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Emily Vasiliauskas, All's Well That Ends, The Cambridge Quarterly, Volume 44, Issue 2, June 2015, Pages 171–177, https://doi.org/10.1093/camqtly/bfv006
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Justacross the street from my apartment is a path through the woods. Although this is a place of retreat – where people come to get away from work and home alike – absorption rather than distraction seems to be the prevailing mood. Punctuating the path are wooden benches, many of them donated in memory of a spouse or a parent who was once nourished by time spent here. One bench has been sponsored by a living couple in recognition of their long marriage. The inscription features the two names, the date of the wedding, and the last stanza of Wallace Stevens's ‘Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour’:
Most of the poem remains poised on the brink of some sort of metaphysical investment – whether in God or in the imagination's transcendence – but these closing lines pull back. The world can offer its own kind of fulfilment. For Stevens, the sufficiency of lived experience is not registered within an individual mind, but rather by a couple. What exists here and now may not be everything, but finitude feels like enough when it is shared.
