Two Selections from Wallace Stevens

The Woman In Sunshine

It is only that this warmth and movement are like
The warmth and movement of a woman.

It is not that there is any image in the air
Nor the beginning nor end of a form:

It is empty.  But a woman in threadless gold
Burns us with brushings of her dress

And a dissociated abundance of being,
More definite for what she is---

Because she is disembodied,
Bearing the odors of the summer fields,

Confessing the taciturn and yet indifferent,
Invisibly clear, the only love.

--- from The Auroras of Autumn (1950)

excerpt:  final section (XV) of Esthetique du Mal

The greatest poverty is not to live
In a physical world, to feel that one's desire
Is too difficult to tell from despair.  Perhaps,
After death, the non-physical people, in paradise,
Itself non-physical, may, by chance, observe
The green corn gleaming and experience
The minor of what we feel.  The adventurer
In humanity has not conceived of a race
Completely physical in a physical world.
The green corn gleams and the metaphysicals
Lie sprawling in majors of the August heat,
The rotund emotions, paradise unknown. 
This is the thesis scrivened in delight,
The reverberating psalm, the right chorale.

One might have thought of sight, but who could think
Of what it sees, for all the ill it sees?
Speech found the ear, for all the evil sound,
But the dark italics it could not propound.
And out of what one sees and hears and out
Of what one feels, who could have thought to make
So many selves, so many sensuous worlds,
As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming
With the metaphysical challenges that occur,
Merely in living as and where we live.

--- from Transport to Summer (1947)