Poetry for Steadiness

by A. R. Ammons

When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider

that birds' bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest

swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue

bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider

that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the

leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.

The poem’s central move is acceptance without conditions. Ammons builds a long, patient list of what radiance — light, reality, the world as it is — does not refuse: not the complicated heart, not decay, not the ugly work of flies on a carcass. Nothing is excluded. Nothing is judged. The world extends its abundance without selection, and this is not sentimentality. Ammons is precise about including the difficult and the repellent alongside the beautiful.

The Stoic resonance is in what follows from that recognition: When you really consider that the world makes no distinctions, that it neither winces from ugliness nor withholds itself from guilt, the heart loosens —Not because the world is perfect but because resistance to it becomes harder to justify. The leaf does not increase itself above the grass. there is no hierarchy, no special claim, no position to defend. And fear, which is largely a resistance to what is, quietly turns to praise.

though it borrows religious language, this poem is about what happens when you stop arguing with reality.

“The City Limits,” Copyright © 1972 by A.R. Ammons, from THE COMPLETE POEMS OF A.R. AMMONS: VOLUME 1 1955-1977 by A.R. Ammons, edited by Robert M. West. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.