Of Mere Being
The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze distance.
A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.
You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.
The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.
~Wallace Stevens, 1954~
of mere being 
74 comments
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June 3, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Dave Crocco
The key is the seventh and eighth lines. When you have transcended the world you understand, in a way that was not previously possible, that nothing in the world “makes us happy or unhappy”; there is no “it” from which we derive happiness or its opposite. Happiness wells up from within.
His greatest poem.
June 13, 2012 at 11:05 am
menumuse
Things in the world certainly make us happy or unhappy, but it is their being that does so, not their meaning, not their reason. fire-fangled feathers (Steven’s language, his song) make us happy, not their meaning, their being. As Picasso said around the same time: do we ask the bird to interpret his song for us? Why the artist? The point is most pointedly not transcendence. “Let be be finale of seem”
October 3, 2012 at 3:25 pm
Joseph Dennis
Agreed. “Fire fangled feathers” alone is a poem.
January 22, 2013 at 11:50 am
Tom Martin
I agree – his greatest poem. I used in one of my philosophy classes to illustrate the “self” in Sartre’s Existentialism. The students were surprisingly attentive as I used initially obscure imagery to explain another.obscure concept. It was my favorite lecture.
I should note that the last word in the third line should read “decor”, not “distance.”
May 5, 2013 at 5:14 am
Bruce
Shining a light annihilates God.
July 1, 2013 at 1:36 pm
Nate Roark
Agreed.
June 3, 2009 at 3:12 pm
Dan
Thank you, Dave. A beautiful explanation. Best to you.
June 21, 2009 at 7:38 pm
Oscar
According to the comments of the editor (Holly Stevens) in the Stevens’ anthology, “The Palm at the End of the Mind,” the word “distance” in line 3 was a mistake in an earlier published version, and the word should be “decor.”
It’s possible that this is not universally accepted.
February 1, 2010 at 3:25 pm
Jim Taylor
I concur with Oscar’s last comment. Holly Stevens changed that word after her father’s death. I’m sure there is a building mountain of apocrypha that surrounds this little difference. But, as for me the Holly Steven’s version is disappointing.
It’s also difficult to say which poem is the poet’s greatest, but suffice it to say, this one lingers for a lifetime…
February 12, 2010 at 8:01 pm
Kay Stuntz
Great discussion, but if I had been Stevens’ daughter I would have said, “Dad, don’t you mean, like, “distance” or something? It is at the end of the mind after all.”
I think this poem has one of the all time best last lines.
March 9, 2014 at 8:11 am
gpayerle
Holly Stevens is not universally accepted!
March 12, 2014 at 10:17 pm
Michael Wilson-South
Well, there is certainly a world of difference between the vision implied by “the bronze décor” and “the bronze distance.” In my reading of Stevens, the use of the word “bronze” is very much associated with the fixtures of the imagined world, and not the imagination itself. The poem at the end of the mind rises in the bronze décor, in the manner of the phoenix rising from the ashes. If he had said “the bronze decorations” there would be no discussion. What could be the meaning of “the bronze distance?”
September 17, 2014 at 11:54 am
Leslie Anneliese (@LeslieAnneliese)
Michael Wilson-Smith, I am so appreciative of your insightful comment. I agree with décor being more descriptive and also more poetic. It is as if the use of “distance” attempts to define something that is poetic, making someone more comfortable. Not really the point of poetry.
June 21, 2009 at 8:20 pm
Dan
Oscar
Yes, I know the revised version and do not want to seem disrespectful to the poet. Yet I grew up with the “distance” version and have a fondness for it. When I decided to use the poem as an inspiration for this blog, I intentionally chose the mistaken version.
June 22, 2009 at 8:45 pm
Oscar
I understand. The first version I read used decor. If later I had found out that “distance” was correct I might well have reacted similarly.
One thinks of Auden, who deliberately changed his poems. I prefer his original elegy for Yeats, but then the original version was the one that I read first. Would I feel differently if that were reversed? I do not know.
