Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

It must be abstract.
It must change.
It must give pleasure.

This is the theme.
The voice will develop like a dream,
True to the first mind,
Equipped for the primal floods, Borne of nature, it shall burgeon
From the substance, substantial,
And create a sense of otherness
In the realms where light refines,
In that above.

The heavens plainly described
And imperfectly delineated,
As if spoken of a flower’s front edge. Beauty introduces change, modulates and swings,
With the active form of the light—or.
Or, and many between such returns.

The senseless quest to merge transpire,
Infinite initials—breezes painted by flow,
Creating a toolbar of rhymes, The summer sky with its clouds, and its brighter shades,
They cannot leave, they will stay
In the heart of fact and blossom,
Both made rich and generous like the oak,
As in the delight that childish larks
Sung throughout strange certainties.

• Wallace Stevens