The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

by Wallace Stevens

  Now the mind lays by its trouble and considers.

  The fidgets of remembrance come to this.

  This is the last day of a certain year

  Beyond which there is nothing left of time.

  It comes to this and the imagination’s life.

  There is nothing more inscribed nor thought nor felt

  And this must comfort the heart’s core against

  Its false disasters—these fathers standing round,

  These mothers touching, speaking, being near,

  These lovers waiting in the soft dry grass.

  II

  Postpone the anatomy of summer, as

  The physical pine, the metaphysical pine.

  Let’s see the very thing and nothing else.

  Let’s see it with the hottest fire of sight.

  Burn everything not part of it to ash.

  Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky

  Without evasion by a single metaphor.

  Look at it in its essential barrenness

  And say this, this is the centre that I seek.

  Fix it in an eternal foliage

  And fill the foliage with arrested peace,

  Joy of such permanence, right ignorance

  Of change still possible. Exile desire

  For what is not. This is the barrenness

  Of the fertile thing that can attain no more.

  III

  It is the natural tower of all the world,

  The point of survey, green’s green apogee,

  But a tower more precious than the view beyond,

  A point of survey squatting like a throne,

  Axis of everything, green’s apogee

  And happiest folk-land, mostly marriage-hymns.

  It is the mountain on which the tower stands,

  It is the final mountain. Here the sun,

  Sleepless, inhales his proper air, and rests.

  This is the refuge that the end creates.

  It is the old man standing on the tower,

  Who reads no book. His ruddy ancientness

  Absorbs the ruddy summer and is appeased,

  By an understanding that fulfils his age,

  By a feeling capable of nothing more.

  IV

  One of the limits of reality

  Presents itself in Oley when the hay,

  Baked through long days, is piled in mows. It is

  A land too ripe for enigmas, too serene.

  There the distant fails the clairvoyant eye

  And the secondary senses of the ear

  Swarm, not with secondary sounds, but choirs,

  Not evocations but last choirs, last sounds

  With nothing else compounded, carried full,

  Pure rhetoric of a language without words.

  Things stop in that direction and since they stop

  The direction stops and we accept what is

  As good. The utmost must be good and is

  And is our fortune and honey hived in the trees

  And mingling of colors at a festival.

  V

  One day enriches a year. One woman makes

  The rest look down. One man becomes a race,

  Lofty like him, like him perpetual.

  Or do the other days enrich the one?

  And is the queen humble as she seems to be,

  The charitable majesty of her whole kin?

  The bristling soldier, weather-foxed, who looms

  In the sunshine is a filial form and one

  Of the land’s children, easily born, its flesh,

  Not fustian. The more than casual blue

  Contains the year and other years and hymns

  And people, without souvenir. The day

  Enriches the year, not as embellishment.

  Stripped of remembrance, it displays its strength—

  The youth, the vital son, the heroic power.

  VI

  The rock cannot be broken. It is the truth.

  It rises from land and sea and covers them.

  It is a mountain half way green and then,

  The other immeasurable half, such rock

  As placid air becomes. But it is not

  A hermit’s truth nor symbol in hermitage.

  It is the visible rock, the audible,

  The brilliant mercy of a sure repose,

  On this present ground, the vividest repose,

  Things certain sustaining us in certainty.

  It is the rock of summer, the extreme,

  A mountain luminous half way in bloom

  And then half way in the extremest light

  Of sapphires flashing from the central sky,

  As if twelve princes sat before a king.

  VII

  Far in the woods they sang their unreal songs,

  Secure. It was difficult to sing in face

  Of the object. The singers had to avert themselves

  Or else avert the object. Deep in the woods

  They sang of summer in the common fields.

  They sang desiring an object that was near,

  In face of which desire no longer moved,

  Nor made of itself that which it could not find…

  Three times the concentred self takes hold, three times

  The thrice concentred self, having possessed

  The object, grips it in savage scrutiny,

  Once to make captive, once to subjugate

  Or yield to subjugation, once to proclaim

  The meaning of the capture, this hard prize,

  Fully made, fully apparent, fully found.

  VIII

  The trumpet of morning blows in the clouds and through

  The sky. It is the visible announced,

  It is the more than visible, the more

  Than sharp, illustrious scene. The trumpet cries

  This is the successor of the invisible.

