Related Expression

 Fog at Gull Heath, Southwest Head, Grand Manan, NB, Canada 

May 25, 2011

"Providence" from Worldly Hopes

To stay

bright as

if just

thought of

earth requires

only that

nothing stay

       
A. R. Ammons 

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Discussed in Helen Vendler's The Music of What Happens:  Poems, Poets, Critics.  Harvard UP, 1988.

The title of her book comes from a poem by Seamus Heaney (discussed in Vendler's book).

Of the Ammons poem she writes:  "....Ammons's philosophic emphasis on the "trivial" words "as," "if," "just," "of," and "only" — the sort of words whose insidiousness interested Wittgenstein too."