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  • Wallace Stevens at the Cliffs of Moher
  • Milton J. Bates

It was like a gust of freedom, a return to the spacious, solitary world in which we used to exist.

—Stevens, letter to Barbara Church, 10 Sept. 1952

Sure enough, they looked just like the photo on the postcard, the cliffs of Moher risingout of the mist until they became his father. That much and more he’d gotten into his poem. When the mist burned off, he could see what

the camera had missed: the churning cream of surf six hundred feet below, the gulls and gannets improvising loops, the puffins standing at attention on the sandstone galleries, and all those people crowding

to the cliff-top, dropping coins in telescopes, ignoring signs that told them whom to call if they felt an urge to jump. The big man felt an urge to leave before his poem shattered on the rocks. He took a detour

through the gift shop to check out t-shirts in his grandson’s size. That’s where he found a postcard like the one that lured him to the cliffs. He paid for card and stamp, then followed the clerk’s pointing finger

to a postal box. For whom this souvenir of misty solitude and spaciousness? He addressed it to a son of stone in Hartford, hoping it would purge from memory much of what he’d come so far to see. [End Page 237]

Milton J. Bates
Marquette, Michigan
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