Hello and welcome back to the Daily Poem here in the Close Reeds Podcast Network.

I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by Wallace Stevens, an American poet, who I have read from once or twice here on the podcast.

He lived from 1879 to 1955.

He was a modernist poet.

He won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his collected poems in 1955.

Some of his more famous collections include the idea of order at Key West

and 13 ways of looking at a blackbird, as well as the disillusionment of 10 o'clock.

The poem that I'm going to read today is called Gallant Chateau.

And this is how it goes.

Is it bad to have come here and to have found the bed empty?

One might have found tragic hair, bitter eyes, hands hostile, and cold.

There might have been a light on a book,

lighting a pitiless verse or two. There might have been the immense solitude of the wind upon the curtains. Pitiless verse? A few words tuned and tuned and tuned and tuned. It is good. The bed is empty. The curtains are

stiff and prim and still. So this is a poem made up of six two-line stanzas. And one of the reasons that Wallace Stegner is so

worth reading among many is that he is so in control of the rhythms and the patterns. And he is

a poet who uses two-line stanzas really, really precisely.

He's got several poems, which I believe are all six stanza, two-line poems.

So 12 lines divided into two-line stanzas or into six couplets.

And Wallace Stegner is a quite, he's an ambitious poet.

You know, he like William Carlos Williams and T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and many other people who are considered modernists, he was playing with forms,

and he was experimenting with them, and he was layering image upon image, and sometimes it felt

...