Wallace Stevens - Of Modern Poetry lyrics

The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice it has not always had
To find: the scene was set it repeated what
Was in the script
Then the theatre was changed
To something else its past was a souvenir
It has to be living
To learn the speech of the place
It has to face the men of
The time and to meet
The women of the time it
Has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice it has
To construct a new stage it has
To be on that stage
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat
Exactly, that which it wants to hear
At the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens
Not to the play, but to it'self, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one the actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
An instrument
Twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses
Wholly containing the mind, below which
It cannot descend
Beyond which it has no will to rise it must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing the poem of the act of the mind