The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

by Wallace Stevens

  The false roses—Compare the silent rose of the sun

  And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell,

  With this paper, this dust. That states the point.

  Messieurs,

  It is an artificial world. The rose

  Of paper is of the nature of its world.

  The sea is so many written words; the sky

  Is blue, clear, cloudy, high, dark, wide and round;

  The mountains inscribe themselves upon the walls.

  And, otherwise, the rainy rose belongs

  To naked men, to women naked as rain.

  Where is that summer warm enough to walk

  Among the lascivious poisons, clean of them,

  And in what covert may we, naked, be

  Beyond the knowledge of nakedness, as part

  Of reality, beyond the knowledge of what

  Is real, part of a land beyond the mind?

  Rain is an unbearable tyranny. Sun is

  A monster-maker, an eye, only an eye,

  A shapener of shapes for only the eye,

  Of things no better than paper things, of days

  That are paper days. The false and true are one.

  II

  The eye believes and its communion takes.

  The spirit laughs to see the eye believe

  And its communion take. And now of that.

  Let the Secretary for Porcelain observe

  That evil made magic, as in catastrophe,

  If neatly glazed, becomes the same as the fruit

  Of an emperor, the egg-plant of a prince.

  The good is evil’s last invention. Thus

  The maker of catastrophe invents the eye

  And through the eye equates ten thousand deaths

  With a single well-tempered apricot, or, say,

  An egg-plant of good air.

  My beards, attend

  To the laughter of evil: the fierce ricanery

  With the ferocious chu-chot-chu between, the sobs

  For breath to laugh the louder, the deeper gasps

  Uplifting the completest rhetoric

  Of sneers, the fugues commencing at the toes

  And ending at the finger-tips.… It is death

  That is ten thousand deaths and evil death.

  Be tranquil in your wounds. It is good death

  That puts an end to evil death and dies.

  Be tranquil in your wounds. The placating star

  Shall be the gentler for the death you die

  And the helpless philosophers say still helpful things.

  Plato, the reddened flower, the erotic bird.

  III

  The lean cats of the arches of the churches,

  That’s the old world. In the new, all men are priests.

  They preach and they are preaching in a land

  To be described. They are preaching in a time

  To be described. Evangelists of what?

  If they could gather their theses into one,

  Collect their thoughts together into one,

  Into a single thought, thus: into a queen,

  An intercessor by innate rapport,

  Or into a dark-blue king, un roi tonnerre,

  Whose merely being was his valiance,

  Panjandrum and central heart and mind of minds—

  If they could! Or is it the multitude of thoughts,

  Like insects in the depths of the mind, that kill

  The single thought? The multitudes of men

  That kill the single man, starvation’s head,

  One man, their bread and their remembered wine?

  The lean cats of the arches of the churches

  Bask in the sun in which they feel transparent,

  As if designed by X, the per-noble master.

  They have a sense of their design and savor

  The sunlight. They bear brightly the little beyond

  Themselves, the slightly unjust drawing that is

  Their genius: the exquisite errors of time.

  IV

  On an early Sunday in April, a feeble day,

  He felt curious about the winter hills

  And wondered about the water in the lake.

  It had been cold since December. Snow fell, first,

  At New Year and, from then until April, lay

  On everything. Now it had melted, leaving

  The gray grass like a pallet, closely pressed;

  And dirt. The wind blew in the empty place.

  The winter wind blew in an empty place—

  There was that difference between the and an,

  The difference between himself and no man,

  No man that heard a wind in an empty place.

  It was time to be himself again, to see

  If the place, in spite of its witheredness, was still

  Within the difference. He felt curious

  Whether the water was black and lashed about

  Or whether the ice still covered the lake. There was still

  Snow under the trees and on the northern rocks,

  The dead rocks not the green rocks, the live rocks. If,

  When he looked, the water ran up the air or grew white

  Against the edge of the ice, the abstraction would

  Be broken and winter would be broken and done,

  And being would be being himself again,

  Being, becoming seeing and feeling and self,

  Black water breaking into reality.

  V

  The law of chaos is the law of ideas,

  Of improvisations and seasons of belief.

  Ideas are men. The mass of meaning and

  The mass of men are one. Chaos is not

  The mass of meaning. It is three or four

  Ideas or, say, five men or, possibly, six.

  In the end, these philosophic assassins pull

  Revolvers and shoot each other. One remains.

