The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

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The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens Page 5

by Wallace Stevens


  On the feat sandbars.

  The black man said,

  “Now, grandmother,

  Crochet me this buzzard

  On your winding-sheet,

  And do not forget his wry neck

  After the winter.”

  The black man said,

  “Look out, O caroller,

  The entrails of the buzzard

  Are rattling.”

  VALLEY CANDLE

  My candle burned alone in an immense valley.

  Beams of the huge night converged upon it,

  Until the wind blew.

  Then beams of the huge night

  Converged upon its image,

  Until the wind blew.

  ANECDOTE OF MEN BY THE THOUSAND

  The soul, he said, is composed

  Of the external world.

  There are men of the East, he said,

  Who are the East.

  There are men of a province

  Who are that province.

  There are men of a valley

  Who are that valley.

  There are men whose words

  Are as natural sounds

  Of their places

  As the cackle of toucans

  In the place of toucans.

  The mandoline is the instrument

  Of a place.

  Are there mandolines of western mountains?

  Are there mandolines of northern moonlight?

  The dress of a woman of Lhassa,

  In its place,

  Is an invisible element of that place

  Made visible.

  THE APOSTROPHE TO VINCENTINE

  I

  I figured you as nude between

  Monotonous earth and dark blue sky.

  It made you seem so small and lean

  And nameless,

  Heavenly Vincentine.

  II

  I saw you then, as warm as flesh,

  Brunette,

  But yet not too brunette,

  As warm, as clean.

  Your dress was green,

  Was whited green,

  Green Vincentine.

  III

  Then you came walking,

  In a group

  Of human others,

  Voluble.

  Yes: you came walking,

  Vincentine.

  Yes: you came talking.

  IV

  And what I knew you felt

  Came then.

  Monotonous earth I saw become

  Illimitable spheres of you,

  And that white animal, so lean,

  Turned Vincentine,

  Turned heavenly Vincentine,

  And that white animal, so lean,

  Turned heavenly, heavenly Vincentine.

  FLORAL DECORATIONS FOR BANANAS

  Well, nuncle, this plainly won’t do.

  These insolent, linear peels

  And sullen, hurricane shapes

  Won’t do with your eglantine.

  They require something serpentine.

  Blunt yellow in such a room!

  You should have had plums tonight,

  In an eighteenth-century dish,

  And pettifogging buds,

  For the women of primrose and purl,

  Each one in her decent curl.

  Good God! What a precious light!

  But bananas hacked and hunched…

  The table was set by an ogre,

  His eye on an outdoor gloom

  And a stiff and noxious place.

  Pile the bananas on planks.

  The women will be all shanks

  And bangles and slatted eyes.

  And deck the bananas in leaves

  Plucked from the Carib trees,

  Fibrous and dangling down,

  Oozing cantankerous gum

  Out of their purple maws,

  Darting out of their purple craws

  Their musky and tingling tongues.

  ANECDOTE OF CANNA

  Huge are the canna in the dreams of

  X, the mighty thought, the mighty man.

  They fill the terrace of his capitol.

  His thought sleeps not. Yet thought that wakes

  In sleep may never meet another thought

  Or thing.… Now day-break comes…

  X promenades the dewy stones,

  Observes the canna with a clinging eye,

  Observes and then continues to observe.

  ON THE MANNER OF ADDRESSING CLOUDS

  Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns,

  Meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous,

  Eliciting the still sustaining pomps

  Of speech which are like music so profound

  They seem an exaltation without sound.

  Funest philosophers and ponderers,

  Their evocations are the speech of clouds.

  So speech of your processionals returns

  In the casual evocations of your tread

  Across the stale, mysterious seasons. These

  Are the music of meet resignation; these

  The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you

  To magnify, if in that drifting waste

  You are to be accompanied by more

  Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.

  OF HEAVEN CONSIDERED AS A TOMB

  What word have you, interpreters, of men

  Who in the tomb of heaven walk by night,

  The darkened ghosts of our old comedy?

