Wallace Stevens: The Changing World Cares Nothing For Us Poem by Dennis Ryan

Friday morning, May 13,2005

"Here in his house and in his room,
In his chair, the most tranquil thought grew peaked..."
- Wallace Stevens, from "A Quiet Normal Life"

The changing world cares nothing for us;
my father's letter gave me no choice but to succeed,
and at the time I remember writing this: The old Biblical injunction to make
the earth fertile and to earn one's bread in the sweat of one's brow
are one's first instructions... So I learned and repeated this, but
It is decidedly wrong to start there with one's tastes fully developed
& to have to forego all satisfaction of them for a vague number of years.
But forego them I did for I knew the world cared nothing for me,
or for anyone else:As the hearse rattled up the street over the cobbles,
in the stiffling heat of the sun, with not a single person paying the least attention
to it and with only four or five carriages behind it at a distance I realized much
that I had doubtingly suspected before—There are few hero-worshippers.
Therefore, few heroes.Looking back, I understand now why I worked so hard,
ascended to a vice presidency and bought the best home in the neighborhood;
but now I sleep alone too, realize my poverty and include you in it in these late poems.
I had failed to care as I should some time ago, but cannot write poems about that.
It would prove too disarming, too... shaming.So I sleep alone in my big room,
my wife in hers.Our daughter moved out some time ago to live with someone else.