“Divinity must live within herself:Passions of rain, or moods in the falling snow;Grievings in loneliness, or unsubduedElations when the forest blooms; gustyEmotions on wet roads on autumn nights;All pleasures and all pains, rememberingThe boughs of summer and the winter branch.These are the measures destined for her soul.”

“We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in cold.”

“One must have a mind of winter.”

“The House Was Quiet and the World Was CalmThe 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 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. And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world, In which there is no other meaning, itself Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself Is the reader leaning late and reading there.”

“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"IAmong twenty snowy mountains, The only moving thing Was the eye of the blackbird. III was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds. IIIThe blackbird whirled in the autumn winds. It was a small part of the pantomime. IVA man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one. VI do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after. VIIcicles filled the long window With barbaric glass. The shadow of the blackbird Crossed it, to and fro. The mood Traced in the shadow An indecipherable cause. VIIO thin men of Haddam, Why do you imagine golden birds? Do you not see how the blackbird Walks around the feet Of the women about you? VIIII know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know. IXWhen the blackbird flew out of sight, It marked the edge Of one of many circles. XAt the sight of blackbirds Flying in a green light, Even the bawds of euphony Would cry out sharply. XIHe rode over Connecticut In a glass coach. Once, a fear pierced him, In that he mistook The shadow of his equipage For blackbirds. XIIThe river is moving. The blackbird must be flying. XIIIIt was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs.”

“Two things of opposite natures seem to dependOn on another, as Logos dependsOn Eros, day on night, the imaginedOn the real. This is the origin of change.Winter and spring, cold copulars, embraceAnd forth the particulars of rapture come.Music falls on the silence like a senseA passion that we feel, not understand.Morning and afternoon are clasped togetherAnd North and South are an intrinsic coupleAnd sun and rain a plural, like two loversThat walk away together as one in the greenest body.”

“The Snow Man"One must have a mind of winterTo regard the frost and the boughsOf the pine-trees crusted with snow;And have been cold a long timeTo behold the junipers shagged with ice,The spruces rough in the distant glitterOf the January sun; and not to thinkOf any misery in the sound of the wind,In the sound of a few leaves,Which is the sound of the landFull of the same windThat is blowing in the same bare placeFor the listener, who listens in the snow,And, nothing himself, beholdsNothing that is not there and the nothing that is.Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. (Vintage; Reissue edition February 19, 1990)”