On the Manner of Addressing Clouds

"On the Manner of Addressing Clouds" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923). It was first published in 1921 according to Librivox^[1] and is therefore in the public domain.[1]

On the Manner of Addressing Clouds  Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns,  Meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous,  Eliciting the still sustaining pomps  Of speech which are like music so profound  They seem an exaltation without sound.  Funest philosophers and ponderers,  Their evocations are the speech of clouds.  So speech of your processionals returns  In the casual evocations of your tread  Across the stale, mysterious seasons. These  Are the music of meet resignation; these  The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you  To magnify, if in that drifting waste  You are to be accompanied by more  Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.

One reading is that the poem expresses Stevens's distrust of the reason of doleful philosophers^[2] and "gloomy grammarians", which creates a layer of obfuscation or "clouds" that occludes the illumination of imagination, "the sun and moon". The clouds may be those of Aristophanes' play, The Clouds, which ridiculed Socrates and the intellectual fashions of the time. The speech of clouds would contrast with "the simplest of speech" that would be enough for those who know "the ultimate plato", as Stevens writes in Homunculus et la Belle Étoile. The poem is consistent with what Stevens called his "pagan" skepticism about religion in Sunday Morning (poem), and his distrust of rationalist philosophy ("rationalists, wearing square hats").

Notes

1. ^ Poetry, October 1921
2. ^ The 1913 Webster defines "funest" as "lamentable, doleful" and refers to Coleridge: "Funest and direful deaths."