The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

by Wallace Stevens

  Its animal. The angelic ones

  Speak of the soul, the mind. It is

  An animal. The blue guitar—

  On that its claws propound, its fangs

  Articulate its desert days.

  The blue guitar a mould? That shell?

  Well, after all, the north wind blows

  A horn, on which its victory

  Is a worm composing on a straw.

  XVIII

  A dream (to call it a dream) in which

  I can believe, in face of the object,

  A dream no longer a dream, a thing,

  Of things as they are, as the blue guitar

  After long strumming on certain nights

  Gives the touch of the senses, not of the hand,

  But the very senses as they touch

  The wind-gloss. Or as daylight comes,

  Like light in a mirroring of cliffs,

  Rising upward from a sea of ex.

  XIX

  That I may reduce the monster to

  Myself, and then may be myself

  In face of the monster, be more than part

  Of it, more than the monstrous player of

  One of its monstrous lutes, not be

  Alone, but reduce the monster and be,

  Two things, the two together as one,

  And play of the monster and of myself,

  Or better not of myself at all,

  But of that as its intelligence,

  Being the lion in the lute

  Before the lion locked in stone.

  XX

  What is there in life except one’s ideas,

  Good air, good friend, what is there in life?

  Is it ideas that I believe?

  Good air, my only friend, believe,

  Believe would be a brother full

  Of love, believe would be a friend,

  Friendlier than my only friend,

  Good air. Poor pale, poor pale guitar…

  XXI

  A substitute for all the gods:

  This self, not that gold self aloft,

  Alone, one’s shadow magnified,

  Lord of the body, looking down,

  As now and called most high,

  The shadow of Chocorua

  In an immenser heaven, aloft,

  Alone, lord of the land and lord

  Of the men that live in the land, high lord.

  One’s self and the mountains of one’s land,

  Without shadows, without magnificence,

  The flesh, the bone, the dirt, the stone.

  XXII

  Poetry is the subject of the poem,

  From this the poem issues and

  To this returns. Between the two,

  Between issue and return, there is

  An absence in reality,

  Things as they are. Or so we say.

  But are these separate? Is it

  An absence for the poem, which acquires

  Its true appearances there, sun’s green,

  Cloud’s red, earth feeling, sky that thinks?

  From these it takes. Perhaps it gives,

  In the universal intercourse.

  XXIII

  A few final solutions, like a duet

  With the undertaker: a voice in the clouds,

  Another on earth, the one a voice

  Of ether, the other smelling of drink,

  The voice of ether prevailing, the swell

  Of the undertaker’s song in the snow

  Apostrophizing wreaths, the voice

  In the clouds serene and final, next

  The grunted breath serene and final,

  The imagined and the real, thought

  And the truth, Dichtung und Wahrheit, all

  Confusion solved, as in a refrain

  One keeps on playing year by year,

  Concerning the nature of things as they are.

  XXIV

  A poem like a missal found

  In the mud, a missal for that young man,

  That scholar hungriest for that book,

  The very book, or, less, a page

  Or, at the least, a phrase, that phrase,

  A hawk of life, that latined phrase:

  To know; a missal for brooding-sight.

  To meet that hawk’s eye and to flinch

  Not at the eye but at the joy of it.

  I play. But this is what I think.

  XXV

  He held the world upon his nose

  And this-a-way he gave a fling.

  His robes and symbols, ai-yi-yi—

  And that-a-way he twirled the thing.

  Sombre as fir-trees, liquid cats

  Moved in the grass without a sound.

  They did not know the grass went round.

  The cats had cats and the grass turned gray

  And the world had worlds, ai, this-a-way:

  The grass turned green and the grass turned gray.

  And the nose is eternal, that-a-way.

  Things as they were, things as they are,

  Things as they will be by and by…

  A fat thumb beats out ai-yi-yi.

  XXVI

  The world washed in his imagination,

  The world was a shore, whether sound or form

  Or light, the relic of farewells,

  Rock, of valedictory echoings,

  To which his imagination returned,

  From which it sped, a bar in space,

  Sand heaped in the clouds, giant that fought

  Against the murderous alphabet:

  The swarm of thoughts, the swarm of dreams

  Of inaccessible Utopia.

