The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
Page 20
XIII
In spite of this, the gigantic bulk of him
Grew strong, as if doubt never touched his heart.
Of what was this the force? From what desire
And from what thinking did his radiance come?
In what new spirit had his body birth?
XIV
He was more than an external majesty,
Beyond the sleep of those that did not know,
More than a spokesman of the night to say
Now, time stands still. He came from out of sleep.
He rose because men wanted him to be.
XV
They wanted him by day to be, image,
But not the person, of their power, thought,
But not the thinker, large in their largeness, beyond
Their form, beyond their life, yet of themselves,
Excluding by his largeness their defaults.
XVI
Last night at the end of night his starry head,
Like the head of fate, looked out in darkness, part
Thereof and part desire and part the sense
Of what men are. The collective being knew
There were others like him safely under roof:
XVII
The captain squalid on his pillow, the great
Cardinal, saying the prayers of earliest day;
The stone, the categorical effigy;
And the mother, the music, the name; the scholar,
Whose green mind bulges with complicated hues:
XVIII
True transfigurers fetched out of the human mountain,
True genii for the diminished, spheres,
Gigantic embryos of populations,
Blue friends in shadows, rich conspirators,
Confiders and comforters and lofty kin.
XIX
To say more than human things with human voice,
That cannot be; to say human things with more
Than human voice, that, also, cannot be;
To speak humanly from the height or from the depth
Of human things, that is acutest speech.
XX
Now, I, Chocorua, speak of this shadow as
A human thing. It is an eminence,
But of nothing, trash of sleep that will disappear
With the special things of night, little by little,
In day’s constellation, and yet remain, yet be,
XXI
Not father, but bare brother, megalfrere,
Or by whatever boorish name a man
Might call the common self, interior fons.
And fond, the total man of glubbal glub,
Political tramp with an heraldic air,
XXII
Cloud-casual, metaphysical metaphor,
But resting on me, thinking in my snow,
Physical if the eye is quick enough,
So that, where he was, there is an enkindling, where
He is, the air changes and grows fresh to breathe.
XXIII
The air changes, creates and re-creates, like strength,
And to breathe is a fulfilling of desire,
A clearing, a detecting, a completing,
A largeness lived and not conceived, a space
That is an instant nature, brilliantly.
XXIV
Integration for integration, the great arms
Of the armies, the solid men, make big the fable.
This is their captain and philosopher,
He that is fortelleze, though he be
Hard to perceive and harder still to touch.
XXV
Last night at the end of night and in the sky,
The lesser night, the less than morning light,
Fell on him, high and cold, searching for what
Was native to him in that height, searching
The pleasure of his spirit in the cold.
XXVI
How singular he was as man, how large,
If nothing more than that, for the moment, large
In my presence, the companion of presences
Greater than mine, of his demanding, head
And, of human realizings, rugged roy…
POESIE ABRUTIE
The brooks are bristling in the field,
Now, brooks are bristling in the fields
And gelid Januar has gone to hell.
II
The water puddles puddles are
And ice is still in Februar.
It still is ice in Februar.
III
The figures of the past go cloaked.
They walk in mist and rain and snow
And go, go slowly, but they go.
IV
The greenhouse on the village green
Is brighter than the sun itself.
Cinerarias have a speaking sheen.
THE LACK OF REPOSE
A young man seated at his table
Holds in his hand a book you have never written
Staring at the secretions of the words as
They reveal themselves.
It is not midnight. It is mid-day,
The young man is well-disclosed, one of the gang,
Andrew Jackson Something. But this book
Is a cloud in which a voice mumbles.
It is a ghost that inhabits a cloud,
But a ghost for Andrew, not lean, catarrhal
And pallid. It is the grandfather he liked,
With an understanding compounded by death
And the associations beyond death, even if only
Time. What a thing it is to believe that
One understands, in the intense disclosures
Of a parent in the French sense.
And not yet to have written a book in which
One is already a grandfather and to have put there
A few sounds of meaning, a momentary end
To the complication, is good, is a good.
SOMNAMBULISMA
On an old shore, the vulgar ocean rolls
Noiselessly, noiselessly, resembling a thin bird,
That thinks of settling, yet never settles, on a nest.
The wings keep spreading and yet are never wings.
The claws keep scratching on the shale, the shallow shale,
The sounding shallow, until by water washed away.
The generations of the bird are all
By water washed away. They follow after.
They follow, follow, follow, in water washed away.
Without this bird that never settles, without
Its generations that follow in their universe,
The ocean, falling and falling on the hollow shore,
Would be a geography of the dead: not of that land
To which they may have gone, but of the place in which
They lived, in which they lacked a pervasive being,
In which no scholar, separately dwelling,
Poured forth the fine fins, the gawky beaks, the personalia,
Which, as a man feeling everything, were his.
CRUDE FOYER
Thought is false happiness: the idea
That merely by thinking one can,
Or may, penetrate, not may,
But can, that one is sure to be able—
That there lies at the end of thought
A foyer of the spirit in a landscape
Of the mind, in which we sit
And wear humanity’s bleak crown;
In which we read the critique of paradise
And say it is the work
Of a comedian, this critique;
In which we sit and breathe
An innocence of an absolute,
False happiness, since we know that we use
Only the eye as faculty, that the mind
Is the eye, and that this landscape of the mind
Is a landscape only of the eye; and that
We are ignorant men incapable
Of the le
ast, minor, vital metaphor, content,
At last, there, when it turns out to be here.
REPETITIONS OF A YOUNG CAPTAIN
I
A tempest cracked on the theatre. Quickly,
The wind beat in the roof and half the walls.
The ruin stood still in an external world.
It had been real. It was something overseas
That I remembered, something that I remembered
Overseas, that stood in an external world.