June 22, 2009 at 9:07 pm
DKO
Ah yes, thank you for that, Oscar. Poems become part of us and, treasured memories, our intimacy with them determines a preference…
January 26, 2017 at 3:10 pm
Lee Johnson
“…on the edge of space” comports with “bronze distance,” if one assumes “bronze” refers to a setting sun or some such light that would, in turn, comport with the bird’s “fire-fangled feathers.” In other words, “decor” seems out of place in this poem. I go the distance with “distance.”
March 6, 2017 at 5:57 am
Stephen J Mach
Decor cheapens the image. Distance is the poetic choice.
September 18, 2009 at 6:37 am
josephine
i love this poem it is the best one of his that i read so far
October 24, 2009 at 1:23 pm
c holland
i love stevens but i would never try to reduce his poems to an “explanation.” i think he wrote to go beyond explanation and reason, to penetrate the wall that language throws up between us and reality. there’s that “old sailor, drunk and asleep in his boots, [who] dreams of tiger in red weather.” you yield to him, you don’t reduce him to meaning.
October 28, 2009 at 11:15 am
Harry B. Williams
Poets, by the nature of the work, seem to demand an intellectual explanation of the meaning of what they write. However, Stevens seems more like the Zen poet who points at the moon to “explain” the moon.
When the tiger devours us, no intellectual explanation will be adequate.
Stevens points with words that talk about what Yeats called “the thing that was before the world was made.”
February 8, 2010 at 6:09 pm
Holly Lev
I like this poem, and it means alot.
February 8, 2010 at 10:21 pm
Simply Poet
truly a classic !!
do check out
http://www.simplypoet.com
And our classic section for more awesome verses
February 18, 2010 at 7:29 pm
maxomus61
The final line has always reminded me of Hopkins’ “as kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame . . .” The elegance of a bird’s feathers is explained in alchemy, the divine energy that “dangles down”. A flicker of movement is exalted through the experience of seeing.
September 25, 2010 at 5:31 am
Valuing Your Unique Life Path | Unfolding Leadership
[…] challenging in our lives and our work? We have to remember how to come down to the ground of being, of mere being, in order to keep going. We have to remember that this is exactly what is meant by leadership, this […]
December 10, 2010 at 6:16 am
Of Mere Being | Gwydion Suilebhan
[…] Read the full poem […]
February 1, 2011 at 1:45 pm
clefstick
John Gray (e.g. “Straw Dogs”) refers passionately to this poem. He is writing about a way of negotiating a stance toward death that does not propose or presuppose an Hereafter.
February 3, 2011 at 8:40 am
Harry B. Williams
Hereafter, whereafter, what u after?
The priest who claimed Stevens had a deathbed conversion ot Catholicism needed to be asked the question “what u after?”
June 12, 2011 at 2:27 am
Wilhelmina
Harry please e-mail me. Need to discuss something with you. Kind regards. Wilhelmina.
June 9, 2011 at 4:48 am
Wilhelmina
Harry B. Williams please contact me I want to discuss something with you.
June 22, 2014 at 11:11 am
harrybonewilliams
Whatsup?
June 16, 2011 at 5:28 am
Maria Lamburn
This fantastic poem inspired the composition Murmur – title track of debut cd Murmur by Madalena (Bable Label BDV2027) On the album the cor anglais plays the melody (originally set to this poem by Maria Lamburn, 1979), and an additional narrative (also by ML) in the middle section manifests a vision of transient earthliness, offsetting the invisible presence of Stevens’ other-worldliness.
August 12, 2011 at 12:24 pm
Bob Moore
I’m not sure why, but this poem reminds me of his poem “Poems of Our Climate”. I imagine that the palm at the end of the mind, is a hand attempting to grasp (to know) what a bird experiences as a living creature, but the bird could be any living creature (with humans as an exception). A bird as an example seems to be in tune with its surroundings, and appears (to us anyway) to celebrate it daily with song as a ritual. There is a distance between this experience and our own experience (represented by the mind). I think this is why Stevens places the palm at the end of the mind, to represent that distance. I realize as was mentioned earier that the word “distance” is a revision from an earlier poem. I still like it. I agree with Dave C. that the key to the poem is lines 7 and 8. It, the bird (or its song) is not the reason that makes us happy or unhappy. What makes us happy or unhappy is our inability to celebrate the day each day as a bird does. The honus is on us to change (if we could) but referencing Steven’s “Poems of Our Climate”, ‘the imperfect is our paradise’. We can’t seem to sense what a bird senses everyday, and it is noone’s fault but our own. I also agree with Dave C. about the greatness of the poem. A wonderful comment on the human condition.
