All night I sat reading a book,
Of sombre pages.
It was autumn and falling stars
Covered the shrivelled forms
Crouched in the moonlight.
No lamp was burning as I read,
A voice was mumbling, "Everything
Falls back to coldness,
Even the musky muscadines,
The melons, the vermilion pears
Of the leafless garden."
The sombre pages bore no print
Except the trace of burning stars
In the frosty heaven.
Creating meaning in the interval. This is what Stevens is up to in his poetry, but what is the interval? Is it our brief life on Earth? An interval is a gap, the space between the oblivion of the void. The void within the void, the interlude that prescribes the construction of meaning; for it is the space where our irrational imagination lives, and it is where we live. Now I'm just talking nonsense: the space within in the space surrounded by space...It makes about as much sense as being both the book and the book's reader at the same time. But it does make sense in Stevens' modern world, in our modern world where the gods have been annihilated and the romantic vision of the poet as ultimate prophet of static Truth is debunked. In such a world we have no choice but to be our own book of dusky pages. And at such a quandary the lamp has become as vain as the way obscure: as the blank pages illuminated by the flashes of dying numina, going the way that we all shall as surely as the ripe fruit languishes in the leafless autumn garden, their forms shriveled and warped upon the vine. The lamp, the light, has gone the same way as the gods, to whatever it is that lies on either side of the interval, that obscure latitude from whence we come and to where we go when the pages of our book, that is us in the lines we ourselves write, crumble to dust and blow hence with the leaves that have left the garden stark, without embellishment. There is no guiding light; only the reader's own voice mumbling the truth, the chilling northern masculine truth, of our provisional earthly endeavor. 
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