  A mountainous music always seemed

  To be falling and to be passing away.

  XXVII

  It is the sea that whitens the roof.

  The sea drifts through the winter air.

  It is the sea that the north wind makes.

  The sea is in the falling snow.

  This gloom is the darkness of the sea.

  Geographers and philosophers,

  Regard. But for that salty cup,

  But for the icicles on the eaves—

  The sea is a form of ridicule.

  The iceberg settings satirize

  The demon that cannot be himself,

  That tours to shift the shifting scene.

  XXVIII

  I am a native in this world

  And think in it as a native thinks,

  Gesu, not native of a mind

  Thinking the thoughts I call my own,

  Native, a native in the world

  And like a native think in it.

  It could not be a mind, the wave

  In which the watery grasses flow

  And yet are fixed as a photograph,

  The wind in which the dead leaves blow.

  Here I inhale profounder strength

  And as I am, I speak and move

  And things are as I think they are

  And say they are on the blue guitar.

  XXIX

  In the cathedral, I sat there, and read,

  Alone, a lean Review and said,

  “These degustations in the vaults

  Oppose the past and the festival,

  What is beyond the cathedral, outside,

  Balances with nuptial song.

  So it is to sit and to balance things

  To and to and to the point of still,

  To say of one mask it is like,

  To say of another it is like,

  To know that the balance does not quite rest,

  That the mask is strange, however like.”

  The shapes are wrong and the sounds are false.

  The bells are the bellowing of bulls.

  Yet Franciscan don was never more

  Himself than in this fertile glass.

  XXX

  From this I shall evolve a man.

  This is his essence: the old fantoche

  Hanging his shawl upon the wind,

&nb
sp; Like something on the stage, puffed out,

  His strutting studied through centuries.

  At last, in spite of his manner, his eye

  A-cock at the cross-piece on a pole

  Supporting heavy cables, slung

  Through Oxidia, banal suburb,

  One-half of all its installments paid.

  Dew-dapper clapper-traps, blazing

  From crusty stacks above machines.

  Ecce, Oxidia is the seed

  Dropped out of this amber-ember pod,

  Oxidia is the soot of fire,

  Oxidia is Olympia.

  XXXI

  How long and late the pheasant sleeps…

  The employer and employee contend,

  Combat, compose their droll affair.

  The bubbling sun will bubble up,

  Spring sparkle and the cock-bird shriek.

  The employer and employee will hear

  And continue their affair. The shriek

  Will rack the thickets. There is no place,

  Here, for the lark fixed in the mind,

  In the museum of the sky. The cock

  Will claw sleep. Morning is not sun,

  It is this posture of the nerves,

  As if a blunted player clutched

  The nuances of the blue guitar.

  It must be this rhapsody or none,

  The rhapsody of things as they aré.

  XXXII

  Throw away the lights, the definitions,

  And say of what you see in the dark

  That it is this or that it is that,

  But do not use the rotted names.

  How should you walk in that space and know

  Nothing of the madness of space,

  Nothing of its jocular procreations?

  Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand

  Between you and the shapes you take

  When the crust of shape has been destroyed.

  You as you are? You are yourself.

  The blue guitar surprises you.

  XXXIII

  That generation’s dream, aviled

  In the mud, in Monday’s dirty light,

  That’s it, the only dream they knew,

  Time in its final block, not time

  To come, a wrangling of two dreams.

  Here is the bread of time to come,

  Here is its actual stone. The bread

  Will be our bread, the stone will be

  Our bed and we shall sleep by night.

  We shall forget by day, except

  The moments when we choose to play

  The imagined pine, the imagined jay.

  A THOUGHT REVOLVED

  I

  The Mechanical Optimist

  A lady dying of diabetes

  Listened to the radio,

  Catching the lesser dithyrambs.

  So heaven collects its bleating lambs.

  Her useless bracelets fondly fluttered,

  Paddling the melodic swirls,

  The idea of god no longer sputtered

  At the roots of her indifferent curls.

  The idea of the Alps grew large,

  Not yet, however, a thing to die in.