October 19, 2011 at 10:55 am
Epicharis
What if the poem is a recognition of the presence of another, or the ‘other’, without preconception?
October 19, 2011 at 6:17 pm
Clefstick
Epicharis, maybe if the the other is the reader or the listener to the poem sharing only that art as a known means to become a confidant.
October 20, 2011 at 3:37 am
harrybonewilliams
Almost all of Stevens’ poems (and particularly this one) are Jedi mind tricks.
October 24, 2011 at 1:54 pm
will
Wallace was sublime…try reading the work backwards…second lines to third and vice a versa…it’s epic
January 3, 2012 at 4:56 pm
Ken
To those comments and commentators above on lines 7 and 8:
I enjoyed your thoughts! I have evolved toward a somewhat different reading of those lines, one that changes the interpretation of the entire poem:
“You know then that it is not The Reason
That makes us happy or unhappy….”
The poem is no longer about “it” or the bird’s state of being. We hear and see “it’s” aesthetic, but the poem has us abandon thought or reasoning to get there. It’s not about the unknown state inside a fantasy bird. It’s a thinking person’s experience of true beauty that, then, is mere being.
February 5, 2012 at 5:41 pm
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[…] Places” by Robert Frost; “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” and “Of Mere Being” by Wallace Stevens; “Filling Station” by Elizabeth Bishop; and “A Journal […]
May 23, 2012 at 4:51 am
The Wall | Abstract art in the era of global conceptualism
[…] derives from the poem by Wallace Stevens quoted a couple of posts back. As it happens, it was his last poem, written on his death bed. The “foreign song,” “without human meaning, without […]
May 31, 2012 at 8:09 am
Bill Greene
” It is not the reason…”
I always thought he meant “the reason,” as in our reasoning, our ability to reason. That our happiness or unhappiness comes from a place beyond reason.
July 31, 2012 at 9:36 pm
Reflections on “Rivering,” a collection of poems by Dean Kostos « bronzebygold
[…] Cure for the Liver” we hear the persona reclaiming the image of Stevens’ gilt bird from “Of Mere Being”—that grand inscrutable image that terrified us all—and transforming it into a baby pigeon that […]
February 12, 2013 at 4:22 pm
In the brave decor … or distance? | roundhousepoetrycircle
[…] conclude the February 28 discussion with Stevens’ last (and some consider his greatest) poem, “Of Mere Being.” If Wallace Stevens is a philosopher, this brilliant poem makes him very much a […]
October 24, 2013 at 12:02 pm
Prof Boguslawski
A FEW LINES IN THE STYLE OF WALLACE STEVENS TO SHOW WHAT HE IS ALWAS SAYING:
Let the sublime harmonies
of these verses
hint at the Chaos
underlying the world
and beyond that,,,chaos
October 25, 2013 at 1:59 am
PROF Hormensis Boguslawski
I wish to correct a small but vital error in my previous comment. The last word should be ’emptiness’ not a repeat of ‘chaos’ Sorry about a ‘senior’moment!
January 30, 2014 at 3:56 am
Cindy at enclos*ure
There’s a mistake in the poem on this page. “distance.” should be “decor,”. “In the bronze decor,”. . .
February 9, 2014 at 12:48 pm
Brian J. Buchanan
“Decor” is what Wallace Stevens originally wrote and it was for a good reason. In Greek mythology, bronze characterized the abodes of the gods. Therefore “decor” is right and “distance” makes no sense.
September 17, 2014 at 11:58 am
Leslie Anneliese (@LeslieAnneliese)
Thank you for elucidating the Greek mythology. Helpful for me.
