The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
Page 19
Jumps from the clouds or, from his window,
Sees the petty gildings on February…
The man-sun being hero rejects that
False empire … These are the works and pastimes
Of the highest self: he studies the paper
On the wall, the lemons on the table.
This is his day. With nothing lost, he
Arrives at the man-man as he wanted.
This is his night and meditation.
XVI
Each false thing ends. The bouquet of summer
Turns blue and on its empty table
It is stale and the water is discolored.
True autumn stands then in the doorway.
After the hero, the familiar
Man makes the hero artificial.
But was the summer false? The hero?
How did we come to think that autumn
Was the veritable season, that familiar
Man was the veritable man? So
Summer, jangling the savagest diamonds and
Dressed in its azure-doubled crimsons,
May truly bear its heroic fortunes
For the large, the solitary figure.
TRANSPORT TO SUMMER
GOD IS GOOD. IT IS A BEAUTIFUL NIGHT
Look round, brown moon, brown bird, as you rise to fly,
Look round at the head and zither
On the ground.
Look round you as you start to rise, brown moon,
At the book and shoe, the rotted rose
At the door.
This was the place to which you came last night,
Flew close to, flew to without rising away.
Now, again,
In your light, the head is speaking. It reads the book.
It becomes the scholar again, seeking celestial
Rendezvous,
Picking thin music on the rustiest string,
Squeezing the reddest fragrance from the stump
Of summer.
The venerable song falls from your fiery wings.
The song of the great space of your age pierces
The fresh night.
CERTAIN PHENOMENA OF SOUND
I
The cricket in the telephone is still.
A geranium withers on the window-sill.
Cat’s milk is dry in the saucer. Sunday song
Comes from the beating of the locust’s wings,
That do not beat by pain, but calendar,
Nor meditate the world as it goes round.
Someone has left for a ride in a balloon
Or in a bubble examines the bubble of air.
The room is emptier than nothingness.
Yet a spider spins in the left shoe under the bed—
And old John Rocket dozes on his pillow.
It is safe to sleep to a sound that time brings back.
II
So you’re home again, Redwood Roamer, and ready
To feast … Slice the mango, Naaman, and dress it
With white wine, sugar and lime juice. Then bring it,
After we’ve drunk the Moselle, to the thickest shade
Of the garden. We must prepare to hear the Roamer’s
Story … The sound of that slick sonata,
Finding its way from the house, makes music seem
To be a nature, a place in which itself
Is that which produces everything else, in which
The Roamer is a voice taller than the redwoods,
Engaged in the most prolific narrative,
A sound producing the things that are spoken.
III
Eulalia, I lounged on the hospital porch,
On the east, sister and nun, and opened wide
A parasol, which I had found, against
The sun. The interior of a parasol,
It is a kind of blank in which one sees.
So seeing, I beheld you walking, white,
Gold-shined by sun, perceiving as I saw
That of that light Eulalia was the name.
Then I, Semiramide, dark-syllabled,
Contrasting our two names, considered speech.
You were created of your name, the word
Is that of which you were the personage.
There is no life except in the word of it.
I write Semiramide and in the script
I am and have a being and play a part.
You are that white Eulalia of the name.
THE MOTIVE FOR METAPHOR
You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.
In the same way, you were happy in spring,
With the half colors of quarter-things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon—
The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed,
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be,
Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,
The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound—
Steel against intimation—the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.
GIGANTOMACHIA
They could not carry much, as soldiers.
There was no past in their forgetting,
No self in the mass: the braver being,
The body that could never be wounded,
The life that never would end, no matter
Who died, the being that was an abstraction,
A giant’s heart in the veins, all courage.
But to strip off the complacent trifles,
To expel the ever-present seductions,
To reject the script for its lack-tragic,
To confront with plainest eye the changes,
That was to look on what war magnified.
It was increased, enlarged, made simple,
Made single, made one. This was not denial.
Each man himself became a giant,
Tipped out with largeness, bearing the heavy
And the high, receiving out of others,
As from an inhuman elevation
And origin, an inhuman person,
A mask, a spirit, an accoutrement.
For soldiers, the new moon stretches twenty feet.
DUTCH GRAVES IN BUCKS COUNTY
Angry men and furious machines
Swarm from the little blue of the horizon
To the great blue of the middle height.
Men scatter throughout clouds.
The wheels are too large for any noise.
And you, my semblables, in sooty residence
Tap skeleton drums inaudibly.
There are shouts and voices.
There are men shuffling on foot in air.
Men are moving and marching
And shuffling lightly, with the heavy lightness
Of those that are marching, many together.
And you, my semblables—the old flag of Holland
Flutters in tiny darkness.
There are circles of weapons in the sun.
The air attends the brightened guns,
As if sounds were forming
Out of themselves, a saying,
An expressive on-dit, a profession.
And you, my semblables, are doubly killed
To be buried in desert and deserted earth.
The flags are natures newly found.
Rifles grow sharper on the sight.
There is a rumble of autumnal marching,
From which no soft sleeve relieves us.
Fate is the present desperado.
&nbs
p; And you, my semblables, are crusts that lie
In the shrivellings of your time and place.
There is a battering of the drums. The bugles
Cry loudly, cry out in the powerful heart.
A force gathers that will cry loudlier
Than the most metal music, loudlier,
Like an instinctive incantation.
And you, my semblables, in the total
Of remembrance share nothing of ourselves.
An end must come in a merciless triumph,
An end of evil in a profounder logic,
In a peace that is more than a refuge,
In the will of what is common to all men,
Spelled from spent living and spent dying.
And you, my semblables, in gaffer-green,
Know that the past is not part of the present.
