"The Trees Around Are For You, The Whole Of The Wideness Of Night Is For You"

Mary Coleridge's "In Dispraise of the Moon," which appeared in my previous post, describes the moon as follows:

She wakes her dim, uncoloured, voiceless hosts,
Ghost of the Sun, herself the sun of ghosts.

The second line put me in mind of one of my favorite poems by Wallace Stevens, a poem which, incidentally, is set in August ("the most peaceful month").  In it, Stevens takes a more charitable view of the moon and its ghosts.


       A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts

The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur --

There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
And August the most peaceful month.

To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
Without that monument of cat,
The cat forgotten in the moon;

And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;

Then there is nothing to think of.  It comes of itself;
And east rushes west and west rushes down,
No matter.  The grass is full

And full of yourself.  The trees around are for you,
The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A self that touches all edges,

You become a self that fills the four corners of night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you are humped high, humped up,

You are humped higher and higher, black as stone --
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.

Wallace Stevens, Parts of a World (1942).
I have previously ventured a guess as to what the poem may be "about" or what it "means."  On the one hand, it is perhaps Stevens's sublimest, most moving articulation of his belief that what makes us human is our imagination (living in -- and transforming -- a real world of moons and rabbits and cats).  On the other hand, it may simply be a tale about a rabbit that was digging up and eating the bulbs in Stevens's flower garden.  Either version is fine by me.


               Song

There are great things doing
In the world,
Little rabbit.
There is a damsel,
Sweeter than the sound of the willow,
Dearer than shallow water
Flowing over pebbles.
Of a Sunday,
She wears a long coat,
With twelve buttons on it.
Tell that to your mother.

Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose (The Library of America 1997).

For those interested in another view of rabbits, I recommend "The Rabbit's Advice" by Elizabeth Jennings, which I have posted previously.