March 16, 2014 at 3:02 am
PROF Hormensis Boguslawski
Fom Hormesis Boguslawski [again]
One more correction to my original message on 24th October: my first name should be as above. It means a little bit of poison coul do you good. It is a pharmaceutical term. Not everyone knows this!
March 23, 2014 at 12:07 am
Michael Wilson-South
PROF, so happy to have that bit. But was just reading Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird, and wondering how verse seven relates to On Mere Being:
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
Any thoughts?
July 6, 2014 at 8:29 pm
PROF Hormensis Boguslawski
I am emerging from a state of bereavement and am now able to attend to things,
The relation between this verse and ‘Of Mere Being’ indicates that direct experience is always more compelling than our conjectures.
July 7, 2014 at 5:43 pm
Michael Wilson-South
My condolences for your loss, sir, and thank you for your reply. I wonder if you have read this poem by Peter Everwine, which also juxtaposes the blackbird and other, more brilliant birds:
LEARNING TO SPEAK
As a child running loose,
I said it this way: Bird.
Bird, a startled sound at field’s edge.
The sound my mouth makes, pushing away the cold.
So, at the end of this quiet afternoon,
wanting to write the love poems I’ve never written,
I turn from the shadow in the cottonwood
and say blackbird, as if to you.
There is the blackbird. Black bird, until its darkness
is the darkness of a woman’s hair falling
across my upturned face.
And I go on speaking into the night.
The oriole, the flicker,
the gold finch. . . .
Hope you are well.
July 8, 2014 at 4:55 am
PROF Hormensis Boguslawski
This poem chimes with me. Thankyou for sending it. And thanks for your condolences.
July 21, 2014 at 2:37 am
dino_saur
Any attempt to explain it is useless
August 17, 2014 at 10:50 pm
New England - The First Breeze of Summer - zippertravel
[…] becoming one of America’s greatest poets of the 20th century. I always have a copy of his Palm at the End of the Mind (selected poems and a play) close at hand so I can delve into The Emperor of Ice Cream or A […]
September 20, 2014 at 9:55 pm
Michael Wilson-South
Thank you, Leslie. More than that, “decor” implies an almost intentional ambiance, and one which one might be almost unaware of, as in a background of mind. “Distance” has a completely different implication. Taken as intended, the “palm” which rises in the “bronze decor” (why bronze?) is perhaps a reference to the final imagination which Stevens wishes to express…..
September 22, 2014 at 2:13 pm
Michael maddox
I saw this title in the Williamsport , Pa.,public library, In 1974. I use to ride my bike down to read it , and Basho’s travel books. It’s much easier to understand Wallace’s poetry if you think of the words leading to an epiphany and allowing yourself to suspend disbelief of simply allow the mind to jump into the void . No doubt he is describing, so eloquently, an intense revelation. The annihilation of space!
October 28, 2014 at 9:15 pm
tari saman
An interesting discussion is worth comment.I’m impressed, I must say. Really rarely do I encounter a blog that’s both educative and entertaining
November 1, 2014 at 7:28 pm
Michael Wilson-South
It is of supreme(sic) importance that this poem is the last penned by Stevens, his final comment, as it were, on a lifetime of contemplation and explication. I have a dear friend, an Asian philosopher, who finds some of Steven’s later poems as if proceeding from a zen mind. We share bottles of Argentinian Malbec and discuss these matters at length.
November 1, 2014 at 8:27 pm
gpayerle
Brilliant, sir. Your friend and you are lucky in each other.
March 3, 2015 at 9:09 am
Charles G. Conway
Palm is mind; bird is imagination,beautiful in itself but unfathomable as to nature and origin. Beyond discursive reasoning stands this image and beyond it an abyss of the “celstial possible”. I still breahe but my wondrous imagination flags and will soon expire. But having been with it “together is enough”.
April 16, 2015 at 2:42 am
Paul Katz
With this poem the poet bid the world adieu.
April 22, 2016 at 8:20 am
vescomfabrics.fr
The Poem by Wallace Stevens | of mere being. I am actually grateful to the holder of this web site who has shared this wonderful post at at this time.
