The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
Page 8
Bellissimo, pomposo,
Sing a song of serpent-kin,
Necks among the thousand leaves,
Tongues around the fruit.
Sing in clownish boots
Strapped and buckled bright.
Wear the breeches of a mask,
Coat half-flare and half galloon;
Wear a helmet without reason,
Tufted, tilted, twirled, and twisted.
Start the singing in a voice
Rougher than a grinding shale.
Hang a feather by your eye,
Nod and look a little sly.
This must be the vent of pity,
Deeper than a truer ditty
Of the real that wrenches,
Of the quick that’s wry.
NEW ENGLAND VERSES
I
The Whole World Including the Speaker
Why nag at the ideas of Hercules, Don Don?
Widen your sense. All things in the sun are sun.
II
The Whole World Excluding the Speaker
I found between moon-rising and moon-setting
The world was round. But not from my begetting.
III
Soupe Aux Perles
Health-o, when ginger and fromage bewitch
The vile antithesis of poor and rich.
IV
Soupe Sans Perles
I crossed in ’38 in the Western Head.
It depends which way you crossed, the tea-belle said.
V
Boston with a Note-book
Lean encyclopædists, inscribe an Iliad.
There’s a Weltanschauung of the penny pad.
VI
Boston without a Note-book
Let us erect in the Basin a lofty fountain.
Suckled on ponds, the spirit craves a watery mountain.
VII
Artist in Tropic
Of Phœbus Apothicaire the first beatitude:
Blessed, who is his nation’s multitude.
VIII
Artist in Arctic
And of Phoebus the Tailor the second saying goes:
Blessed, whose beard is cloak against the snows.
IX
Statue against a Clear Sky
Ashen man on ashen cliff above the salt halloo,
O ashen admiral of the hale, hard blue.…
X
Statue against a Cloudy Sky
Scaffolds and derricks rise from the reeds to the clouds
Meditating the will of men in formless crowds.
XI
Land of Locust
Patron and patriarch of couplets, walk
In fragrant leaves heat-heavy yet nimble in talk.
XII
Land of Pine and Marble
Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints
Of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.
XIII
The Male Nude
Dark cynic, strip and bathe and bask at will.
Without cap or strap, you are the cynic still.
XIV
The Female Nude
Ballatta dozed in the cool on a straw divan
At home, a bit like the slenderest courtesan.
XV
Scène Flétrie
The purple dress in autumn and the belfry breath
Hinted autumnal farewells of academic death.
XVI
Scène Fleurie
A perfect fruit in perfect atmosphere.
Nature as Pinakothek. Whist! Chanticleer.…
LUNAR PARAPHRASE
The moon is the mother of pathos and pity.
When, at the wearier end of November,
Her old light moves along the branches,
Feebly, slowly, depending upon them;
When the body of Jesus hangs in a pallor,
Humanly near, and the figure of Mary,
Touched on by hoar-frost, shrinks in a shelter
Made by the leaves, that have rotted and fallen;
When over the houses, a golden illusion
Brings back an earlier season of quiet
And quieting dreams in the sleepers in darkness—
The moon is the mother of pathos and pity.
ANATOMY OF MONOTONY
I
If from the earth we came, it was an earth
That bore us as a part of all the things
It breeds and that was lewder than it is.
Our nature is her nature; Hence it comes,
Since by our nature we grow old, earth grows
The same. We parallel the mother’s death.
She walks an autumn ampler than the wind
Cries up for us and colder than the frost
Pricks in our spirits at the summer’s end,
And over the bare spaces of our skies
She sees a barer sky that does not bend.
II
The body walks forth naked in the sun
And, out of tenderness or grief, the sun
Gives comfort, so that other bodies come,
Twinning our phantasy and our device,
And apt in versatile motion, touch and sound
To make the body covetous in desire
Of the still finer, more implacable chords.
So be it. Yet the spaciousness and light
In which the body walks and is deceived,
Falls from that fatal and that barer sky,
And this the spirit sees and is aggrieved.
