Poetry in Motion
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Le Monocle de Mon Oncle (an excerpt)
Wallace Stevens
Le Monocle de Mon Oncle (an excerpt)
This luscious and impeccable fruit of life
Falls, it appears, of its own weight to earth.
When you were Eve, its acrid juice was sweet,
Untasted, in its heavenly, orchard air.
An apple serves as well as any skull
To be the book in which to read a round,
And is as excellent, in that it is composed
Of what, like skulls, comes rotting back to ground.
But it excels in this, that as the fruit
Of love, it is a book too mad to read
Before one merely reads to pass the time.
From "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle," section IV, by Wallace Stevens.
From The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens. Reprinted with the permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
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