Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow...
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache...
The sun was coming from the outside.
That scrawny cry--It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow...
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache...
The sun was coming from the outside.
That scrawny cry--It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
Wallace Stevens
This poem gives me fits. I like it, and yet I don't quite know why. It sits with me after I read it. I've done some looking at an allusion in the poem - do you see it? Probably not. It is an allusion to the philosopher Kant and his theory of noumenon or "the thing-in-itself". Look it up - try to reason through some of his theory, whew.
At it's most basic level, noumenon, or thing-in-itself, is a world unknowable by humans because it is a world that exists not in sensory reality but independent of the senses. An unknowable we assume to know because we shape meaning by our senses.
Using this primitive definition, and all that you understand if you take to reading some of Kant, speak to the poem's elusive, unknowable but perceivable, message.