  This is its substitute in stratagems

  Of the spirit. This, in sight and memory,

  Must take its place, as what is possible

  Replaces what is not. The resounding cry

  Is like ten thousand tumblers tumbling down

  To share the day. The trumpet supposes that

  A mind exists, aware of division, aware

  Of its cry as clarion, its diction’s way

  As that of a personage in a multitude:

  Man’s mind grown venerable in the unreal.

  IX

  Fly low, cock bright, and stop on a bean pole. Let

  Your brown breast redden, while you wait for warmth.

  With one eye watch the willow, motionless.

  The gardener’s cat is dead, the gardener gone

  And last year’s garden grows salacious weeds.

  A complex of emotions falls apart,

  In an abandoned spot. Soft, civil bird,

  The decay that you regard: of the arranged

  And of the spirit of the arranged, douceurs,

  Tristesses, the fund of life and death, suave bush

  And polished beast, this complex falls apart.

  And on your bean pole, it may be, you detect

  Another complex of other emotions, not

  So soft, so civil, and you make a sound,

  Which is not part of the listener’s own sense.

  X

  The personae of summer play the characters

  Of an inhuman author, who meditates

  With the gold bugs, in blue meadows, late at night.

  He does not hear his characters talk. He sees

  Them mottled, in the moodiest costumes,

  Of blue and yellow, sky and sun, belted

  And knotted, sashed and seamed, half pales of red,

  Half pales of green, appropriate habit for

  The huge decorum, the manner of the time,

  Part of the mottled mood of summer’s whole,

  In which the characters speak because they want

  To speak, the fat, the roseate c
haracters,

  Free, for a moment, from malice and sudden cry,

  Complete in a completed scene, speaking

  Their parts as in a youthful happiness.

  A PASTORAL NUN

  Finally, in the last year of her age,

  Having attained a present blessedness,

  She said poetry and apotheosis are one.

  This is the illustration that she used:

  If I live according to this law I live

  In an immense activity, in which

  Everything becomes morning, summer, the hero,

  The enraptured woman, the sequestered night,

  The man that suffered, lying there at ease,

  Without his envious pain in body, in mind,

  The favorable transformations of the wind

  As of a general being or human universe.

  There was another illustration, in which

  The two things compared their tight resemblances:

  Each matters only in that which it conceives.

  THE PASTOR CABALLERO

  The importance of its hat to a form becomes

  More definite. The sweeping brim of the hat

  Makes of the form Most Merciful Capitan,

  If the observer says so: grandiloquent

  Locution of a hand in a rhapsody.

  Its line moves quickly with the genius

  Of its improvisation until, at length,

  It enfolds the head in a vital ambiance,

  A vital, linear ambiance. The flare

  In the sweeping brim becomes the origin

  Of a human evocation, so disclosed

  That, nameless, it creates an affectionate name,

  Derived from adjectives of deepest mine.

  The actual form bears outwardly this grace,

  An image of the mind, an inward mate,

  Tall and unfretted, a figure meant to bear

  Its poisoned laurels in this poisoned wood,

  High in the height that is our total height.

  The formidable helmet is nothing now.

  These two go well together, the sinuous brim

  And the green flauntings of the hours of peace.

  NOTES TOWARD A SUPREME FICTION

  To Henry Church

  And for what, except for you, do I feel love?

  Do I press the extremest book of the wisest man

  Close to me, hidden in me day and night?

  In the uncertain light of single, certain truth,

  Equal in living changingness to the light

  In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest,

  For a moment in the central of our being,

  The vivid transparence that you bring is peace.

  It Must Be Abstract

  I

  Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea

  Of this invention, this invented world,

  The inconceivable idea of the sun.

  You must become an ignorant man again

  And see the sun again with an ignorant eye

  And see it clearly in the idea of it.

  Never suppose an inventing mind as source

  Of this idea nor for that mind compose

  A voluminous master folded in his fire.

  How clean the sun when seen in its idea,

  Washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven

  That has expelled us and our images…

  The death of one god is the death of all.

  Let purple Phoebus lie in umber harvest,

  Let Phoebus slumber and die in autumn umber,

  Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was

  A name for something that never could be named.