THE PUBLIC SQUARE
A slash of angular blacks
Like a fractured edifice
That was buttressed by blue slants
In a coma of the moon.
A slash and the edifice fell,
Pylon and pier fell down.
A mountain-blue cloud arose
Like a thing in which they fell,
Fell slowly as when at night
A languid janitor bears
His lantern through colonnades
And the architecture swoons.
It turned cold and silent. Then
The square began to clear.
The bijou of Atlas, the moon,
Was last with its porcelain leer.
SONATINA TO HANS CHRISTIAN
If any duck in any brook,
Fluttering the water
For your crumb,
Seemed the helpless daughter
Of a mother
Regretful that she bore her;
Or of another,
Barren, and longing for her;
What of the dove,
Or thrush, or any singing mysteries?
What of the trees
And intonations of the trees?
What of the night
That lights and dims the stars?
Do you know, Hans Christian,
Now that you see the night?
IN THE CLEAR SEASON OF GRAPES
The mountains between our lands and the sea—
This conjunction of mountains and sea and our lands—
Have I stopped and thought of its point before?
When I think of our lands I think of the house
And the table that holds a platter of pears,
Vermilion smeared over green, arranged for show.
But this gross blue under rolling bronzes
Belittles those carefully chosen daubs.
Flashier fruits! A flip for the sun and moon,
If they mean no more than that. But they do.
And mountains and the sea do. And our lands.
And the welter of frost and the fox cries do.
Much more than that. Autumnal passages
Are overhung by the shadows of the rocks
And his nostrils blow out salt around each man.
TWO AT NORFOLK
Mow the grass in the cemetery, darkies,
Study the symbols and the requiescats,
But leave a bed beneath the myrtles.
This skeleton had a daughter and
that, a son.
In his time, this one had little to speak of,
The softest word went gurrituck in his skull.
For him the moon was always in Scandinavia
And his daughter was a foreign thing.
And that one was never a man of heart.
The making of his son was one more duty.
When the music of the boy fell like a fountain,
He praised Johann Sebastian, as he should.
The dark shadows of the funereal magnolias
Are full of the songs of Jamanda and Carlotta;
The son and the daughter, who come to the darkness,
He for her burning breast and she for his arms.
And these two never meet in the air so full of summer
And touch each other, even touching closely,
Without an escape in the lapses of their kisses.
Make a bed and leave the iris in it.
INDIAN RIVER
The trade-wind jingles the rings in the nets around the racks by the docks on Indian River.
It is the same jingle of the water among the roots under the banks of the palmettoes,
It is the same jingle of the red-bird breasting the orange-trees out of the cedars.
Yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu, nor on the nunnery beaches.
TEA
When the elephant’s-ear in the park
Shrivelled in frost,
And the leaves on the paths
Ran like rats,
Your lamp-light fell
On shining pillows,
Of sea-shades and sky-shades,
Like umbrellas in Java.
TO THE ROARING WIND
What syllable are you seeking,
Vocalissimus,
In the distances of sleep?
Speak it.
IDEAS OF ORDER
FAREWELL TO FLORIDA
I
Go on, high ship, since now, upon the shore,
The snake has left its skin upon the floor.
Key West sank downward under massive clouds
And silvers and greens spread over the sea. The moon
Is at the mast-head and the past is dead.
Her mind will never speak to me again.
I am free. High above the mast the moon
Rides clear of her mind and the waves make a refrain
Of this: that the snake has shed its skin upon
The floor. Go on through the darkness. The waves fly back.
II
Her mind had bound me round. The palms were hot
As if I lived in ashen ground, as if
The leaves in which the wind kept up its sound
From my North of cold whistled in a sepulchral South,
Her South of pine and coral and coraline sea,
Her home, not mine, in the ever-freshened Keys,
Her days, her oceanic nights, calling
For music, for whisperings from the reefs.
How content I shall be in the North to which I sail
And to feel sure and to forget the bleaching sand…
III
I hated the weathery yawl from which the pools
Disclosed the sea floor and the wilderness
Of waving weeds. I hated the vivid blooms
Curled over the shadowless hut, the rust and bones,
The trees likes bones and the leaves half sand, half sun.