  The mass of meaning becomes composed again.

  He that remains plays on an instrument

  A good agreement between himself and night,

  A chord between the mass of men and himself,

  Far, far beyond the putative canzones

  Of love and summer. The assassin sings

  In chaos and his song is a consolation.

  It is the music of the mass of meaning.

  And yet it is a singular romance,

  This warmth in the blood-world for the pure idea,

  This inability to find a sound,

  That clings to the mind like that right sound, that song

  Of the assassin that remains and sings

  In the high imagination, triumphantly.

  VI

  Of systematic thinking … Ercole,

  O, skin and spine and hair of you, Ercole,

  Of what do you lie thinking in your cavern?

  To think it is to think the way to death…

  That other one wanted to think his way to life,

  Sure that the ultimate poem was the mind,

  Or of the mind, or of the mind in these

  Elysia, these days, half earth, half mind;

  Half sun, half thinking of the sun; half sky,

  Half desire for indifference about the sky.

  He, that one, wanted to think his way to life,

  To be happy because people were thinking to be.

  They had to think it to be. He wanted that,

  To face the weather and be unable to tell

  How much of it was light and how much thought,

  In these Elysia, these origins,

  This single place in which we are and stay,

  Except for the images we make of it,

  And for it, and by which we think the way,

  And, being unhappy, talk of happiness

  And, talking of happiness, know that it means

  That the mind is the end and must be satisfied.

  It cannot be half earth, half mind; half sun,

  Half thinking; until th
e mind has been satisfied,

  Until, for him, his mind is satisfied.

  Time troubles to produce the redeeming thought.

  Sometimes at sleepy mid-days it succeeds,

  Too vaguely that it be written in character.

  VII

  To have satisfied the mind and turn to see,

  (That being as much belief as we may have,)

  And turn to look and say there is no more

  Than this, in this alone I may believe,

  Whatever it may be; then one’s belief

  Resists each past apocalypse, rejects

  Ceylon, wants nothing from the sea, la belle

  Aux crinolines, smears out mad mountains.

  What

  One believes is what matters. Ecstatic identities

  Between one’s self and the weather and the things

  Of the weather are the belief in one’s element,

  The casual reunions, the long-pondered

  Surrenders, the repeated sayings that

  There is nothing more and that it is enough

  To believe in the weather and in the things and men

  Of the weather and in one’s self, as part of that

  And nothing more. So that if one went to the moon,

  Or anywhere beyond, to a different element,

  One would be drowned in the air of difference,

  Incapable of belief, in the difference.

  And then returning from the moon, if one breathed

  The cold evening, without any scent or the shade

  Of any woman, watched the thinnest light

  And the most distant, single color, about to change,

  And naked of any illusion, in poverty,

  In the exactest poverty, if then

  One breathed the cold evening, the deepest inhalation

  Would come from that return to the subtle centre.

  VIII

  We live in a camp … Stanzas of final peace

  Lie in the heart’s residuum … Amen.

  But would it be amen, in choirs, if once

  In total war we died and after death

  Returned, unable to die again, fated

  To endure thereafter every mortal wound,

  Beyond a second death, as evil’s end?

  It is only that we are able to die, to escape

  The wounds. Yet to lie buried in evil earth,

  If evil never ends, is to return

  To evil after death, unable to die

  Again and fated to endure beyond

  Any mortal end. The chants of final peace

  Lie in the heart’s residuum.

  How can

  We chant if we live in evil and afterward

  Lie harshly buried there?

  If earth dissolves

  Its evil after death, it dissolves it while

  We live. Thence come the final chants, the chants

  Of the brooder seeking the acutest end

  Of speech: to pierce the heart’s residuum

  And there to find music for a single line,

  Equal to memory, one line in which

  The vital music formulates the words.

  Behold the men in helmets borne on steel,

  Discolored, how they are going to defeat.

  MONTRACHET-LE-JARDIN

  What more is there to love than I have loved?

  And if there be nothing more, O bright, O bright,

  The chick, the chidder-barn and grassy chives

  And great moon, cricket-impresario,

  And, hoy, the impopulous purple-plated past,

  Hoy, hoy, the blue bulls kneeling down to rest.

  Chome! clicks the clock, if there be nothing more.

