On a recent afternoon, there was a rabbit in my backyard, crouched on the matted gray-brown patch of last year’s grass. It was just sitting still, not doing anything, its face twitching in the way of rabbits who are eating some mysterious thing or perhaps chewing on nothing at all. The sight of it made me think of a weird, beautiful poem I read years ago that has stuck in my mind ever since.
Written by Wallace Stevens and published in 1937, it’s called “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts.”
There is a rabbit sitting in the grass late on an August afternoon, when “nothing is left except light on your fur.” This is an interlude of utter peace and stillness. Nothing moves except the changing light: “east rushes west and west rushes down, / No matter.”
You, the rabbit, are completely and only immersed in your own rabbitness.
“… 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.”
The poem is addressing the rabbit — “you” — but at the same time it is inhabiting the rabbit, describing from the inside what it feels like to be that rabbit sitting in the grass as the August afternoon turns to evening.
“… 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 scene, like the cadence of the language, is quiet, dreamy, and so peaceful that everything you were aware of during the day has slipped away.
The cat “slopping its milk all day” has now become “The cat forgotten in the moon.” The world is benevolent, everything about it focused tenderly on you; you can let down your guard.
The tone of the poem is so lullingly dreamy that when I first read it I barely noticed the cat. It seemed to be there only as an example of how the day’s preoccupations have fallen away in the peace of evening. But the cat is there — mentioned six times in what is a pretty short poem. In the middle of this peaceful rabbit-centric twilight, “The red cat hides away in the fur-light.”
So is the rabbit’s unguardedness paradisiacal or dangerous? The poem doesn’t say.
It ends with the rabbit “humped high, humped up, / You are humped higher and higher, black as stone,” a perception that fuses the rabbit’s point of view (more and more mighty, invincible) with the cat’s (creep toward it and the prey looks bigger and bigger). Then the last line takes us back inside the rabbit’s point of view: “And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.” Which could mean either that the cat is nothing, insignificant, or that the rabbit is fatally underestimating the threat.
Part of what I think is so great about the poem is that it lets this ambiguity just sit there. The rabbit is described with such tenderness, yet the universe is not necessarily tender. Maybe the rabbit’s sense of safety is lovely. Maybe it’s stupid. Maybe it’s both.
“A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts” isn’t sentimental or didactic, and it’s not a parable. It is a subtle, very closely observed scene of beauty and ambiguity, at once loving and dispassionate. That is its strength, and that’s why its power endures.
Joan Wickersham’s latest book is “No Ship Sets Out To Be A Shipwreck.” She is a contributing Globe Opinion writer.