Life & Wisdom Quote by Wallace Stevens

A whole life-cycle snaps into focus in two cool, almost bureaucratic sentences. Stevens takes the lush romance out of “bloom” and replaces it with something harder: consequence. “Our bloom is gone” isn’t just nostalgia for youth or beauty; it’s an announcement that the phase of pure possibility, the ornamental season, is over. The line is blunt on purpose, refusing consolation. Stevens’ speaker doesn’t plead for the bloom to return. He notes the fact like weather.

Then comes the knife turn: “We are the fruit thereof.” “Thereof” has a legalistic chill, as if identity is a clause in a contract signed long ago by time itself. The subtext is accountability. Fruit is what the bloom was for, but it’s also heavier, less glamorous, and destined to be consumed or to rot. Stevens compresses the uneasy bargain of adulthood and aging: what you “become” is the product of what you once merely “were.” The flower can pretend to be self-sufficient; the fruit can’t. It exists to be taken.

Context matters because Stevens, writing in a modernist key, is always suspicious of easy transcendence. His poetry keeps circling the relationship between imagination and reality, between the radiant moment and the stubborn aftermath. Here, he makes the aftermath the point. The wit is in the refusal to sentimentalize: the bloom wasn’t cheated; it was a prelude. The line makes maturity sound like a verdict, and that’s why it lands.