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March 19, 2022

Much Later

Gertrude Stein

Elephants and birds of beauty and a gold fish. Gold fish or a superstition. They always bring bad luck. He had them and he was not told. Gold fish and he was not old. Gold fish and he was not to scold. Gold fish all told. The result was that the other people never had them and he knows nothing of it.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on March 19, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“Much Later” appeared in A Book Concluding With As A Wife Has A Cow: A Love Story (Éditions de la Galerie Simon, 1926).

Gertrude Stein, born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, on February 3, 1874, was a poet, novelist, and art collector from the Modernist movement. Her books include Tender Buttons (Claire Marie, 1914), The Making of Americans (Contact Press, 1925), and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1933). She died on July 27, 1946.

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Thanks to Brenda Shaughnessy, author of The Octopus Museum: Poems (Knopf, 2021), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Listen to a Q&A about Shaughnessy’s curatorial approach and find out more about our guest editors for the year.

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Poem-a-Day - "Much Later" by Gertrude Stein

Much Later

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