  There was a project for the sun and is.

  There is a project for the sun. The sun

  Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be

  In the difficulty of what it is to be.

  II

  It is the celestial ennui of apartments

  That sends us back to the first idea, the quick

  Of this invention; and yet so poisonous

  Are the ravishments of truth, so fatal to

  The truth itself, the first idea becomes

  The hermit in a poet’s metaphors,

  Who comes and goes and comes and goes all day.

  May there be an ennui of the first idea?

  What else, prodigious scholar, should there be?

  The monastic man is an artist. The philosopher

  Appoints man’s place in music, say, today.

  But the priest desires. The philosopher desires.

  And not to have is the beginning of desire.

  To have what is not is its ancient cycle.

  It is desire at the end of winter, when

  It observes the effortless weather turning blue

  And sees the myosotis on its bush.

  Being virile, it hears the calendar hymn.

  It knows that what it has is what is not

  And throws it away like a thing of another time,

  As morning throws off stale moonlight and shabby sleep.

  III

  The poem refreshes life so that we share,

  For a moment, the first idea … It satisfies

  Belief in an immaculate beginning

  And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,

  To an immaculate end. We move between these points:

  From that ever-early candor to its late plural

  And the candor of them is the strong exhilaration

  Of what we feel from what we think, of thought

  Beating in the heart, as if blood newly came,

  An elixir, an excitation, a pure power.

  The poem, through candor, brings back a power again

  That gives a candid kind to everything.

  We say: At night an Arabian in my room,

  With his damned hoobla-hoobla-hoobla-how,

  Inscribes a primitive astronomy

  Across the unscrawled fores the future casts

  And throws his stars around the floor. By day

  The wood-dove used to chant his hoobla-hoo

  And still the grossest iridescence of ocean

  Howls hoo and rises and howls hoo and falls.

  Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.

  IV

  The first idea was not our own. Adam

  In Eden was the father of Descartes

  And Eve made air the mirror of herself,

  Of her sons and of her daughters. They found themselves

  In heaven as in a glass; a second earth;

  And in the earth itself they found a green—

  The inhabitants of a very varnished green.

  But the first idea was not to shape the clouds

  In imitation. The clouds preceded us

  There was a muddy centre before we breathed.

  There was a myth before the myth began,

  Venerable and articulate and complete.

  From this the poem springs: that we live in a place

  That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves

  And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.

  We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues

  The air is not a mirror but bare board,

  Coulisse bright-dark, tragic chiaroscuro

  And comic color of the rose, in which

  Abysmal instruments make sounds like pips

  Of the sweeping meanings that we add to them.

  V

  The lion roars at the enraging desert,

  Reddens the sand with his red-colored noise,

  Defies red emptiness to evolve his match,

  Master by foot and jaws and by the mane,

  Most supple challenger. The elephant

  Breaches the darkness of Ceylon with blares,

  The glitter-goes on surfaces of tanks,

  Shattering velvetest far-away. The bear,

  The ponderous cinnamon, snarls in his mountain

  At summer thunder and sleeps throu
gh winter snow.

  But you, ephebe, look from your attic window,

  Your mansard with a rented piano. You lie

  In silence upon your bed. You clutch the corner

  Of the pillow in your hand. You writhe and press

  A bitter utterance from your writhing, dumb,

  Yet voluble dumb violence. You look

  Across the roofs as sigil and as ward

  And in your centre mark them and are cowed…

  These are the heroic children whom time breeds

  Against the first idea—to lash the lion,

  Caparison elephants, teach bears to juggle.

  VI

  Not to be realized because not to

  Be seen, not to be loved nor hated because

  Not to be realized. Weather by Franz Hals,

  Brushed up by brushy winds in brushy clouds,

  Wetted by blue, colder for white. Not to

  Be spoken to, without a roof, without

  First fruits, without the virginal of birds,

  The dark-blown ceinture loosened, not relinquished.

  Gay is, gay was, the gay forsythia

  And yellow, yellow thins the Northern blue.

  Without a name and nothing to be desired,

  If only imagined but imagined well.

  My house has changed a little in the sun.

  The fragrance of the magnolias comes close,