These are the actual seemings that we see,
Hear, feel, and know. We feel and know them so.
If seeming is description without place,
The spirit’s universe, then a summer’s day,
Even the seeming of a summer’s day,
Is description without a place. It is a sense
To which we refer experience, a knowledge
Incognito, the column in the desert,
On which the dove alights. Description is
Composed of a sight indifferent to the eye.
The future is description without place,
The categorical predicate, the arc.
Description is revelation. It is not
The thing described, nor false facsimile.
It is an artificial thing that exists,
In its own seeming, plainly visible…
Thus the theory of description matters most.
It is the theory of the word for those
For whom the word is the making of the world,
The buzzing world and lisping firmament.
It is a world of words to the end of it,
In which nothing solid is its solid self.
It matters, because everything we say
Of the past is description without place, a cast
Of the imagination, made in sound;
And because what we say of the future must portend,
Be alive with its own seemings, seeming to be
Like rubies reddened by rubies reddening.
-Wallace Stevens, “Description Without Place”
