The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night was like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
— Wallace Stevens
For a long time, I wanted nothing more than to live in the world described in this poem. After a while, you realize that it isn't possible, or even desirable, but you still cherish the moments when total quiet descends. The way the opening line is broken into pieces later in the poem reminds me of a moment in the first movement of Brahms's Fourth Symphony — when the first theme comes back in the recapitulation, the second half of the phrase materializing out of nowhere after a mysterious interruption.
