Night Louis Stevens

Stevens’s poem is so fulfilling because it enacts the texture and feeling of the experience of reading late into the night. It is not a report but a dramatic realization in the form of a meditative lyric, a poem that moves on the wings of eight stately two-line stanzas. At one moment, for example, the words seem to come to the fictive reader unmediated by the printed letters on the page, by the actual physical object of the book itself (“the words were spoken as if there was no book”), and he merges with his chosen text (“the reader became the book”). At another moment, however, he feels himself distanced and hovering over the very same book (“the reader leaned above the page”). Reading is re-created here as a physical activity as well as a …show more content…
The poem establishes a correspondence between the inner realm of the house and the outer one of the cosmos. It’s as if the quietness of the dwelling rhymes with the calmness of the universe on a summer night. The proposition is twofold: the house was quiet and the world was calm. Daily life, the daylight world itself, is suppressed. The poem takes place at night in order to establish a scene of autonomous solitude. No one else seems to be stirring nearby. The world sleeps, and the reader is alone with his book. So, too, this must be a summer night because summer is the season of plenitude and fulfillment. The reader in Stevens’s poem is a poetic quester, a pilgrim in search of a vivid transparence. He wants to transform himself into “the scholar to whom his book is true.” That desire in turn leads to an even greater one, since this scholar wants to be the one “to whom / The summer night is like a perfection of thought.” He seeks an utter realization of mind and, indeed, the phrase “a perfection of thought” puts one in the range, in the unlimited mental space—the cosmos—of the