Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself

At the earliest ending of winter,

In March, a scrawny cry from outside

Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,

A bird's cry, at daylight or before,

In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,

No longer a battered panache above the snow...

It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism

Of sleep's faded papier-mache...

The sun was coming from the outside.

That scrawny cry—It was

A chorister whose c preceded the choir.

It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,

Still far away. It was like

A new knowledge of reality.

-Wallace Stevens