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Sunday, May 5, 2013

Poem-A-Day: The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage by Wallace Stevens

The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage

by Wallace Stevens

 

But not on a shell, she starts,
Archaic, for the sea.
But on the first-found weed
She scuds the glitters,
Noiselessly, like one more wave.

She too is discontent
And would have purple stuff upon her arms,
Tired of the salty harbors,
Eager for the brine and bellowing
Of the high interiors of the sea.

The wind speeds her on,
Blowing upon her hands
And watery back.
She touches the clouds, where she goes,
In the circle of her traverse of the sea.

Yet this is meagre play
In the scrurry and water-shine,
As her heels foam--
Not as when the goldener nude
Of a later day

Will go, like the centre of sea-green pomp,
In an intenser calm,
Scullion of fate,
Across the spick torrent, ceaselessly,
Upon her irretrievable way.

 

Today's poem is in the public domain.
Work by Stevens

Collected Poetry and Prose 

 

Poem-A-Day launched in 2006 and features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.

 

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May 5, 2013

Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania on October 2, 1879. He wrote poetry while also working as an insurance executive in Hartford, Connecticut. He died in 1955.

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