  Do they believe they range the gusty cold,

  With lanterns borne aloft to light the way,

  Freemen of death, about and still about

  To find whatever it is they seek? Or does

  That burial, pillared up each day as porte

  And spiritous passage into nothingness,

  Foretell each night the one abysmal night,

  When the host shall no more wander, nor the light

  Of the steadfast lanterns creep across the dark?

  Make hue among the dark comedians,

  Halloo them in the topmost distances

  For answer from their icy Élysée.

  OF THE SURFACE OF THINGS

  I

  In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;

  But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud.

  II

  From my balcony, I survey the yellow air,

  Reading where I have written,

  “The spring is like a belle undressing.”

  III

  The gold tree is blue.

  The singer has pulled his cloak over his head.

  The moon is in the folds of the cloak.

  ANECDOTE OF THE PRINCE OF PEACOCKS

  In the moonlight

  I met Berserk,

  In the moonlight

  On the bushy plain.

  Oh, sharp he was

  As the sleepless!

  And, “Why are you red

  In this milky blue?”

  I said.

  “Why sun-colored,

  As if awake

  In the midst of sleep?”

  “You that wander,”

  So he said,

  “On the bushy plain,

  Forget so soon.

  But I set my traps

  In the midst of dreams.”

  I knew from this

  That the blue ground

  Was full of blocks

  And blocking steel.

  I knew the dread

  Of the bushy plain,

  And the beauty

  Of the moonlight

  Falling there,

  Falling

  As sleep falls

  In the innocent air.

  A HIGH-TONED OLD CHRISTIAN WOMAN

  Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.

  Take the moral law and make a nave of it

  And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,

  The conscience is converted into palms,

  Like windy
citherns hankering for hymns.

  We agree in principle. That’s clear. But take

  The opposing law and make a peristyle,

  And from the peristyle project a masque

  Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,

  Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,

  Is equally converted into palms,

  Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,

  Madame, we are where we began. Allow,

  Therefore, that in the planetary scene

  Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,

  Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,

  Proud of such novelties of the sublime,

  Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,

  May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves

  A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.

  This will make widows wince. But fictive things

  Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

  THE PLACE OF THE SOLITAIRES

  Let the place of the solitaires

  Be a place of perpetual undulation.

  Whether it be in mid-sea

  On the dark, green water-wheel,

  Or on the beaches,

  There must be no cessation

  Of motion, or of the noise of motion,

  The renewal of noise

  And manifold continuation;

  And, most, of the motion of thought

  And its restless iteration,

  In the place of the solitaires,

  Which is to be a place of perpetual undulation.

  THE WEEPING BURGHER

  It is with a strange malice

  That I distort the world.

  Ah! that ill humors

  Should mask as white girls.

  And ah! that Scaramouche

  Should have a black barouche.

  The sorry verities!

  Yet in excess, continual,

  There is cure of sorrow.

  Permit that if as ghost I come

  Among the people burning in me still,

  I come as belle design

  Of foppish line.

  And I, then, tortured for old speech,

  A white of wildly woven rings;

  I, weeping in a calcined heart,

  My hands such sharp, imagined things.

  THE CURTAINS IN THE HOUSE OF THE METAPHYSICIAN

  It comes about that the drifting of these curtains

  Is full of long motions; as the ponderous

  Deflations of distance; or as clouds

  Inseparable from their afternoons;

  Or the changing of light, the dropping

  Of the silence, wide sleep and solitude

  Of night, in which all motion

  Is beyond us, as the firmament,

  Up-rising and down-falling, bares

  The last largeness, bold to see.

  BANAL SOJOURN

  Two wooden tubs of blue hydrangeas stand at the foot of the stone steps.

  The sky is a blue gum streaked with rose. The trees are black.

  The grackles crack their throats of bone in the smooth air.

  Moisture and heat have swollen the garden into a slum of bloom.

