The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
Page 24
Of propositions about life. The human
Revery is a solitude in which
We compose these propositions, torn by dreams,
By the terrible incantations of defeats
And by the fear that defeats and dreams are one.
The whole race is a poet that writes down
The eccentric propositions of its fate.
THINKING OF A RELATION BETWEEN THE IMAGES OF METAPHORS
The wood-doves are singing along the Perkiomen.
The bass lie deep, still afraid of the Indians.
In the one ear of the fisherman, who is all
One ear, the wood-doves are singing a single song.
The bass keep looking ahead, upstream, in one
Direction, shrinking from the spit and splash
Of waterish spears. The fisherman is all
One eye, in which the dove resembles the dove.
There is one dove, one bass, one fisherman.
Yet coo becomes rou-coo, rou-coo. How close
To the unstated theme each variation comes…
In that one ear it might strike perfectly:
State the disclosure. In that one eye the dove
Might spring to sight and yet remain a dove.
The fisherman might be the single man
In whose breast, the dove, alighting, would grow still.
CHAOS IN MOTION AND NOT IN MOTION
Oh, that this lashing wind was something more
Than the spirit of Ludwig Richter…
The rain is pouring down. It is July.
There is lightning and the thickest thunder.
It is a spectacle. Scene 10 becomes 11,
In Series X, Act IV, et cetera.
People fall out of windows, trees tumble down,
Summer is changed to winter, the young grow old,
The air is full of children, statues, roofs
And snow. The theatre is spinning round,
Colliding with deaf-mute churches and optical trains.
The most massive sopranos are singing songs of scales.
And Ludwig Richter, turbulent Schlemihl,
Has lost the whole in which he was contained,
Knows desire without an object of desire,
All mind and violence and nothing felt.
He knows he has nothing more to think about,
Like the wind that lashes everything at once.
THE HOUSE WAS QUIET AND THE WORLD WAS CALM
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
CONTINUAL CONVERSATION WITH A SILENT MAN
The old brown hen and the old blue sky,
Between the two we live and die—
The broken cartwheel on the hill.
As if, in the presence of the sea,
We dried our nets and mended sail
And talked of never-ending things,
Of the never-ending storm of will,
One will and many wills, and the wind,
Of many meanings in the leaves,
Brought down to one below the eaves,
Link, of that tempest, to the farm,
The chain of the turquoise hen and sky
And the wheel that broke as the cart went by.
It is not a voice that is under the eaves.
It is not speech, the sound we hear
In this conversation, but the sound
Of things and their motion: the other man,
A turquoise monster moving round.
A WOMAN SINGS A SONG FOR A SOLDIER COME HOME
The wound kills that does not bleed.
It has no nurse nor kin to know
Nor kin to care.
And the man dies that does not fall.
He walks and dies. Nothing survives
Except what was,
Under the white clouds piled and piled
Like gathered-up forgetfulness,
In sleeping air.
The clouds are over the village, the town,
To which the walker speaks
And tells of his wound,
Without a word to the people, unless
One person should come by chance,
This man or that,
So much a part of the place, so little
A person he knows, with whom he might
Talk of the weather—
And let it go, with nothing lost,
Just out of the village, at its edge,
In the quiet there.
THE PEDIMENT OF APPEARANCE
Young men go walking in the woods,
Hunting for the great ornament,
The pediment of appearance.
They hunt for a form which by its form alone,
Without diamond—blazons or flashing or
Chains of circumstance,
By its form alone, by being right,
By being high, is the stone
For which they are looking:
The savage transparence. They go crying
The world is myself, life is myself,
Breathing as if they breathed themselves,
Full of their ugly lord,
Speaking the phrases that follow the sight
Of this essential ornament
In the woods, in this full-blown May,
The months of understanding. The pediment
Lifts up its heavy scowl before them.
BURGHERS OF PETTY DEATH
These two by the stone wall
Are a slight part of death.
The grass is still green.
But there is a total death,
A devastation, a death of great height
And depth, covering all surfaces,
Filling the mind.
These are the small townsmen of death,
A man and a woman, like two leaves
That keep clinging to a tree,
Before winter freezes and grows black—
Of great height and depth
Without any feeling, an imperium of quiet,
In which a wasted figure, with an instrument,
Propounds blank final music.
HUMAN ARRANGEMENT
Place-bound and time-bound in evening rain
And bound by a sound which does not change,
Except that it begins and ends,
Begins again and ends again—
Rain without change within or from
Without. In this place and in this time
And in this sound, which do not change,
In which the rain is all one thing,
In the sky, an imagined, wooden chair
Is the clear-point of an edifice,
Forced up from nothing, evening’s chair,
Blue-strutted curule, true—unreal,
The centre of transformations that
Transform for transformation’s self,
In a glitter that is a life, a gold
That is a being, a will, a fate.
THE GOOD MAN HAS NO SHAPE
Through centuries he lived in poverty.
God only was his only elegance.
Then generation by generation he grew
Stronger and freer, a li
ttle better off.
He lived each life because, if it was bad,
He said a good life would be possible.
At last the good life came, good sleep, bright fruit,
And Lazarus betrayed him to the rest,
Who killed him, sticking feathers in his flesh
To mock him. They placed with him in his grave
Sour wine to warn him, an empty book to read;
And over it they set a jagged sign,
Epitaphium to his death, which read,
The Good Man Has No Shape, as if they knew.
THE RED FERN
The large-leaved day grows rapidly,
And opens in this familiar spot
Its unfamiliar, difficult fern,
Pushing and pushing red after red.
