sudden rightnesses, wholly containing the mind

 

.

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, 
Every poem an epitaph. 
And any action 
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat 
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.


—T.S. Eliot

.

The poem of the mind in the act of finding  

What will suffice. It has not always had  

To find: the scene was set; it repeated what  

Was in the script.

Then the theatre was changed  

To something else. Its past was a souvenir.


It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.  

It has to face the men of the time and to meet  

The women of the time. It has to think about war  

And it has to find what will suffice. It has  

To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage  

And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and

With meditation, speak words that in the ear,  

In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,

Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound  

Of which, an invisible audience listens,

Not to the play, but to itself, expressed

In an emotion as of two people, as of two  

Emotions becoming one. The actor is

A metaphysician in the dark, twanging

An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives  

Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly  

Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,  

Beyond which it has no will to rise.

It must

Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may

Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman  

Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.

—Wallace Stevens
Of Modern Poetry
(begs to be spoken

.