He preferred the brightness of bells,
The mille fiori of vestments,
The voice of centuries
On the priestly gramophones.
It was the custom
For his rage against chaos
To abate on the way to church,
In regulations of his spirit.
How good life is, on the basis of propriety,
To be followed by a platter of capon!
Yet he kept promising himself
To go to Florida one of these days,
And in one of the little arrondissements
Of the sea there,
To give this further thought.
ACADEMIC DISCOURSE AT HAVANA
I
Canaries in the morning, orchestras
In the afternoon, balloons at night. That is
A difference, at least, from nightingales,
Jehovah and the great sea-worm. The air
Is not so elemental nor the earth
So near.
But the sustenance of the wilderness
Does not sustain us in the metropoles.
II
Life is an old casino in a park.
The bills of the swans are flat upon the ground.
A most desolate wind has chilled Rouge-Fatima
And a grand decadence settles down like cold.
III
The swans … Before the bills of the swans fell flat
Upon the ground, and before the chronicle
Of affected homage foxed so many books,
They warded the blank waters of the lakes
And island canopies which were entailed
To that casino. Long before the rain
Swept through its boarded windows and the leaves
Filled its encrusted fountains, they arrayed
The twilights of the mythy goober khan.
The centuries of excellence to be
Rose out of promise and became the sooth
Of trombones floating in the trees.
The toil
Of thought evoked a peace eccentric to
The eye and tinkling to the ear. Gruff drums
Could beat, yet not alarm the populace.
The indolent progressions of the swans
Made earth come right; a peanut parody
For peanut people.
And serener myth
Conceiving from its perfect plenitude,
Lusty as June, more fruitful than the weeks
Of ripest summer, always lingering
To touch again the hottest bloom, to strike
Once more the longest resonance, to cap
The clearest woman with apt weed, to mount
The thickest man on thickest stallion-back,
This urgent, competent, serener myth
Passed like a circus.
Politic man ordained
Imagination as the fateful sin.
Grandmother and her basketful of pears
Must be the crux for our compendia.
That’s world enough, and more, if one includes
Her daughters to the peached and ivory wench
For whom the towers are built. The burgher’s breast,
And not a delicate ether star-impaled,
Must be the place for prodigy, unless
Prodigious things are tricks. The world is not
The bauble of the sleepless nor a word
That should import a universal pith
To Cuba. Jot these milky matters down.
They nourish Jupiters. Their casual pap
Will drop like sweetness in the empty nights
When too great rhapsody is left annulled
And liquorish prayer provokes new sweats: so, so:
Life is an old casino in a wood.
IV
Is the function of the poet here mere sound,
Subtler than the ornatest prophecy,
To stuff the ear? It causes him to make
His infinite repetition and alloys
Of pick of ebon, pick of halcyon.
It weights him with nice logic for the prim.
As part of nature he is part of us.
His rarities are ours: may they be fit
And reconcile us to our selves in those
True reconcilings, dark, pacific words,
And the adroiter harmonies of their fall.
Close the cantina. Hood the chandelier.
The moonlight is not yellow but a white
That silences the ever-faithful town.
How pale and how possessed a night it is,
How full of exhalations of the sea…
All this is older than its oldest hymn,
Has no more meaning than tomorrow’s bread.
But let the poet on his balcony
Speak and the sleepers in their sleep shall move,
Waken, and watch the moonlight on their floors.
This may be benediction, sepulcher,
And epitaph. It may, however, be
An incantation that the moon defines
By mere example opulently clear.
And the old casino likewise may define
An infinite incantation of our selves
In the grand decadence of the perished swans.
NUDITY AT THE CAPITAL
But nakedness, woolen massa, concerns an innermost atom.
If that remains concealed, what does the bottom matter?
NUDITY IN THE COLONIES
Black man, bright nouveautés leave one, at best, pseudonymous.
Thus one is most disclosed when one is most anonymous.
RE-STATEMENT OF ROMANCE
The night knows nothing of the chants of night
It is what it is as I am what I am:
And in perceiving this I best perceive myself
And you. Only we two may interchange
Each in the other what each has to give.
Only we two are one, not you and night,
Nor night and I, but you and I, alone,
So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,
So far beyond the casual solitudes,
That night is only the background of our selves,
Supremely true each to its separate self,
In the pale light that each upon the other throws.
THE READER
All night I sat reading a book,
Sat reading as if in a book
Of sombre pages.
It was autumn and falling stars
Covered the shrivelled forms
Crouched in the moonlight.
No lamp was burning as I read,
A voice was mumbling, “Everything
Falls back to coldness,
Even the musky muscadines,
The melons, the vermilion pears
Of the leafless garden.”
The sombre pages bore no print
Except the trace of burning stars
In the frosty heaven.
MUD MASTER
The muddy rivers of spring
Are snarling
Under muddy skies.
The mind is muddy.
As yet, for the mind, new banks
Of bulging green
Are not;
Sky-sides of gold
Are not.
The mind snarls.
Blackest of pickanines,
There is a master of mud.
The shaft of light
Falling, far off, from sky to land,
That is he—
The peach-bud maker,
The mud master,
The master of the mind.
ANGLAIS MORT À FLORENCE
A little less returned for him each spring.
Music began to fail him. Brahms, although
His dark familiar, often walked apart.
His spirit grew uncertain of delight,
Certain of its uncertainty, in which
That dark companion left him unconsoled
For a self returning
mostly memory.
Only last year he said that the naked moon
Was not the moon he used to see, to feel
(In the pale coherences of moon and mood
When he was young), naked and alien,
More leanly shining from a lankier sky.
Its ruddy pallor had grown cadaverous.
He used his reason, exercised his will,
Turning in time to Brahms as alternate
In speech. He was that music and himself.