To stand here on the deck in the dark and say
Farewell and to know that that land is forever gone
And that she will not follow in any word
Or look, nor ever again in thought, except
That I loved her once … Farewell. Go on, high ship.
IV
My North is leafless and lies in a wintry slime
Both of men and clouds, a slime of men in crowds.
The men are moving as the water moves,
This darkened water cloven by sullen swells
Against your sides, then shoving and slithering,
The darkness shattered, turbulent with foam.
To be free again, to return to the violent mind
That is their mind, these men, and that will bind
Me round, carry me, misty deck, carry me
To the cold, go on, high ship, go on, plunge on.
GHOSTS AS COCOONS
The grass is in seed. The young birds are flying.
Yet the house is not built, not even begun.
The vetch has turned purple. But where is the bride?
It is easy to say to those bidden—But where,
Where, butcher, seducer, bloodman, reveller,
Where is sun and music and highest heaven’s lust,
For which more than any words cries deeplier?
This mangled, smutted semi-world hacked out
Of dirt … It is not possible for the moon
To blot this with its dove-winged blendings.
She must come now. The grass is in seed and high.
Come now. Those to be born have need
Of the bride, love being a birth, have need to see
And to touch her, have need to say to her,
“The fly on the rose prevents us, O season
Excelling summer, ghost of fragrance falling
On dung.” Come now, pearled and pasted, bloomy-leafed,
While the domes resound with chant involving chant.
SAILING AFTER LUNCH
It is the word pejorative that hurts.
My old boat goes round on a crutch
And doesn’t get under way.
It’s the time of the year
And the time of the day.
Perhaps it’s the lunch that we had
Or the lunch that we should have had.
But I am, in any case,
A most inappropriate man
In a most unpropitious place.
Mon Dieu, hear the poet’s prayer.
The romantic should be here.
The romantic should be there.
It ought to be everywhere.
But the romantic must never remain,
Mon Dieu, and must never again return.
This heavy historical sail
Through the mustiest blue of the lake
In a really vertiginous boat
Is wholly the vapidest fake.…
It is least what one ever sees.
It is only the way one feels, to say
Where my spirit is I am,
To say the light wind worries the sail,
To say the water is swift today,
To expunge all people and be a pupil
Of the gorgeous wheel and so to give
That slight transcendence to the dirty sail,
By light, the way one feels, sharp white,
And then rush brightly through the summer air.
SAD STRAINS OF A GAY WALTZ
The truth is that there comes a time
When we can mourn no more over music
That is so much motionless sound.
There comes a time when the waltz
Is no longer a mode of desire, a mode
Of revealing desire and is empty of shadows.
Too many waltzes have ended. And then
There’s that mountain-minded Hoon,
For whom desire was never that of the waltz,
Who found all form and order in solitude,
For whom the shapes were never the figures of men.
Now, for him, his forms have vanished.
There is order in neither sea nor sun.
The shapes have lost their glistening.
There are these sudden mobs of men,
These sudden clouds of faces and arms,
An immense suppression, freed,
These voices crying without knowing for what,
Except to be happy, without knowing how,
Imposing forms they cannot describe,
Requiring order beyond their speech.
Too many wa
ltzes have ended. Yet the shapes
For which the voices cry, these, too, may be
Modes of desire, modes of revealing desire.
Too many waltzes—The epic of disbelief
Blares oftener and soon, will soon be constant.
Some harmonious skeptic soon in a skeptical music
Will unite these figures of men and their shapes
Will glisten again with motion, the music
Will be motion and full of shadows.
DANCE OF THE MACABRE MICE
In the land of turkeys in turkey weather
At the base of the statue, we go round and round.
What a beautiful history, beautiful surprise!
Monsieur is on horseback. The horse is covered with mice.
This dance has no name. It is a hungry dance.
We dance it out to the tip of Monsieur’s sword,
Reading the lordly language of the inscription,
Which is like zithers and tambourines combined:
The Founder of the State. Whoever founded
A state that was free, in the dead of winter, from mice?