A Rabbit As King Of The Ghosts

The placidity of animals. The nowness of the animal and the oneness of the animal with everything else. Wallace Stevens in his “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts” captures the presence, the fullness, of the rabbit at night. It’s memory is jogged at the beginning of the poem – from fur to the cat. However the associations leads the rabbit back to the present and a remarkable unity with all that surrounds it, “In which everything is meant for you / And nothing need to be explained; / Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself”.

A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts

The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur—

There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
And August the most peaceful month.

To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
Without that monument of cat,
The cat forgotten on the moon;

And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;

Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;
And east rushes west and west rushes down,
No matter. The grass is full

And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,
The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A self that touches all edges,

You become a self that fills the four corners of night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you are humped high, humped up,

You are humped higher and higher, black as stone—
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.

- Wallace Stevens