This is part of the last stanza and the end
of a poem by Wallace Stevens called Esthetique du Mal,
The Aesthetic of Evil.
The greatest poverty is not to live in a physical world,
to feel that one's desire is too difficult to tell from despair.
Perhaps after death the non-physical people
in paradise, itself non-physical,
may by chance observe the green corn gleaming
and experience the minor of what we feel.
The adventure in humanity has not
conceived of a race completely physical in a physical world.
The green corn gleams, and the metaphysicals
lie sprawling in majors of the August
heat, the rotund emotions, paradise unknown.
This is the thesis scrivened in delight,
the reverberating sound, the right corral.
One might have thought of sight, but who
could think of what it sees, for all the ill it sees?
Speech found the ear, for all the evil sound,
but the dark italics it could not propound.
And out of what one sees and hears
and out of what one feels, who could have thought
to make so many selves, so many sensuous worlds, as if the air,
the midday air, was swarming with the metaphysical changes
that occur merely in living as and where we live?
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.