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"Angel Surrounded by Paysans"
© Wallace Stevens
[Image: "Man in Doorway" © 2006 Victor Friedman, www.victorfriedman.com used by permission]
One of the countrymen:
There is
a welcome at the door to which no one comes?
 The angel:
I am the angel of reality
Seen for a moment standing in the door.
I have neither ashen wing nor wear of ore
And live without a tepid aureole,
Or stars that follow me, not to attend,
But, of my being and its knowing, part.
I am one of you and being one of you
Is being and knowing what I am and know.
Yet I am the necessary angel of earth,
Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,
Cleared of its set and stubborn, man-locked set
And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone
Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings
Like water words awash; like meanings said
By repetitions of half meanings. I am not
Myself; only half of a figure of a sort,
A figure half seen, or seen for a moment; a man
Of the mind, an apparition apparelled in
Apparels of such lightest look that a turn
Of my shoulder, and quickly, too quickly I am gone.
Wallace Stevens (1879 - 1955) was a major American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, and spent most of his adult life working for an insurance company in Connecticut. Stevens is a rare example of a poet whose main output came at a fairly advanced age. His first major publication (four poems from a sequence entitled "Phases" in the November 1914 edition of Poetry Magazine)[9] was written at the age of thirty-five, although as an undergraduate at Harvard Stevens had written poetry and exchanged sonnets with George Santayana, with whom he was close through much of his life. Many of his canonical works were written well after he turned fifty. According to the literary critic Harold Bloom, no Western writer since Sophocles has had such a late flowering of artistic genius.
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