there is a resistance involved;
And being part is an exertion that declines:
One feels the life of that which gives life as it is.
The leaves cry. It is not a cry of divine attention,
Nor the smoke-drift of puffed-out heroes, nor human cry.
It is the cry of leaves that do not transcend themselves,
In the absence of fantasia, without meaning more
Than they are in the final finding of the ear, in the thing
Itself, until, at last, the cry concerns no one at all.
– Wallace Stevens
Question: What does this poem mean?
a) What it says.
b) That "in the absence of fantasia," everything amounts to nothing.
c) Nature is indifferent to human beings and their imaginary or deceased gods.
d) When "the nothingness of winter becomes a little less," it is a positive thing, though the phrasing and the rhyme of "nothingness" and "a little less" make you think things are even bleaker than they were.
e) One grows old and one's powers decline. (Born in Reading, PA (Oct 2, 1879), died Hartford, CT (Aug 3, 1955).)
f) The "meaning" of any sound depends on the existence of an ear.