Of Mere Being

LOVE. :) Wallace Stevens starts off by using a sort of reversed idea ( I forgot what it's called) like, instead of saying saying, "a mind at the end of a palm," he says "a palm at the end of a mind." I don't know, was I the only one who thought this to be peculiar? What I got from this statement is an open mind. I pictured a person holding all of their ideas in the palm of their hands; kind of like "wearing your heart on your sleeve," or whatever cliche can be appropriately inserted here. :)
Then he goes on talking about a bird, that seems to come (there's a better word) out of the palm of his hand. He describes the bird as being "gold-feathered" and "sing[ing] in the palm without human meaning. Without human feeling, a foreign song."
Birds sing. So for Stevens to refer to the song of the bird as foreign was a neat approach in describing its presence.
I interpreted this poem in being a man looking into the human element and how every person percieves things differently. The mind uses different senses to interpret something, and I think that he chose a bird because it's symbolic in the sense that it is free. People are free to think what they want to, and everybody has a different, foreign song. I also pictured this bird to be very majestic, with its gold feathers and long wings. By giving this type of description, I totally pictured somebody's creativity soaring without limitation. A bird is an animal often connected to freedom, so I think this ties into, again, the freedom of thought. When Stevens says, "without human feeling," I don't think he he necessarily means apathy, but that there isn't a marked emotion that can describe every body's thoughts -- each person differs. Perhaps I'm not really getting the true meaning of this poem, but this is how I took it, and I'm okay with that. :)
Plus -- I read this poem and immediately thought of Stravinsky's Finale of the Firebird Suite. I listened to it while I read the poem. The imagery was amazing! :)