Tuesday, July 20, 2010

"A Man Saw a Ball of Gold" by Stephen Crane


A man saw a ball of gold in the sky;
He climbed for it,
And eventually he achieved it --
It was clay.

Now this is the strange part:
When the man went to the earth
And looked again,
Lo, there was the ball of gold.
Now this is the strange part:
It was a ball of gold.
Aye, by the heavens, it was a ball of gold.


--Stephen Crane

1 comment:

Scott said...

Stephen Crane is of course better known for his novel The Red Badge of Courage than just about anything else, but he wrote a lot of poetry too, stuff that's surprisingly modern and mystical and just really ahead of its time.

This is representative of the tenor of his poetical work for me: so fraught with possible meaning and portent, without being totally explainable or obviously interpretable. I was thinking of this poem when I wrote this sonnet, which is still one of my favorites although nobody else seems to like it as much as I do. *shrug*