Explore "The Doctor of Geneva" by Wallace Stevens on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The doctor of Geneva stamped the sand / That lay impounding the Pacific swell, / Patted his stove-pipe hat and tugged his shawl.
Lacustrine man had never been assailed / By such long-rolling opulent cataracts, / Unless Racine or Bossuet held the like.
He did not quail. A man so used to plumb / The multifarious heavens felt no awe / Before these visible, voluble delugings,
Which yet found means to set his simmering mind / Spinning and hissing with oracular / Notations of the wild, the ruinous waste,
Until the steeples of his city clanked and sprang / In an unburgherly apocalypse. / The doctor used his handkerchief and sighed.