  It seemed serener just to die,

  To float off in the floweriest barge,

  Accompanied by the exegesis

  Of familiar things in a cheerful voice,

  Like the night before Christmas and all the carols.

  Dying lady, rejoice, rejoice!

  II

  Mystic Garden & Middling Beast

  The poet striding among the cigar stores,

  Ryan’s lunch, hatters, insurance and medicines,

  Denies that abstraction is a vice except

  To the fatuous. These are his infernal walls,

  A space of stone, of inexplicable base

  And peaks outsoaring possible adjectives.

  One man, the idea of man, that is the space,

  The true abstract in which he promenades.

  The era of the idea of man, the cloak

  And speech of Virgil dropped, that’s where he walks,

  That’s where his hymns come crowding, hero-hymns,

  Chorals for mountain voices and the moral chant,

  Happy rather than holy but happy-high,

  Day hymns instead of constellated rhymes,

  Hymns of the struggle of the idea of god

  And the idea of man, the mystic garden and

  The middling beast, the garden of paradise

  And he that created the garden and peopled it.

  III

  Romanesque Affabulation

  He sought an earthly leader who could stand

  Without panache, without cockade,

  Son only of man and sun of men,

  The outer captain, the inner saint,

  The pine, the pillar and the priest,

  The voice, the book, the hidden well,

  The faster’s feast and heavy-fruited star,

  The father, the beater of the rigid drums,

  He that at midnight touches the guitar,

  The solitude, the barrier, the Pole

  In Paris, celui qui chante et pleure,

  Winter devising summer in its breast,

  Summer assaulted, thundering, illumed,

  Shelter yet thrower of the summer spear,

  With all his attributes no god but man

  Of men whose heaven is in themselves,

  Or else whose hell, foamed with their blood

  And the long echo of their dying cry,

  A fate intoned, a death before they die,

  The race that sings and weeps and knows not why.

  IV

  The Leader

  Behold the moralist hidalgo

  Whose whore is Morning Star

  Dressed in metal, silk and stone,

  Syringa, cicada, his flea.

  In how severe a book he read,

  Until his nose grew thin and taut

  And knowledge dropped upon his heart

  Its pitting poison, half the night.

  He liked the nobler works of man,

  The gold façade round early squares,

  The bronzes liquid through gay light.

  He hummed to himself at such a plan.

  He sat among beggars wet with dew,

  Heard the dogs howl at barren bone,

  Sat alone, his great toe like a horn,

  The central flaw in the solar morn.

  THE MEN THAT ARE FALLING

  God and all angels sing the world to sleep,

  Now that the moon is rising in the heat

  And crickets are loud again in the grass. The moon

  Burns in the mind on lost remembrances.

  He lies down and the night wind blows upon him here.

  The bells grow longer. This is not sleep. This is desire.

  Ah! Yes, desire … this leaning on his bed,

  This leaning on his elbows on his bed,

  Staring, at midnight, at the pillow that is black

  In the catastrophic room … beyond despair,

  Like an intenser instinct. What is it he desires?

  But this he cannot know, the man that thinks,

  Yet life itself, the fulfilment of desire

  In the grinding ric-rac, staring steadily

  At a head upon the pillow in the dark,

  More than sudarium, speaking the speech

  Of absolutes, bodiless, a head

  Thick-lipped from riot and rebellious cries,

  The head of one of the men that are falling, placed

  Upon the pillow to repose and speak,

  Speak and say the immaculate syllables

  That he spoke only by doing what he did.

  God and all angels, this was his desire,

  Whose head lies blurring here, for this he died.

  Taste of the blood upon his martyred lips,

  O pensioners, O demagogues and pay-men!

  This death was his belief though d
eath is a stone.

  This man loved earth, not heaven, enough to die.

  The night wind blows upon the dreamer, bent

  Over words that are life’s voluble utterance.

  PARTS OF A WORLD

  PAROCHIAL THEME

  Long-tailed ponies go nosing the pine-lands,

  Ponies of Parisians shooting on the hill.

  The wind blows. In the wind, the voices

  Have shapes that are not yet fully themselves,