Wallace Stevens - Botanist on Alp (No. 1) lyrics

Panoramas are not what they used to be. Claude has been dead a long time And apostrophes are forbidden on the funicular. Marx has ruined Nature, For the moment. For myself, I live by leaves, So that corridors of clouds, Corridors of cloudy thoughts, Seem pretty much one: I don't know what. But in Claude how near one was (In a world that is resting on pillars, That was seen through arches) To the central composition, The essential theme. What composition is there in all this: Stockholm slender in a slender light, And Adriatic riva rising, Statues and stars, Without a theme? The pillars are prostrate, the arches are haggard, The hotel is boarded and bare. Yet the panorama of despair Cannot be the speciality Of this ecstatic air.