"On the Manner of Addressing Clouds" 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 according to Librivox and is therefore in the public domain.http://librivox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4077

On the Manner of Addressing Clouds  Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns,  Meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous,  Eliciting the still sustaining pomps  Of speech which are like music so profound  They seem an exaltation without sound.  Funest philosophers and ponderers,  Their evocations are the speech of clouds.  So speech of your processionals returns  In the casual evocations of your tread  Across the stale, mysterious seasons. These  Are the music of meet resignation; these  The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you  To magnify, if in that drifting waste  You are to be accompanied by more  Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.

One reading is that the poem expresses Stevens's distrust of the reason of doleful philosophers and "gloomy grammarians", which creates a layer of obfuscation or "clouds" that occludes the illumination of imagination, "the sun and moon". The clouds may be those of Aristophanes' play, The Clouds

The Clouds

The Clouds is a comedy written by the celebrated playwright Aristophanes lampooning intellectual fashions in classical Athens. It was originally produced at the City Dionysia in 423 BC and it was not well received, coming last of the three plays competing at the festival that year. It was revised...

, which ridiculed Socrates

Socrates

Socrates was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known chiefly through the accounts of later classical writers, especially the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon, and the plays of his contemporary ...

 and the intellectual fashions of the time. The speech of clouds would contrast with "the simplest of speech" that would be enough for those who know "the ultimate plato", as Stevens writes in Homunculus et la Belle Étoile

Homunculus et la Belle Etoile

Homunculus et la Belle Etoile is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1919.The poem pursues a contrast between poeticimagination and philosophical reasoning, the latter understood as...

. The poem is consistent with what Stevens called his "pagan" skepticism about religion in Sunday Morning (poem)

Sunday Morning (poem)

"Sunday Morning" is a poem from Wallace Stevens' first book of poetry, Harmonium. Published in part in the November 1915 issue of Poetry, then in full in 1923 in Harmonium, it is now in the public domain....

, and his distrust of rationalist philosophy ("rationalists, wearing square hats"

Six Significant Landscapes

Stevens"Six Significant Landscapes" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1916, so it is in the public domain....

).