A Clear Day and No Memories

"A Clear Day and No Memories" is the seventh and final poem and song in Ned Rorem's Last Poems of Wallace Stevens. The song is for soprano, cello, and piano.

Date: 1972Composer: Ned RoremText: Wallace StevensSong Collection: Last Poems of Wallace Stevens

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Text

A Clear Day and No Memories
by Wallace Stevens

No soldiers in the scenery,
No thoughts of people now dead,
As they were fifty years ago,
Young and living in a live air,
Young and walking in the sunshine,
Bending in blue dresses to touch something,
Today the mind is not part of the weather.
Today the air is clear of everything.
It has no knowledge except of nothingness
And it flows over us without meanings,
As if none of us had ever been here before
And are not now: in this shallow spectacle,
This invisible activity, this sense.

–The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play

Books

Sheet Music

Last Poems of Wallace Stevens

Composer(s): Ned Rorem

Song(s): 1. Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself
2. The River of Rivers in Connecticut
3. A Child Asleep in Its Own Life
4. The Planet on the Table
5. The Dove in Spring
6. Of Mere Being
7. A Clear Day and No Memories

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