"Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb" is a short meditative poem by Wallace Stevens that reimagines the heavens not as a place of divine promise or spiritual reward but as a vast, cold, and silent burial ground for the dead. The poem opens with a direct address to "interpreters," figures who might be expected to explain or give meaning to the afterlife and to the souls that inhabit it. Stevens asks what these interpreters can tell us about the dead, whom he characterizes as "darkened ghosts of our old comedy," wandering through the sky at night. The phrase "old comedy" suggests not humor but rather the ancient theatrical tradition in which human life is framed as a dramatic performance, one that has now ended for these wandering figures. The dead are imagined as moving through a gusty, cold darkness, carrying lanterns aloft, still searching for something without knowing what it is. They are described as "freemen of death," a phrase that is ironic in its suggestion of liberty, since their freedom consists only of endless, purposeless roaming through a void. Stevens then introduces a second, darker possibility. Perhaps the sky itself, which appears each day as a grand architectural passage, a "porte and spiritous passage into nothingness," is simply foretelling the final and absolute darkness that must come for all things. Each night may be a rehearsal for that one ultimate night when even the wandering stops, when the lanterns go out entirely, and when there is no more movement of any kind. This possibility strips away even the minimal consolation of ghostly activity and replaces it with the prospect of total annihilation and silence. The poem closes with a command, though one that carries little hope of response. The speaker urges the interpreters to call out to the dead, to make noise among these "dark comedians" in the highest and most remote distances of the sky, to shout to them in their icy Elysian dwelling and wait for an answer. The use of "Elysée," a French inflection of the classical Elysium, lends the poem a slight ironic elegance. Elysium in classical tradition was a paradise for the blessed dead, but Stevens renders it frozen, remote, and unresponsive. The very act of calling out and waiting for an answer implies that no answer will come. The poem belongs to Stevens's persistent concern with the relationship between the human imagination and the cold facts of mortality and cosmic indifference. Heaven, in this poem, is not abolished outright but is reinterpreted through a skeptical and secular imagination. It becomes a metaphor for the sky itself, for the vast physical dome above the earth that human beings have historically populated with gods, angels, and the souls of the departed. Stevens regards this projection as a kind of creative fiction, a comedy in the older sense, but one whose characters are now merely ghostly remnants of belief systems that no longer carry conviction. The tone throughout is elegiac and austere, combining the rhetorical formality of a philosophical inquiry with the imagery of cold, darkness, and infinite space. Stevens does not mourn religious belief in a sentimental way but examines its remnants with a mixture of curiosity and detachment. The interpreters he addresses are figures who still claim authority over such questions, but the poem suggests that their authority is hollow. The dead do not answer, the darkness does not yield meaning, and the lanterns carried through the heavenly tomb illuminate nothing of final significance. The poem is relatively brief and compressed, typical of Stevens's earlier manner in which dense imagery and layered philosophical suggestion are packed into a small formal space. It sits within a broader body of work in which Stevens repeatedly interrogates the idea of heaven, the consolations of religion, and the capacity of human imagination to create meaningful substitutes for beliefs that modernity has eroded. In this particular poem, the conclusion toward which the imagery points is one of ultimate silence and emptiness, a heaven that is not a home for the dead but simply the cold sky above, indifferent to the lanterns and the wanderers beneath its dark vault.
By Wallace Stevens · First published 1947 · Genre: Poetry, Modernist Literature, Metaphysical Poetry