There were other soldiers, other people,
Men came as the sun comes, early children
And late wanderers creeping under the barb of night,
Year, year and year, defeated at last and lost
In an ignorance of sleep with nothing won.
And you, my semblables, know that this time
Is not an early time that has grown late.
But these are not those rusted armies.
There are the lewdest and the lustiest,
The hullaballoo of health and have,
The much too many disinherited
In a storm of torn-up testaments.
And you, my semblables, know that your children
Are not your children, not your selves.
Who are the mossy cronies muttering,
Monsters antique and haggard with past thought?
What is this crackling of voices in the mind,
This pitter-patter of archaic freedom,
Of the thousands of freedoms except our own?
And you, my semblables, whose ecstasy
Was the glory of heaven in the wilderness—
Freedom is like a man who kills himself
Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife
Grows sharp in blood. The armies kill themselves,
And in their blood an ancient evil dies—
The action of incorrigible tragedy.
And you, my semblables, behold in blindness
That a new glory of new men assembles.
This is the pit of torment that placid end
Should be illusion, that the mobs of birth
Avoid our stale perfections, seeking out
Their own, waiting until we go
To picnic in the ruins that we leave.
So that the stars, my semblables, chimeres,
Shine on the very living of those alive.
These violent marchers of the present,
Rumbling along the autumnal horizon,
Under the arches, over the arches, in arcs
Of a chaos composed in more than order,
March toward a generation’s centre.
Time was not wasted in your subtle temples.
No: nor divergence made too steep to follow down.
NO POSSUM, NO SOP, NO TATERS
He is not here, the old sun,
As absent as if we were asleep.
The field is frozen. The leaves are dry.
Bad is final in this light.
In this bleak air the broken stalks
Have arms without hands. They have trunks
Without legs or, for that, without heads.
They have heads in which a captive cry
Is merely the moving of a tongue.
Snow sparkles like eyesight falling to earth,
Like seeing fallen brightly away.
The leaves hop, scraping on the ground.
It is deep January. The sky is hard.
The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.
It is in this solitude, a syllable,
Out of these gawky flitterings,
Intones its single emptiness,
The savagest hollow of winter-sound.
It is here, in this bad, that we reach
The last purity of the knowledge of good.
The crow looks rusty as he rises up.
Bright is the malice in his eye…
One joins him there for company,
But at a distance, in another tree.
SO-AND-SO RECLINING ON HER COUCH
On her side, reclining on her elbow.
This mechanism, this apparition,
Suppose we call it Projection A.
She floats in air at the level of
The eye, completely anonymous,
Born, as she was, at twenty-one,
Without lineage or language, only
The curving of her hip, as motionless gesture,
Eyes dripping blue, so much to learn.
If just above her head there hung,
Suspended in air, the slightest crown
Of Gothic prong and practick bright,
The suspension, as in solid space,
The suspending hand withdrawn, would be
An invisible gesture. Let this be called
Projection B. To get at the thing
Without gestures is to get at it as
Idea. She floats in the contention, the flux
Between the thing as idea and
The idea as thing. She is half who made her.
This is the final Projection, C.
The arrangement contains the desire of
The artist. But one confides in what has no
Concealed creator. One walks easily
The unpainted shore, accepts the world
As anything but sculpture. Good-bye,
Mrs. Pappadopoulos, and thanks.
CHOCORUA TO ITS NEIGHBOR
I
To speak quietly at such a distance, to speak
And to be heard is to be large in space,
That, like your own, is large, hence, to be part
Of sky, of sea, large earth, large air. It is
To perceive men without reference to their form.
II
The armies are forms in number, as cities are.
The armies are cities in movement. But a war
Between cities is a gesticulation of forms,
A swarming of number over number, not
One foot approaching, one uplifted arm.
III
At the end of night last night a crystal star,
The crystal-pointed star of morning, rose
And lit the snow to a light congenial
To this prodigious shadow, who then came
In an elemental freedom, sharp and cold.
IV
The feeling of him was the feel of day,
And of a day as yet unseen, in which
To see was to be. He was the figure in
A poem for Liadoff, the self of selves:
To think of him destroyed the body’s form.
V
He was a shell of dark blue glass, or ice,
Or air collected in a deep essay,
Or light embodied, or almost, a flash
On more than muscular shoulders, arms and chest,
Blue’s last transparence as it turned to black,
VI
The glitter of a being, which the eye
Accepted yet which nothing understood,
A fusion of night, its blue of the pole of blue
And of the brooding mind, fixed but for a slight
Illumination of movement as he breathed.
VII
He was as tall as a tree in the middle of
The night. The substance of his body seemed
Both substance and non-substance, luminous flesh
Or shapely fire: fire from an underworld,
Of less degree than flame and lesser shine.
VIII
Upon my top he breathed the pointed dark.
He was not man yet he was nothing else.
If in the mind, he vanished, taking the
re
The mind’s own limits, like a tragic thing
Without existence, existing everywhere.
IX
He breathed in crystal-pointed change the whole
Experience of night, as if he breathed
A consciousness from solitude, inhaled
A freedom out of silver-shaping size,
Against the whole experience of day.
X
The silver-shapeless, gold-encrusted size
Of daylight came while he sat thinking. He said,
“The moments of enlargement overlook
The enlarging of the simplest soldier’s cry
In what I am, as he falls. Of what I am,
XI
The cry is part. My solitaria
Are the meditations of a central mind.
I hear the motions of the spirit and the sound
Of what is secret becomes, for me, a voice
That is my own voice speaking in my ear.
XII
There lies the misery, the coldest coil
That grips the centre, the actual bite, that life
Itself is like a poverty in the space of life,
So that the flapping of wind around me here
Is something in tatters that I cannot hold.”