Wallace Stevens: The Late Inventory Poem by Dennis Ryan

Tuesday, July 5,2022

'The image must be of the nature of its creator.
It is the nature of its creator increased,
Heightened. It is he, anew, in a freshened youth...'
- Wallace Stevens, from 'A Mythology Reflects Its Region',
one of the last poems Stevens wrote in 1955

Lately, I have been reviewing past events,
seem to have inventoried everything important,
image after image springing newborn from this old head.
And selection, selectivity—yes, only certain images
will make due, harmonize, ring true, join sights
and sounds that fit me, my personality and mood.
Yes, that's the key. That musicality—that sense
of myself heightened, taking me to... Oh, yes,
to that... To that too—to that tintinnabulation
I discovered long ago in youth; from that solitary cry
at my window back to those other sights and sounds
that transported us to summer—the cricket's call, the cat's,
the sounds of my past life that time brings back—
Rossini's opera and sung words so sweet-sounding.
Life's this sense-filled medley of becoming, becoming
substantial in one's own place—fields, forests and mountains.