One must have a mind of winter […]

The Snow Man, Harmonium

*
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, Harmonium

*
The moon is the mother of pathos and pity.

When, at the wearier end of November,
Her old light moves along the branches,
Feebly, slowly, depending upon them; […]

Lunar Paraphrase, Harmonium

*
The Founder of the State. Whoever founded
A state that was free, in the dead of winter, from mice?

Dance of the Macabre Mice, Ideas of Order

*
We hardened ourselves to live by bluest reason
In a world of wind and frost, […]

Meditation Celestial & Terrestrial, Ideas of Order

*
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-mâché…
The sun was coming from 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.

Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself, The Rock

*

For more about Wallace Stevens:

The Academy of American Poets
http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?45442B7C000C07070C

Hartford Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens
http://www.wesleyan.edu/wstevens/stevens.html

Website of Alan Filreis, Kelly Professor of English, U. Penn.
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Stevens/home.html

The Wallace Stevens Journal
http://www.wallacestevens.com/index.html