They were particles of order, a single majesty:
But he remembered the time when he stood alone.
He stood at last by God’s help and the police;
But he remembered the time when he stood alone.
He yielded himself to that single majesty;
But he remembered the time when he stood alone,
When to be and delight to be seemed to be one,
Before the colors deepened and grew small.
THE PLEASURES OF MERELY CIRCULATING
The garden flew round with the angel,
The angel flew round with the clouds,
And the clouds flew round and the clouds flew round
And the clouds flew round with the clouds.
Is there any secret in skulls,
The cattle skulls in the woods?
Do the drummers in black hoods
Rumble anything out of their drums?
Mrs. Anderson’s Swedish baby
Might well have been German or Spanish,
Yet that things go round and again go round
Has rather a classical sound.
LIKE DECORATIONS IN A NIGGER CEMETERY
[for Arthur Powell]
I
In the far South the sun of autumn is passing
Like Walt Whitman walking along a ruddy shore.
He is singing and chanting the things that are part of him,
The worlds that were and will be, death and day.
Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end.
His beard is of fire and his staff is a leaping flame.
II
Sigh for me, night-wind, in the noisy leaves of the oak.
I am tired. Sleep for me, heaven over the hill.
Shout for me, loudly and loudly, joyful sun, when you rise.
III
It was when the trees were leafless first in November
And their blackness became apparent, that one first
Knew the eccentric to be the base of design.
IV
Under the mat of frost and over the mat of clouds.
But in between lies the sphere of my fortune
And the fortunes of frost and of clouds,
All alike, except for the rules of the rabbis,
Happy men, distinguishing frost and clouds.
V
If ever the search for a tranquil belief should end,
The future might stop emerging out of the past,
Out of what is full of us; yet the search
And the future emerging out of us seem to be one.
VI
We should die except for Death
In his chalk and violet robes.
Not to die a parish death.
VII
How easily the feelings flow this afternoon
Over the simplest words:
It is too cold for work, now, in the fields.
VIII
Out of the spirit of the holy temples,
Empty and grandiose, let us make hymns
And sing them in secrecy as lovers do.
IX
In a world of universal poverty
The philosophers alone will be fat
Against the autumn winds
In an autumn that will be perpetual.
X
Between farewell and the absence of farewell,
The final mercy and the final loss,
The wind and the sudden falling of the wind.
XI
The cloud rose upward like a heavy stone
That lost its heaviness through that same will,
Which changed light green to olive then to blue.
XII
The sense of the serpent in you, Ananke,
And your averted stride
Add nothing to the horror of the frost
That glistens on your face and hair.
XIII
The birds are singing in the yellow patios,
Pecking at more lascivious rinds than ours,
From sheer Gemütlichkeit.
XIV
The leaden pigeon on the entrance gate
Must miss the symmetry of a leaden mate,
Must see her fans of silver undulate.
XV
Serve the rouged fruits in early snow.
They resemble a page of Toulet
Read in the ruins of a new society,
Furtively, by candle and out of need.
XVI
If thinking could be blown away
Yet this remain the dwelling-place
Of those with a sense for simple space.
XVII
The sun of Asia creeps above the horizon
Into this haggard and tenuous air,
A tiger lamed by nothingness and frost.
XVIII
Shall I grapple with my destroyers
In the muscular poses of the museums?
But my destroyers avoid the museums.
XIX
An opening of portals when night ends,
A running forward, arms stretched out as drilled.
Act I, Scene i, at a German Staats-Oper.
XX
Ah, but the meaningless, natural effigy!
The revealing aberration should appear,
The agate in the eye, the tufted ear,
The rabbit fat, at last, in glassy grass.
XXI
She was a shadow as thin in memory
As an autumn ancient underneath the snow,
Which one recalls at a concert or in a café.
XXII
The comedy of hollow sounds derives
From truth and not from satire on our lives.
Clog, therefore, purple Jack and crimson Jill.
XXIII
The fish are in the fishman’s window,
The grain is in the baker’s shop,
The hunter shouts as the pheasant falls.
Consider the odd morphology of regret.
XXIV
A bridge above the bright and blue of water
And the same bridge when the river is frozen.
Rich Tweedle-dum, poor Tweedle-dee.
XXV
From oriole to crow, note the decline
In music. Crow is realist. But, then,
Oriole, also, may be realist.
XXVI
This fat pistache of Belgian grapes exceeds
The total gala of auburn aureoles.
Cochon! Master, the grapes are here and now.
XXVII
John Constable they could never quite transplant
And our streams rejected the dim Academy.
Granted the Picts impressed us otherwise
In the taste for iron dogs and iron deer.
XXVIII
A pear should come to the table popped with juice,
Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On terms
Like these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.
XXIX
Choke every ghost with acted violence,
Stamp down the phosphorescent toes, tear off
The spittling tissues tight across the bones.
The heavy bells are tolling rowdy-dow.
XXX
The hen-cock crows at midnight and lays no egg,
The cock-hen crows all day. But cockerel shrieks,
Hen shudders: the copious egg is made and laid.
XXXI
A teeming millpond or a furious mind.
Gray grasses rolling windily away
; And bristling thorn-trees spinning on the bank
The actual is a deft beneficence.
XXXII
Poetry is a finikin thing of air
That lives uncertainly and not for long
Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.
XXXIII
For all his purple, the purple bird must have
Notes for his comfort that he may repeat
Through the gross tedium of being rare.
XXXIV
A calm November. Sunday in the fields.
A reflection stagnant in a stagnant stream.
Yet invisible currents clearly circulate.
XXXV
Men and the affairs of men seldom concerned
This pundit of the weather, who never ceased
To think of man the abstraction, the comic sum.
XXXVI
The children will be crying on the stair,
Half-way to bed, when the phrase will be spoken,
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens Page 10