This April is the 24th National Poetry Month, a celebration established and organized by the Academy of American Poets.  Throughout the month, there are a number of specific events including Poem in Your Pocket Day, April 18, and the Dear Poet project.  Every school day this month, the King Street Chronicle will publish one poem in honor of National Poetry Month.  

The House Was Quiet and The World Was Calm
Wallace Stevens
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
Contributed by Upper School English Teacher Mrs. Linda Vasu
– Sydney Kim, Opinions Editor
Featured Image by Sydney Kim ’20