There are doubles of this fern in clouds,
Less firm than the paternal flame,
Yet drenched with its identity,
Reflections and off-shoots, mimic-motes
And mist-mites, dangling seconds, grown
Beyond relation to the parent trunk:
The dazzling, bulging, brightest core,
The furiously burning father-fire…
Infant, it is enough in life
To speak of what you see. But wait
Until sight wakens the sleepy eye
And pierces the physical fix of things.
FROM THE PACKET OF ANACHARSIS
In his packet Anacharsis found the lines:
“The farm was fat and the land in which it —,
Seemed in the morning like a holiday.”
He had written them near Athens. The farm was white.
The buildings were of marble and stood in marble light.
It was his clarity that made the vista bright.
A subject for Puvis. He would compose
The scene in his gray-rose with violet rocks.
And Bloom would see what Puvis did, protest
And speak of the floridest reality…
In the punctual centre of all circles white
Stands truly. The circles nearest to it share
Its color, but less as they recede, impinged
By difference and then by definition
As a tone defines itself and separates
And the circles quicken and crystal colors come
And flare and Bloom with his vast accumulation
Stands and regards and repeats the primitive lines.
THE DOVE IN THE BELLY
The whole of appearance is a toy. For this,
The dove in the belly builds his nest and coos,
Selah, tempestuous bird. How is it that
The rivers shine and hold their mirrors up,
Like excellence collecting excellence?
How is it that the wooden trees stand up
And live and heap their panniers of green
And hold them round the sultry day? Why should
These mountains being high be, also, bright,
Fetched up with snow that never falls to earth?
And this great esplanade of corn, miles wide,
Is something wished for made effectual
And something more. And the people in costumes,
Though poor, though raggeder than ruin, have that
Within them right for terraces—oh, brave salut!
Deep dove, placate you in your hiddenness.
MOUNTAINS COVERED WITH CATS
The sea full of fishes in shoals, the woods that let
One seed alone grow wild, the railway-stops
In Russia at which the same statue of Stalin greets
The same railway passenger, the ancient tree
In the centre of its cones, the resplendent flights
Of red facsimiles through related trees,
White houses in villages, black communicants—
The catalogue is too commodious.
Regard the invalid personality
Instead, outcast, without the will to power
And impotent, like the imagination seeking
To propagate the imagination or like
War’s miracle begetting that of peace.
Freud’s eye was the microscope of potency.
By fortune, his gray ghost may meditate
The spirits of all the impotent dead, seen clear,
And quickly understand, without their flesh,
How truly they had not been what they were.
THE PREJUDICE AGAINST THE PAST
Day is the children’s friend.
It is Marianna’s Swedish cart.
It is that and a very big hat.
Confined by what they see,
Aquiline pedants treat the cart,
As one of the relics of the heart.
They treat the philosopher’s hat,
Left thoughtlessly behind,
As one of the relics of the mind…
Of day, then, children make
What aquiline pedants take
For souvenirs of time, lost time,
Adieux, shapes, images—
No, not of day, but of themselves,
Not of perpetual time.
And, therefore, aquiline pedants find
The philosopher’s hat to be part of the mind,
The Swedish cart to be part of the heart.
EXTRAORDINARY REFERENCES
The mother ties the hair-ribbons of the child
And she has peace. My Jacomyntje!
Your great-grandfather was an Indian fighter.
The cool sun of the Tulpehocken refers
To its barbed, barbarous rising and has peace.
These earlier dissipations of the blood
And brain, as the extraordinary references
Of ordinary people, places, things,
Compose us in a kind of eulogy.
My Jacomyntje! This first spring after the war,
In which your father died, still breathes for him
And breathes again for us a fragile breath.
In the inherited garden, a second-hand
Vertumnus creates an equilibrium.
The child’s three ribbons are in her plaited hair.
ATTEMPT TO DISCOVER LIFE
At San Miguel de los Baños,
The waitress heaped up black Hermosas
In the magnificence of a volcano.
Round them she spilled the roses
Of the place, blue and green, both streaked.
And white roses shaded emerald on petals
Out of the deadliest heat.
There entered a cadaverous person,
Who bowed and, bowing, brought, in her mantilla,
A woman brilliant and pallid-skinned,
Of fiery eyes and long thin arms.
She stood with him at the table,
Smiling and wetting her lips
In the heavy air.
The green roses drifted up from the table
In smoke. The blue petals became
The yellowing fomentations of effulgence,
Among fomentations of black bloom and of white bloom.
The cadaverous persons were dispelled.
On the table near which they stood
Two coins were lying—dos centavos.
A LOT OF PEOPLE BATHING IN A STREAM
It was like passing a boundary to dive
Into the sun-filled water, brightly leafed
And limbed and lighted out from bank to bank.
That’s how the stars shine during the day. There, then,
The yellow that was yesterday, refreshed,
Became to-day, among our children and
Ourselves, in the clearest green—well, call it green.
We bathed in yellow green and yellow blue
And in these comic colors dangled down,
Like their particular characters, addicts
To blotches, angular anonymids
Gulping for shape among the reeds. No doubt,
We were the appropriate conceptions,
less
Than creatures, of the sky between the banks,
The water flowing in the flow of space.
It was passing a boundary, floating without a head
And naked, or almost so, into the grotesque
Of being naked, or almost so, in a world
Of nakedness, in the company of the sun,
Good-fortuner of the grotesque, patroon,
A funny foreigner of meek address.
How good it was at home again at night
To prepare for bed, in the frame of the house, and move
Round the rooms, which do not ever seem to change…
CREDENCES OF SUMMER
I
Now in midsummer come and all fools slaughtered
And spring’s infuriations over and a long way
To the first autumnal inhalations, young broods
Are in the grass, the roses are heavy with a weight
Of fragrance and the mind lays by its trouble.