The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm in  General   

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

By Wallace Stevens

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Other poems by Wallace Stevens:

• A High-Toned Old Christian Woman
• A Postcard From The Volcano
• A Rabbit As King Of The Ghosts
• Anecdote Of The Jar
• Bantams In Pine-Woods
• Continual Conversation With A Silent Man
• Domination Of Black
• Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour
• Gray Room
• Looking Across The Fields And Watching The Birds F
• Metaphors Of A Magnifico
• Nomad Exquisite
• Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself
• Of Modern Poetry
• Peter Quince At The Clavier
• Poem Written At Morning
• Six Significant Landscapes
• Sunday Morning
• Tattoo
• The Emperor Of Ice-Cream
• The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm
• The Idea Of Order At Key West
• The Planet On The Table
• The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain
• The River Of Rivers In Connecticut
• The Sense Of The Sleight-Of-Hand Man
• The Snow Man
• The Well Dressed Man With A Beard
• Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird
• To The One Of Fictive Music
• Valley Candle