This week another from Wallace Stevens (see also weeks 164 and 311), a poet that I continue to find myself drawn to yet frustrated by. Frustrated because I can never make my mind up as to whether his are free-floating works of the imagination, all right as far as they go but somewhat rootless and lacking in real substance, or whether they are in fact perfectly well rooted in reality, just not a reality which I as an English reader am culturally attuned to.
Clearly this poem is about what our posterity will and will not be able to make of our lives, about how much (or little) can be conveyed by our physical remains and by language. I do like a lot of the poem’s phrasing, but as usual for me with Stevens there are one or two stumbling blocks. I can live with ‘…the windy sky/Cries out a literate despair’, which has a fine ring to it even though I would be hard put to pin down its precise meaning. But what are ‘budded aureoles’ and how does one weave them? And I find the last line, ‘smeared with the gold of the opulent sun’, a bit strained and precious for my taste.
Still, I am aware that there are those for whom Wallace Stevens is by some margin the greatest American poet of the 20th century, so I remain hopeful of tuning my antenna better to his wavelength.
A Postcard from the Volcano
Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;
And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;
And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt
At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion-house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky
Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion’s look
And what we said of it became
A part of what it is … Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,
Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,
A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.
Wallace Stevens
David Sutton 
A fine poem, and perhaps a little clearer than many by Wallace Stevens. Or was it that your introduction clued me in a bit before I read it. Thank you.
Does one weave budded aureoles by making a daisy chain perhaps?
Thanks Mike. I never thought of a daisy chain, but I suspect that the poet had something less tangible in mind – that the phrase refers perhaps to that state of haloed innocence sometimes attributed to small children by those who have had little contact with small children!
aureole [noun] – “a radiant light around the head or body of a representation of a sacred personage”.
I’m tempted to read the poem as simply a poet (though he says “we”) talking to future generations (the “Children”). “… with our bones / We left much more, left what still is / The look of things, left what we felt / At what we saw”. The last two verses might be the children repeating lines from the poems – but they don’t really understand them.