Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

"Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb" is a poem from Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar",...

's first book of poetry, Harmonium

Harmonium (poetry collection)

Harmonium is a book of poetry by U.S. poet Wallace Stevens. His first book, it was published in 1923 by Knopf in an edition of 1500 copies. He was in middle age at that time, forty-four years old. The collection comprises 85 poems, ranging in length from just a few lines to several hundred...

(1923). It was first published in 1921, so it is in the public domain.http://librivox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4077

Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb

What word have you, interpreters, of men

Who in the tomb of heaven walk by night,

The darkened ghosts of our old bloody comedy?

Do they believe they range the gusty cold,

With lanterns borne aloft to light the way,

Freemen of death, about and still about

To find whatever they seek? Or does

That burial, pillared up each day as porte

And spiritous passage into nothingness,

Foretell each night the one abysmal night

When the host shall no more wander, nor the light

Of the steadfast lanterns creep across the dark?

Make hue among the dark comedians,

Halloo them in the topmost distances

For answer from their icy Élysée.

This is a poem about the other side of death, optimistically halloo'ing the departed ("the darkened ghosts") for news that they are still "about and still about", pessimistically anticipating that the burials that occur each day are a portal into nothingness, "the one abysmal night". It may be compared with "The Worms at Heaven's Gate

The Worms at Heaven's Gate

The Worms at Heaven's Gate is a poem from Wallace Stevens' first book of poetry, Harmonium . It was first published in 1916 and is therefore in the public domain....

", which presents death more naturalistically.

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