It had been real. It was not now. The rip
Of the wind and the glittering were real now,
In the spectacle of a new reality.
II
The people sat in the theatre, in the ruin,
As if nothing had happened. The dim actor spoke.
His hands became his feelings. His thick shape
Issued thin seconds glibly gapering.
Then faintly encrusted, a tissue of the moon
Walked toward him on the stage and they embraced.
They polished the embracings of a pair
Born old, familiar with the depths of the heart,
Like a machine left running, and running down.
It was a blue scene washing white in the rain,
Like something I remembered overseas.
It was something overseas that I remembered.
III
Millions of major men against their like
Make more than thunder’s rural rumbling. They make
The giants that each one of them becomes
In a calculated chaos: he that takes form
From the others, being larger than he was,
Accoutred in a little of the strength
That sweats the sun up on its morning way
To giant red, sweats up a giant sense
To the make-matter, matter-nothing mind,
Until this matter-makes in years of war.
This being in a reality beyond
The finikin spectres in the memory,
This elevation, in which he seems to be tall,
Makes him rise above the houses, looking down.
His route lies through an image in his mind:
My route lies through an image in my mind,
It is the route that milky millions find,
An image that leaves nothing much behind.
IV
If these were only words that I am speaking
Indifferent sounds and not the heraldic-ho
Of the clear sovereign that is reality,
Of the clearest reality that is sovereign,
How should I repeat them, keep repeating them,
As if they were desperate with a know-and-know,
Central responses to a central fear,
The adobe of the angels? Constantly,
At the railway station, a soldier steps away,
Sees a familiar building drenched in cloud
And goes to an external world, having
Nothing of place. There is no change of place
Nor of time. The departing soldier is as he is,
Yet in that form will not return. But does
He find another? The giant of sense remains
A giant without a body. If, as giant,
He shares a gigantic life, it is because
The gigantic has a reality of its own.
V
On a few words of what is real in the world
I nourish myself. I defend myself against
Whatever remains. Of what is real I say,
Is it the old, the roseate parent or
The bride come jingling, kissed and cupped, or else
The spirit and all ensigns of the self?
A few words, a memorandum voluble
Of the giant sense, the enormous harnesses
And writhing wheels of this world’s business,
The drivers in the wind-blows cracking whips,
The pulling into the sky and the setting there
Of the expanses that are mountainous rock and sea;
And beyond the days, beyond the slow-foot litters
Of the nights, the actual, universal strength,
Without a word of rhetoric—there it is.
A memorandum of the people sprung
From that strength, whose armies set their own expanses.
A few words of what is real or may be
Or of glistening reference to what is real,
The universe that supplements the manqué,
The soldier seeking his point between the two,
The organic consolation, the complete
Society of the spirit when it is
Alone, the half-arc hanging in mid-air
Composed, appropriate to the incomplete,
Supported by a half-arc in mid-earth.
Millions of instances of which I am one.
VI
And if it be theatre for theatre,
The powdered personals against the giants’ rage,
Blue and its deep inversions in the moon
Against gold whipped reddened in big-shadowed black,
Her vague “Secrete me from reality,”
His “That reality secrete itself,”
The choice is made. Green is the orator
Of our passionate height. He wears a tufted green,
And tosses green for those for whom green speaks.
Secrete us in reality. It is there
My orator. Let this giantness fall down
And come to nothing. Let the rainy arcs
And pathetic magnificences dry in the sky.
Secrete us in reality. Discover
A civil nakedness in which to be,
In which to bear with the exactest force
The precisions of fate, nothing fobbed off, nor changed
In a beau language without a drop of blood.
THE CREATIONS OF SOUND
If the poetry of X was music,
So that it came to him of its own,
Without understanding, out of the wall
Or in the ceiling, in sounds not chosen,
Or chosen quickly, in a freedom
That was their element, we should not know
That X is an obstruction, a man
Too exactly himself, and that there are words
Better without an author, without a poet,
Or having a separate author, a different poet,
An accretion from ourselves, intelligent
Beyond intelligence, an artificial man
At a distance, a secondary expositor,
A being of sound, whom one does not approach
Through any exaggeration. From him, we collect.
Tell X that speech is not dirty silence
Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.
It is more than an imitation for the ear.
He lacks this venerable complication.
His poems are not of the second part of life.
They do not make the visible a little hard
To see nor, reverberating, eke out the mind
On peculiar horns, themselves eked out
By the spontaneous particulars of sound.
We do not say ourselves like that in poems.
We say ourselves in syllables that rise
From the floor, rising in speech we do not speak.
HOLIDAY IN REALITY
I
It was something to see that their white was different,
Sharp as white paint in the January sun;
Something to feel that they needed another yellow,
Less Aix than Stockholm, hardly a yellow at all,
A vibrancy not to be taken for granted, from
A sun in an almost colorless, cold heaven.
They had known that there was not even a common speech,
Palabra of a common man who did not exist.
Why should they not know they had everything of their own
As each had a particular woman and her touch?
After all, they knew that to be real each had
To find for himself his earth, his sky, his sea.
And the words for them and the colors that they possessed.
It was impossible to breathe at Durand-Ruel’s.
II
The flowering Judas grows from the belly or not at all.
The breast is covered with violets. It is a green leaf.
Spring is umbilical or else it is not spring.
Spring is the truth of spring or nothing, a waste, a fake.
These trees and their argentines, their dark-spiced branches,
Grow out of the spirit or they are fantastic dust.
The bud of the apple is desire, the down-falling gold,
The catbird’s gobble in the morning half-awake—
These are real only if I make them so. Whistle
For me, grow green for me and, as you whistle and grow green,
Intangible arrows quiver and stick in the skin