"The Man on the Dump" by Wallace Stevens

With all the imagery, the music of the words and the contrasting elements of the poem, it was a piece that was hard to digest. My reflex was to grasp the underlying, overarching idea or theme that Stevens might have been talking about. My initial impression was that it was a piece that was really unplanned and jumbled together. After reading it the fifth time, I entertained the idea that maybe that was the point. Though I’ve never actually seen a dump myself, I usually picture them as large landscapes with piles of random crap that may have been someone’s treasure at one point, or a necessity, souvenirs, old food and wrappers, rodents; alive and dead, everything under the sun that is subject to time and decay. Like the piles of old and used and rotting things, I thought of how the mind is so intricately layered with mounds of decomposing ideas, emotions, motives, reflection, inhibitions, that somehow disintegrate into some sort of truth- Like how my impressions and reactions became words on this paper.

When things are new and fresh, they are like dew-but it applies to just before the sun or moon rises because as exciting and vibrant they are at first, they are just as disposable. Like the poem says, "between that disgust and this, between the things that are on the dump and those that will be, one feels the purifying change". The duality is dismissed to being one-sided, only life, only happiness and other related products. As it states: “one rejects the trash”. Apparently, that’s when the moon creeps up, because there’s a limit to valuing something, and then it must be disposed as soon as something better is in place. It’s the time of death, darkness, decay, but beholds a beauty in which we understand and observe the “elephant-colorings of tires”, and “everything is shed” as we see things the way they really are, ironically, with less light.

It all reminded me of when I was in elementary school, and I had gone to the grocery store for my mom. On the way there, I noticed myself treading over the filthy sidewalks flooded with sloshes of brown snow and wrappers of all sorts shoved in and between the crevices. I was old enough to feel disgusted. I remember the sky being a mysterious medium between gray and blue. Though it was bright enough to see what was in front of me, it was dark enough to see the moon. I had just enough money for what I needed, and a dime leftover. I walked out of the grocery store, and spotted an old man sitting on a large white pail. There were layers of soil smeared here and there on his skin and jacket, and the thread on the hem of his pants were branching out from all angles. And he held out his blackened hand, slowly, with a smile, to me. I hesitated for a second and almost passed him. But I pulled out the dime I had, and placed it there. He looked down at it and smiled again. After that I could only think about how that man must not have been a beggar after all.