Wallace Stevens: The House was Quiet and the World Was Calm

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

The 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 most 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 evening, 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 he reader leaning late and reading there.

-- Wallace Stevens --



Another title for this poem could be "Meditations on Reading."  Or, perhaps that could be a subtitle for I really don't want to give up the title for it fits the poem so well, for when I am reading, the house is quiet, regardless of how noisy it may really be, and the world is calm, in spite of the daily headlines.  The title flows as do the words on the page.

This poem best describes the act of reading, as least as far as I am concerned.   The flowing into a union of the reader, the writer, the ideas/words, and the night convey what I experience when I look back at a time when I was absorbed in a book.  I am somewhere else and only partially me.   To say I am only reading words on a page is true, but only partially true.  It is not the whole truth.  Emily Dickinson said some thing very similar when she wrote, "There is no frigate like a book/To take us Lands away."

T'ao Ch'ien: a June poem

Reading the Book of Hills and Seas

In the month of June the grass grows high
And round my cottage thick-leaved branches sway.
There is not a bird but delights in the place where it rests;
And I too--love my thatched cottage.
I have done my ploughing;
I have sown my seed.
Again I have time to sit and read my books.
In the narrow lane there are no deep ruts;
Often my friends' carriages turn back.
In  high spirits I pour out my spring wine
And pluck the lettuce growing in my garden.
A gentle wind comes stealing up from the east
And a sweet wind bears it company.
My thoughts float idly over the story of the king of Chou,
My eyes wander over the pictures of Hills and Seas.
At a single glance I survey the whole Universe.
He will never be happy, whom such pleasures fail to please!


-- T'ao Ch'ien --
(Chinese, 365-427)
from Art and Nature: An Illustrated Anthology of Nature Poetry

 Common themes found among the hermit poets of China:  nature, gardening, reading, isolation--a mix of hard work with ploughing and setting seeds and the relaxation with a book or just seeing.  He has friends, but he doesn't encourage them and many find it to hard to visit him.  I suspect they choose their places with this in mind.

Perhaps there's a contrast here.to western hermits who went out into the desert and the Wilderness to focus their lives on God.  But, I don't remember reading about them with a garden for many depended upon the people nearby to feed them or perhaps animals inspired by God fed them.   The focus of the Eastern and Western hermits differed: one solely on the Deity and therefore not on this world and the Eastern hermit on day-to-day living, as well as reading and poetry and the created universe.

Serendipity: more autumn poetry from China

Listening to a Monk From Shu Playing the Lute
The monk from Shu with his green lute-case walked
Westward down Emei Shan, and at the sound
Of the first notes he strummed for me I heard
A thousand valleys' rustling pines resound.
My heart was cleansed, as if in flowing water.
In bells of frost I heard the resonance die.
Dusk came unnoticed over the emerald hills
And autumn clouds layered the darkening sky.

-- Li Po --
(701--762)
trans. by Vikram Seth



A lute seems the perfect instrument to capture the flavor of autumn. The only other instrument, I think, would be the flute--well--maybe a cello. That would make an interesting trio--a lute, a cello, and a flute. I wonder if there are any works composed for this trio.





from Autumn Thoughts

Leaves fall turning turning to the ground,
by the front eaves racing, following the wind;
murmuring voices seem to speak to me
as they whirl and toss in headlong flight.
An empty hall in the yellow dusk of evening:
I sit here silent, unspeaking.
The young boy comes in from outdoors,
trims the lamp, sets it before me,
asks me questions I do not answer,
brings me a supper I do not eat.
He goes and sits down by the west wall,
reading me poetry--three or four poems;
the poet is not a man of today--
already a thousand years divide us--
but something in his words strikes my heart,
fills it again with an acid grief.
I turn and call to the boy:
Put down the book and go to bed now--
a man has times when he must think,
and work to do that never ends.

-- Han Yu --
(768--824)
trans. by Burton Watson


One can't always live in the past; today is always interrupting, isn't it.





Both poems are taken from
World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our TimeKatherine Washburn and John S. Major, editors