  Pardie! Summer is like a fat beast, sleepy in mildew,

  Our old bane, green and bloated, serene, who cries,

  “That bliss of stars, that princox of evening heaven!” reminding of seasons,

  When radiance came running down, slim through the bareness.

  And so it is one damns that green shade at the bottom of the land.

  For who can care at the wigs despoiling the Satan ear?

  And who does not seek the sky unfuzzed, soaring to the princox?

  One has a malady, here, a malady. One feels a malady.

  DEPRESSION BEFORE SPRING

  The cock crows

  But no queen rises.

  The hair of my blonde

  Is dazzling,

  As the spittle of cows

  Threading the wind.

  Ho! Ho!

  But ki-ki-ri-ki

  Brings no rou-cou,

  No rou-cou-cou.

  But no queen comes

  In slipper green.

  THE EMPEROR OF ICE-CREAM

  Call the roller of big cigars,

  The muscular one, and bid him whip

  In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

  Let the wenches dawdle in such dress

  As they are used to wear, and let the boys

  Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.

  Let be be finale of seem.

  The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

  Take from the dresser of deal.

  Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet

  On which she embroidered fantails once

  And spread it so as to cover her face.

  If her horny feet protrude, they come

  To show how cold she is, and dumb.

  Let the lamp affix its beam.

  The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

  THE CUBAN DOCTOR

  I went to Egypt to escape

  The Indian, but the Indian struck

  Out of his cloud and from his sky.

  This was no worm bred in the moon,

  Wriggling far down the phantom air,

  And on a comfortable sofa dreamed.

  The Indian struck and disappeared.

  I knew my enemy was near—I,

  Drowsing in summer’s sleepiest horn.

  TEA AT THE PALAZ OF HOON

  Not less because in purple I descended

  The western day through what you called

  The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

  What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?

  What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?

  What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

  Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,

  And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.

  I was myself the compass of that sea:

  I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw

  Or heard or felt came not but from myself;

  And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

  DISILLUSIONMENT OF TEN O’CLOCK

  The houses are haunted

  By white night-gowns.

  None are green,

  Or purple with green rings,

  Or green with yellow rings,

  Or yellow with blue rings.

  None of them are strange,

  With socks of lace

  And beaded ceintures.

  People are not going

  To dream of baboons and periwinkles.

  Only, here and there, an old sailor,

  Drunk and asleep in his boots,

  Catches tigers

  In red weather.

  SUNDAY MORNING

  I

  Complacencies of the peignoir, and late

  Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,

  And the green freedom of a cockatoo

  Upon a rug mingle to dissipate

  The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.

  She dreams a little, and she feels the dark

  Encroachment of that old catastrophe,

  As a calm darkens among water-lights.

  The pungent oranges and bright, green wings

  Seem things in some procession of the dead,

  Winding across wide water, without sound.

  The day is like wide water, without sound,

  Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet

  Over the seas, to silent Palestine,

  Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

  II

  Why should she give her bounty to the dead?

  What is divinity if it can come

  Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

  Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,

  In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else

  In any balm or beauty of the earth,r />
  Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?

  Divinity must live within herself:

  Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;

  Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued

  Elations when the forest blooms; gusty

  Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;

  All pleasures and all pains, remembering

  The bough of summer and the winter branch.

  These are the measures destined for her soul.

  III

  Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.

  No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave

  Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind

  He moved among us, as a muttering king,

  Magnificent, would move among his hinds,

  Until our blood, commingling, virginal,

  With heaven, brought such requital to desire

  The very hinds discerned it, in a star.

  Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be

  The blood of paradise? And shall the earth

  Seem all of paradise that we shall know?

  The sky will be much friendlier then than now,

  A part of labor and a part of pain,

  And next in glory to enduring love,

  Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

  IV

  She says, “I am content when wakened birds,

  Before they fly, test the reality

  Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;

  But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields

  Return no more, where, then, is paradise?”

  There is not any haunt of prophecy,

 

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