April 22, 2016 at 8:24 am
DKO
Thank you, vescomfabrics.fr.
June 28, 2016 at 8:18 am
Arthur Riverez
We know that Stevens was familiar with modern painters, and for the purposes of the poem “Of Mere Being”– Matisse. (Sunday Morning Service, sets a Matisse-like scene). Matisse’s last works i believe were paintings done in Nice, where one of the major motifs of the work was palm trees. Not only do they appear in the paintings, but vertical and horizontal lines, which imitate palm leaves themselves are everywhere. Here is a late work by Stevens, with the luminous image of the palm at the end of the mind.Elaine Scarry covers this topic perfectly in her small invaluable book On Beauty. From what Matisse and his painting indicate he had a palm at the end of his mind as well.
November 17, 2016 at 7:40 pm
Jayboy
I think it’s bronze “decor”.
November 18, 2016 at 7:38 am
Michael Wilson-South
It must be “decor”. We are at the end of the mind, beyond thought. In a certain place, with a bronze decor, in which a palm arises. It is as if it were a final place, with a final appraisal of knowledge of being. If the word were “distance”, there would be implied a further, more distant place, with therefore no “finality of seem”.
January 26, 2017 at 4:46 pm
Michael Wilson-South
The “bronze decor” is the context in which the poem itself occurs. If we accept that palm trees in Steven’s poems represent, generally speaking, poetic vision, or poems themselves, then what does it mean to say “THE palm, at the END of the MIND, RISES in the bronze_________? We know that the word “bronze” describes the reflective and cold artifacts of mind, so what might it mean to say, that a poem that “rises”, that is, a poem that is NOT constructed or conceived in the mind, but which merely IS, should arise whole in, what, “the bronze distance’? No, it is the mind itself, beyond its last thought, which IS “the bronze decor,” from which barren landscape arises THE supreme vision, an imagination “beyond human meaning” which can never be understood, but which merely is.
January 26, 2017 at 5:00 pm
Lee Johnson
Bronze goes with the gold of the bird’s feathers. Both are distanced.
January 26, 2017 at 5:19 pm
Michael Wilson-South
If, as you say, the palm “rises in the distance”, how far in the distance exactly? How does the narrator discern the golden bird, or notice the faint breeze moving the branches? No, the palm is here and now, in the bronze decor.
January 26, 2017 at 5:15 pm
Michael Wilson-South
The gold, “fire-fangled feathers” are immediate, radiant, not “distanced” nor a part of the decor.
January 27, 2017 at 6:04 am
Lee Johnson
The delightful dissonance between “decor” and “distance” may have been somewhat resolved in the latest scholarly editions. I am still entranced by the immediacy of the gold feathers and the bronze distance, a meditative technique of “distancing” that paradoxically calls attention to the origination of things “beyond the last thought” and “on the edge of space” in the meditating sensibility itself. Those who prefer “decor” may be placing more emphasis on the imagination meditating; “distance” may be more intriguing in conjunction with “the thing itself.” Mere or elemental being encompasses both. Which word prevails is nevertheless significant, and I think Michael W-S’s defense of “decor” is as close to “authoritative” as we may expect this side of the grave!
March 6, 2017 at 3:56 pm
Michael Wilson-South
Décor v. Distance
What after all could be the meaning of “the bronze décor”? Well, from my reading of Stevens’ work, it is the artifacts of the imagined world; dead ideas, old poems, abandoned theatres, failed philosophies, all that which no longer suffices to contain and explain mankind to himself. In this context, then, “the palm at the end of the mind, beyond the last thought” is the final imagination, arising like the Phoenix from within the detritus of the past. What is new, and revelatory in this final vision, is the bird, “golden”, and “fire-fangled” unlike the dull bronze of the décor, singing a meaningless and incomprehensible song. There is no point or need for “distance”. The poem is immediate, containing the complete statement and message of the poem: “It is not the reason that makes us happy or unhappy; the bird sings, its’ feathers shine” The true beauty of the world exists beyond our mind, beyond the constructs of our imagination.
March 12, 2017 at 5:19 am
Jeanne Ruppert
An excellent discussion. Thank you.