Today I am reading Wallace Stevens’s “The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain.” I found it to be a quiet manifesto for those who build inner landscapes out of language. The mountain here isn’t geology; it’s a made place, assembled by breath, memory, and pages, a summit composed of choices—recomposed pines, shifted rocks, a picked way among clouds. The poem becomes equipment for living: a compass for “his own direction,” oxygen for the day, a precise rock for our inexact lives. Reading it, I feel how art can grant an outlook that is earned and inexplicable, a vantage where solitude clarifies, and home appears below like sea-light.
The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain
By Wallace Stevens
There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.
He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.
It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction,
How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,
For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:
The exact rock where his inexactnesses
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,
Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.
The poem that took the place of a mountain.
He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.
It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction,
How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,
For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:
The exact rock where his inexactnesses
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,
Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.
Singing oneness!
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