The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

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Wallace Stevens

 

The  house was quiet and the world was calm.

The reader became the book; and summer night

 

Was like the conscious being of the book.

The house was quiet and the world was calm.

 

The words were spoken as if there was no book,

Except that the reader leaned above the page,

 

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be

The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

 

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

The house was quiet because it had to be.

 

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:

The access of perfection to the page.

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