The more things stay the same

It's the last day of April, so you get one more poem. Then I go into homework-hibernation until the semester ends.

I was walking back from class tonight and the moon was brilliant and almost full, and it was really windy. Everything was, you know, stirring. A lot of things have come at me lately from my past in one way or another (like the girl wearing the Kentucky shirt on the bus today), and to go along with a quote from Clare's Facebook profile, I've been trying to separate a sense of history from a sense of nostalgia. I've been thinking about the inverted and faux-deep sentence: the more things stay the same, the more they change. All this has something - though certainly not everything - to do with this poem. Wallace Stevens can be impenetrably abstract, in contrast to his detail-oriented day job (insurance executive). But I fell in love, hard, with this poem last fall. I hope you like it too.

Re-Statement of Romance by Wallace Stevens

The night knows nothing of the chants of night.
It is what it is as I am what I am:
And in perceiving this I best perceive myself

And you. Only we two may interchange
Each in the other what each has to give.
Only we two are one, not you and night,

Nor night and I, but you and I, alone,
So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,
So far beyond the casual solitudes,

That night is only the background of our selves,
Supremely true each to its separate self,
In the pale light that each upon the other throws.

from The Collected Poems by Wallace Stevens. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.