The official Skritter poem:
AUTUMN REFRAIN
The skreak and skritter of evening gone
And grackles gone and sorrows of the sun,
The sorrows of sun, too, gone . . . the moon and moon,
The yellow moon of words about the nightingale
In measureless measures, not a bird for me
But the name of a bird and the name of a nameless air
I have never--shall never hear. And yet beneath
The stillness of everything gone, and being still,
Being and sitting still, something resides,
Some skreaking and skrittering residuum,
And grates these evasions of the nightingale
Though I have never--shall never hear that bird.
And the stillness is in the key, all of it is,
The stillness is all in the key of that desolate sound.
--WALLACE STEVENS
'THIS MOST secretly American of poems begins with new sounds, new words: "The skreak and skritter of evening gone." A careful reader of poetry will immediately hear in that "skreak and skritter" the glimmering play of Wallace Stevens. Will also hear,
soon after, the steady iambic cadence into which the two bright words have been put, like diamonds set into a row of lesser stones. And finally, one will
hear the melancholy contrast presented by "evening gone" against the seeming insouciance of "skreak and skritter."'
Source: Rick Barrot, "The Nightingale and the Grackles" in The Threepenny Review, No. 92 (Winter, 2003), pp. 12-13.