The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

by Wallace Stevens

  In flat appearance we should be and be,

  Except for delicate clinkings not explained.

  These are the actual seemings that we see,

  Hear, feel and know. We feel and know them so.

  III

  There are potential seemings, arrogant

  To be, as on the youngest poet’s page,

  Or in the dark musician, listening

  To hear more brightly the contriving chords.

  There are potential seemings turbulent

  In the death of a soldier, like the utmost will,

  The more than human commonplace of blood,

  The breath that gushes upward and is gone,

  And another breath emerging out of death,

  That speaks for him such seemings as death gives.

  There might be, too, a change immenser than

  A poet’s metaphors in which being would

  Come true, a point in the fire of music where

  Dazzle yields to a clarity and we observe,

  And observing is completing and we are content,

  In a world that shrinks to an immediate whole,

  That we do not need to understand, complete

  Without secret arrangements of it in the mind.

  There might be in the curling-out of spring

  A purple-leaping element that forth

  Would froth the whole heaven with its seeming-so,

  The intentions of a mind as yet unknown,

  The spirit of one dwelling in a seed,

  Itself that seed’s ripe, unpredictable fruit.

  Things are as they seemed to Calvin or to Anne

  Of England, to Pablo Neruda in Ceylon,

  To Nietzsche in Basel, to Lenin by a lake.

  But the integrations of the past are like

  A Museo Olimpico, so much

  So little, our affair, which is the affair

  Of the possible: seemings that are to be,

  Seemings that it is possible may be.

  IV

  Nietzsche in Basel studied the deep pool

  Of these discolorations, mastering

  The moving and the moving of their forms

  In the much-mottled motion of blank time.

  His revery was the deepness of the pool,

  The very pool, his thoughts the colored forms,

  The eccentric souvenirs of human shapes,

  Wrapped in their seemings, crowd on curious crowd,

  In a kind of total affluence, all first,

  All final, colors subjected in revery

  To an innate grandiose, an innate light,

  The sun of Nietzsche gildering the pool,

  Yes: gildering the swarm-like manias

  In perpetual revolution, round and round…

  Lenin on a bench beside a lake disturbed

  The swans. He was not the man for swans.

  The slouch of his body and his look were not

  In suavest keeping. The shoes, the clothes, the hat

  Suited the decadence of those silences,

  In which he sat. All chariots were drowned. The swans

  Moved on the buried water where they lay.

  Lenin took bread from his pocket, scattered it—

  The swans fled outward to remoter reaches,

  As if they knew of distant beaches; and were

  Dissolved. The distances of space and time

  Were one and swans far off were swans to come.

  The eye of Lenin kept the far-off shapes.

  His mind raised up, down-drowned, the chariots.

  And reaches, beaches, tomorrow’s regions became

  One thinking of apocalyptic legions.

  V

  If seeming is description without place,

  The spirit’s universe, then a summer’s day,

  Even the seeming of a summer’s day,

  Is description without place. It is a sense

  To which we refer experience, a knowledge

  Incognito, the column in the desert,

  On which the dove alights. Description is

  Composed of a sight indifferent to the eye.

  It is an expectation, a desire,

  A palm that rises up beyond the sea,

  A little different from reality:

  The difference that we make in what we see

  And our memorials of that difference,

  Sprinklings of bright particulars from the sky.

  The future is description without place,

  The categorical predicate, the arc.

  It is a wizened starlight growing young,

  In which old stars are planets of morning, fresh

  In the brilliantest descriptions of new day,

  Before it comes, the just anticipation

  Of the appropriate creatures, jubilant,

  The forms that are attentive in thin air.

  VI

  Description is revelation. It is not

  The thing described, nor false facsimile.

  It is an artificial thing that exists,

  In its own seeming, plainly visible,

  Yet not too closely the double of our lives,

  Intenser than any actual life could be,

  A text we should be born that we might read,

  More explicit than the experience of sun

  And moon, the book of reconciliation,

  Book of a concept only possible

  In description, canon central in itself,

  The thesis of the plentifullest John.

  VII

  Thus the theory of description matters most.

