"The obscure moon lighting an obscure world"

Perhaps you know someone, someone that you are close to, that you are drawn to. This person captures your imagination and you use yours to explain this person to yourself. Yet, you can only approximate, hint at, glance over this person, who perhaps, of all others you are closest to in life. This next poem has Stevens skimming over possible metaphors to explain this: YOU of the “half colors of quarter things”, YOU “the obscure moon”, YOU “the melting clouds”. The beauty and attraction of the indeterminate, the waning, waxing, the this-and-that. A wonderfully beautiful poem that captures the elusive: “of things that would never be quite expressed.”

The Motive for Metaphor
By Wallace Stevens

You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.

In the same way, you were happy in spring,
With the half colors of quarter things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon—
The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed,
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be,

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,

The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound—
Steel against intimation—the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.