Autumn+Refrain


 * AUTUMN REFRAIN**

The skreak and skritter of evening gone And grackles gone and sorrows of the sun, The sorrows of sun, too, gone. . . the moon and moon, The yellow moon of words about the nightingale In measureless measures, not a bird for me But the name of a bird and the name of a nameless air I have never--shall never hear. And yet beneath

The stillness of everything gone, and being still, Being and sitting still, something resides, Some skreaking and skrittering residuum, And grates these evasions of the nightingale Though I have never--shall never hear that bird. And the stillness is in the key, all of it is, The stillness is all in the key of that desolate sound.

--WALLACE STEVENS

Grackle - an American songbird that is a member of the blackbird family. Nightingale - a small European thrush noted for the rich melodious song of the male, heard especially at night in breeding season. Residuum - a substance or thing that remains or is left behind. Desolate - deserted of people, and in a state of bleak and dismal emptiness.

His best-known poems include "[|Anecdote of the Jar]", "[|Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock]", "[|The Emperor of Ice-Cream]", "[|The Idea of Order at Key West]", "[|Sunday Morning]", "[|The Snow Man]", and "[|Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird]", all of which appear in his //Collected Poems// for which he won the [|Pulitzer Prize for Poetry] in 1955.
 * Wallace Stevens** (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an [|American] [|Modernist] poet. He was born in [|Reading, Pennsylvania], educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in [|Connecticut].