  It is the theory of the word for those

  For whom the word is the making of the world,

  The buzzing world and lisping firmament.

  It is a world of words to the end of it,

  In which nothing solid is its solid self.

  As, men make themselves their speech: the hard hidalgo

  Lives in the mountainous character of his speech;

  And in that mountainous mirror Spain acquires

  The knowledge of Spain and of the hidalgo’s hat—

  A seeming of the Spaniard, a style of life,

  The invention of a nation in a phrase,

  In a description hollowed out of hollow-bright,

  The artificer of subjects still half night.

  It matters, because everything we say

  Of the past is description without place, a cast

  Of the imagination, made in sound;

  And because what we say of the future must portend,

  Be alive with its own seemings, seeming to be

  Like rubies reddened by rubies reddening.

  TWO TALES OF LIADOFF

  I

  Do you remember how the rocket went on

  And on, at night, exploding finally

  In an ovation of resplendent forms—

  Ovation on ovation of large blue men

  In pantaloons of fire and of women hatched,

  Like molten citizens of the vacuum?

  Do you remember the children there like wicks,

  That constantly sparkled their small gold? The town

  Had crowded into the rocket and touched the fuse.

  That night, Liadoff, a long time after his death,

  At a piano in a cloud sat practicing,

  On a black piano practiced epi-tones.

  Do you remember what the townsmen said,

  As they fell down, as they heard Liadoff’s cloud

  And its tragical, its haunted arpeggios?

  And is it true that what they said, as they fell,

  Was repeated by Liadoff in a narration

  Of incredible colors ex, ex and ex and out?

  II

  The feeling of Liadoff was changed. It is

  The instant of the change that was the poem,

  When the cloud pressed suddenly the whole return

  From thought, like a violent pulse in the cloud itself,

  As if Liadoff no l
onger remained a ghost

  And, being straw, turned green, lived backward, shared

  The fantastic fortune of fantastic blood,

  Until his body smothered him, until

  His being felt the need of soaring, the need

  Of air … But then that cloud, that piano placed

  Just where it was, oh beau caboose … It was part

  Of the instant to perceive, after the shock,

  That the rocket was only an inferior cloud.

  There was no difference between the town

  And him. Both wanted the same thing. Both sought

  His epi-tones, the colors of the ear,

  The sounds that soon become a voluble speech—

  Voluble but archaic and hard to hear.

  ANALYSIS OF A THEME

  THEME

  How happy I was the day I told the young Blandina of three-legged giraffes…

  ANALYSIS

  In the conscious world, the great clouds

  Potter in the summer sky.

  It is a province—

  Of ugly, subconscious time, in which

  There is no beautiful eye

  And no true tree,

  There being no subconscious place,

  Only Indyterranean

  Resemblances

  Of place: time’s haggard mongrels.

  Yet in time’s middle deep,

  In its abstract motion,

  Its immaterial monsters move,

  Without physical pedantry

  Or any name.

  Invisible, they move and are,

  Not speaking worms, nor birds

  Of mutable plume,

  Pure coruscations, that lie beyond

  The imagination, intact

  And unattained,

  Even in Paris, in the Gardens

  Of Acclimatization,

  On a holiday.

  The knowledge of bright-ethered things

  Bears us toward time, on its

  Perfective wings.

  We enjoy the ithy oonts and long-haired

  Plomets, as the Herr Gott

  Enjoys his comets.

  LATE HYMN FROM THE MYRRH-MOUNTAIN

  Unsnack your snood, madanna, for the stars

  Are shining on all brows of Neversink.

  Already the green bird of summer has flown

  Away. The night-flies acknowledge these planets,

  Predestined to this night, this noise and the place

  Of summer. Tomorrow will look like today,

  Will appear like it. But it will be an appearance,

  A shape left behind, with like wings spreading out,

  Brightly empowered with like colors, swarmingly,

  But not quite molten, not quite the fluid thing,

  A little changed by tips of artifice, changed

  By the glints of sound from the grass. These are not

  The early constellations, from which came the first

  Illustrious intimations—uncertain love,

  The knowledge of being, sense without sense of time.

  Take the diamonds from your hair and lay them down.

  The deer-grass is thin. The timothy is brown.

