Welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by Wallace Stevens, an American poet who was born in Reading, Pennsylvania,

educated at Harvard, and then spent most of his life working for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut.

He lived from 1879 to 1955, and in

1955 won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his collected poems. And the poem that I'm going to

read today is called Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramore. I will read it first and then offer

a few comments, as usual.

Light the first light of evening, as in a room in which we rest, and for small reason, think the world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.

It is in that thought that we collect ourselves, of all the indifferences into one thing.

Within a single thing, a single shawl wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,

a light of power, the miraculous influence. Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.

We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole, a knowledge,

that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary in the mind,

we say God and the imagination are one.

How high that highest candle lights in the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind, we make a dwelling in the evening air,

in which being there together is enough.

I wanted to read this poem today, first because it's beautiful, second because it's a fun one

to read aloud for me, three, because Wallace Stevens is a genius beautiful. Second, because it's a fun one to read aloud for me. Three, because

Wallace Stevens is a genius. And four, because in his book, Why Poetry, Matthew Zeprooter, who I've

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