Crude foyer

"Crude Foyer" is a beautifully skeptic poem of Stevens's that draws the mind as a physical space with enclosing walls. In the first line, he says "Thought is a false happiness," and it is a place where we can talk ourselves into believing we can do anything (1-4), where we look at paradise and laugh (9-12), and where we know that seeing is not always believing (13-20). Stevens says we have only entered the foyer--the waiting room, of sorts, to "wear humanity's bleak crown" (line 8). It is a dark truth--a unfair and crude state of affairs.