“The Plain Sense of Things” also takes place in Elizabeth Park. It is late autumn, the leaves have fallen, and the park looks bare. The greenhouse is exposed in all its dilapidation. The water lilies on the pond are now just “waste.” It seems to Stevens that this is how the world would look if one had no imagination. He wonders if the depression he feels, looking at this barren scene, means that his own imagination has failed. But no. He realizes that “the absence of the imagination had / Itself to be imagined.” His perception of this scene, his feelings about it, and his description of it in this poem are themselves imaginative acts. Our imaginations are always at work.
The Plain Sense of Things
by Wallace Stevens
After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.
It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.
The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.
Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence
Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.
Glossary
savoir: French for knowledge
“The Plain Sense of Things” from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF WALLACE STEVENS by Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.