  The shadow of an external world comes near.

  MAN CARRYING THING

  The poem must resist the intelligence

  Almost successfully. Illustration:

  A brune figure in winter evening resists

  Identity. The thing he carries resists

  The most necessitous sense. Accept them, then,

  As secondary (parts not quite perceived

  Of the obvious whole, uncertain particles

  Of the certain solid, the primary free from doubt,

  Things floating like the first hundred flakes of snow

  Out of a storm we must endure all night,

  Out of a storm of secondary things),

  A horror of thoughts that suddenly are real.

  We must endure our thoughts all night, until

  The bright obvious stands motionless in cold.

  PIECES

  Tinsel in February, tinsel in August.

  There are things in a man besides his reason.

  Come home, wind, he kept crying and crying.

  Snow glistens in its instant in the air,

  Instant of millefiori bluely magnified—

  Come home, wind, he said as he climbed the stair—

  Crystal on crystal until crystal clouds

  Become an over-crystal out of ice,

  Exhaling these creations of itself.

  There is a sense in sounds beyond their meaning.

  The tinsel of August falling was like a flame

  That breathed on ground, more blue than red, more red

  Than green, fidgets of all-related fire.

  The wind is like a dog that runs away.

  But it is like a horse. It is like motion

  That lives in space. It is a person at night,

  A member of the family, a tie,

  An ethereal cousin, another milleman.

  A COMPLETELY NEW SET OF OBJECTS

  From a Schuylkill in mid-earth there came emerging

  Flotillas, willed and wanted, bearing in them

  Shadows of friends, of those he knew, each bringing

  From the water in which he believed and out of desire

  Things made by mid-terrestrial, mid-human

  Makers without knowing, or intending, uses.

  These figures verdant with time’s buried verdure

  Came paddling their canoes, a thousand thousand,

  Carrying such shapes, of such alleviation,

  That the beholder knew their subtle purpose,

  Knew well the shapes were the exactest shaping

  Of a vast people old in meditation…

  Under Tinicum or small Cohansey,

  The fathers of the makers may lie and weather.

  ADULT EPIGRAM

  The romance of the precise is not the elision

  Of the tired romance of imprecision.

  It is the ever-never-changing same,

  An appearance of Again, the diva-dame.

  TWO VERSIONS OF THE SAME POEM

  That Which Cannot Be Fixed

  I

  Once more he turned to that which could not be fixed.

  By the sea, insolid rock, stentor, and said:

  Lascar, is there a body, turbulent

  With time, in wavering water lies, swollen

  With thought, through which it cannot see? Does it

  Lie lengthwise like the cloud of sleep, not quite

  Reposed? And does it have a puissant heart

  To toll its pulses, vigors of its self?

  Lascar, and water-carcass never-named,

  These vigors make, thrice-triple-syllabled,

  The difficult images of possible shapes,

  That cannot now be fixed. Only there is

  A beating and a beating in the centre of

  The sea, a strength that tumbles everywhere,

  Like more and more becoming less and less,

  Like space dividing its blue and by division

  Being changed from space to the sailor’s metier,

  Or say from that which was conceived to that

  Which was realized, like reason’s constant ruin.

  Sleep deep, good eel, in your perverse marine.

  II

  The human ocean beats against this rock

  Of earth, rises against it, tide by tide,

  Continually. And old John Zeller stands

  On his hill, watching the rising and falling, and says:

  Of what are these the creatures, what element

  Or—yes: what elements, unreconciled

  Because there is no golden solvent here?

  If they were creatures of the sea alone,

  But singular, they would, like water, scale

  The uptopping top and tip of things, borne up

  By the cadaver of these caverns, half-asle
ep.

  But if they are of sea, earth, sky—water

  And fire and air and things not discomposed

  From ignorance, not an undivided whole,

  It is an ocean of watery images

  And shapes of fire, and wind that bears them down.

  Perhaps these forms are seeking to escape

  Cadaverous undulations. Rest, old mould…

  MEN MADE OUT OF WORDS

  What should we be without the sexual myth,

  The human revery or poem of death?

  Castratos of moon-mash—Life consists