Wallace

"The Plain Sense of Things" is sufficiently unambiguous until the fourth stanza, where the crucial statement in the poem occurs: "Yet the absence of the imagination had/ Itself to be imagined." What is the "necessity," mentioned in the last line of the poem, that must be involved in this statement if it is to be read as more than a trivial verbal paradox? "After the leaves have fallen," the poem begins— that is, in autumn or in an autumnal mood (possibly provoked by advancing age)—the bare constant of reality, the "plain sense of things," is evident. (The bare earth or rock is beneath the foliage as a metaphor for reality is common in Stevens; see, for example, "The Rock" CP, p. 525.) This is (reality seen without the imagination, or...