  But if, but if there be something more to love,

  Something in now a senseless syllable,

  A shadow in the mind, a flourisher

  Of sounds resembling sounds, efflorisant,

  Approaching the feelings or come down from them,

  These other shadows, not in the mind, players

  Of aphonies, tuned in from zero and

  Beyond, futura’s fuddle-fiddling lumps,

  But if there be something more to love, amen,

  Amen to the feelings about familiar things,

  The blessed regal dropped in daggers’ dew,

  Amen to thought, our singular skeleton,

  Salt-flicker, amen to our accustomed cell,

  The moonlight in the cell, words on the wall.

  To-night, night’s undeciphered murmuring

  Comes close to the prisoner’s ear, becomes a throat

  The hand can touch, neither green bronze nor marble,

  The hero’s throat in which the words are spoken,

  From which the chant comes close upon the ear,

  Out of the hero’s being, the deliverer

  Delivering the prisoner by his words,

  So that the skeleton in the moonlight sings,

  Sings of an heroic world beyond the cell,

  No, not believing, but to make the cell

  A hero’s world in which he is the hero.

  Man must become the hero of his world.

  The salty skeleton must dance because

  He must, in the aroma of summer nights,

  Licentious violet and lascive rose,

  Midsummer love and softest silences,

  Weather of night creatures, whistling all day, too,

  And echoing rhetorics more than our own.

  He hears the earliest poems of the world

  In which man is the hero. He hears the words,

  Before the speaker’s youngest breath is taken!

  Fear never the brute clouds nor winter-stop

  And let the water-belly of ocean roar,

  Nor feel the x malisons of other men,

  Since in the hero-land to which we go,

  A little nearer by each multitude,

  To which we come as into bezeled plain,

  The poison in the blood will have been purged,

  An inner miracle and sun-sacrament,

  One of the major miracles, that fall

  As apples fall, without astronomy,

  One of the sacraments between two breaths,

  Magical only for the change they make.

  The skeleton said it is a question of

  The naked man, the naked man as last

  And tallest hero and plus gaudiest vir.

  Consider how the speechless, invisible gods

  Ruled us before, from over Asia, by

  Our merest apprehension of their will.

  There must be mercy in Asia and divine

  Shadows of scholars bent upon their books,

  Divine orations from lean sacristans

  Of the good, speaking of good in the voice of men.

  All men can speak of it in the voice of gods.

  But to speak simply of good is like to love,

  To equate the root-man and the super-man,

  The root-man swarming, tortured by his mass,

  The super-man friseured, possessing and possessed.

  A little while of Terra Paradise

  I dreamed, of autumn rivers, silvas green,

  Of sanctimonious mountains high in snow,

  But in that dream a heavy difference

  Kept waking and a mournful sense sought out,

  In vain, life’s season or death’s element.

  Bastard chateaux and smoky demoiselles,

  No more. I can build towers of my own,

  There to behold, there to proclaim, the grace

  And free requiting of responsive fact,

  To project the naked man in a state of fact,

  As acutest virtue and ascetic trove.

  Item: The cocks crow and the birds cry and

  The sun expands, like a repetition on

  One string, an absolute, not varying

  Toward an inaccessible, pure sound.

  Item: The wind is never rounding O

  And, imag
eless, it is itself the most,

  Mouthing its constant smatter throughout space.

  Item: The green fish pensive in green reeds

  Is an absolute. Item: The cataracts

  As facts fall like rejuvenating rain,

  Fall down through nakedness to nakedness,

  To the auroral creature musing in the mind.

  Item: Breathe, breathe upon the centre of

  The breath life’s latest, thousand senses.

  But let this one sense be the single main.

  And yet what good were yesterday’s devotions?

  I affirm and then at midnight the great cat

  Leaps quickly from the fireside and is gone.

  THE NEWS AND THE WEATHER

  I

  The blue sun in his red cockade

  Walked the United States today,

  Taller than any eye could see,

  Older than any man could be.

  He caught the flags and the picket-lines

  Of people, round the auto-works:

  His manner slickened them. He milled

  In the rowdy serpentines. He drilled.

  His red cockade topped off a parade.

  His manner took what it could find,

  In the greenish greens he flung behind

  And the sound of pianos in his mind.

  II

  Solange, the magnolia to whom I spoke,

  A nigger tree and with a nigger name,

  To which I spoke, near which I stood and spoke,

  I am Solange, euphonious bane, she said.

  I am a poison at the winter’s end,

  Taken with withered weather, crumpled clouds,