The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

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by Wallace Stevens


  False flick, false form, but falseness close to kin.

  It must be visible or invisible,

  Invisible or visible or both:

  A seeing and unseeing in the eye.

  The weather and the giant of the weather,

  Say the weather, the mere weather, the mere air:

  An abstraction blooded, as a man by thought.

  VII

  It feels good as it is without the giant,

  A thinker of the first idea. Perhaps

  The truth depends on a walk around a lake,

  A composing as the body tires, a stop

  To see hepatica, a stop to watch

  A definition growing certain and

  A wait within that certainty, a rest

  In the swags of pine-trees bordering the lake.

  Perhaps there are times of inherent excellence,

  As when the cock crows on the left and all

  Is well, incalculable balances,

  At which a kind of Swiss perfection comes

  And a familiar music of the machine

  Sets up its Schwärmerei, not balances

  That we achieve but balances that happen,

  As a man and woman meet and love forthwith.

  Perhaps there are moments of awakening,

  Extreme, fortuitous, personal, in which

  We more than awaken, sit on the edge of sleep,

  As on an elevation, and behold

  The academies like structures in a mist.

  VIII

  Can we compose a castle-fortress-home,

  Even with the help of Viollet-le-Duc,

  And set the MacCullough there as major man?

  The first idea is an imagined thing.

  The pensive giant prone in violet space

  May be the MacCullough, an expedient,

  Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis,

  Incipit and a form to speak the word

  And every latent double in the word,

  Beau linguist. But the MacCullough is MacCullough.

  It does not follow that major man is man.

  If MacCullough himself lay lounging by the sea,

  Drowned in its washes, reading in the sound,

  About the thinker of the first idea,

  He might take habit, whether from wave or phrase,

  Or power of the wave, or deepened speech,

  Or a leaner being, moving in on him,

  Of greater aptitude and apprehension,

  As if the waves at last were never broken,

  As if the language suddenly, with ease,

  Said things it had laboriously spoken.

  IX

  The romantic intoning, the declaimed clairvoyance

  Are parts of apotheosis, appropriate

  And of its nature, the idiom thereof.

  They differ from reason’s click-clack, its applied

  Enflashings. But apotheosis is not

  The origin of the major man. He comes,

  Compact in invincible foils, from reason,

  Lighted at midnight by the studious eye,

  Swaddled in revery, the object of

  The hum of thoughts evaded in the mind,

  Hidden from other thoughts, he that reposes

  On a breast forever precious for that touch,

  For whom the good of April falls tenderly,

  Falls down, the cock-birds calling at the time.

  My dame, sing for this person accurate songs.

  He is and may be but oh! he is, he is,

  This foundling of the infected past, so bright,

  So moving in the manner of his hand.

  Yet look not at his colored eyes. Give him

  No names. Dismiss him from your images.

  The hot of him is purest in the heart.

  X

  The major abstraction is the idea of man

  And major man is its exponent, abler

  In the abstract than in his singular,

  More fecund as principle than particle,

  Happy fecundity, flor-abundant force,

  In being more than an exception, part,

  Though an heroic part, of the commonal.

  The major abstraction is the commonal,

  The inanimate, difficult visage. Who is it?

  What rabbi, grown furious with human wish,

  What chieftain, walking by himself, crying

  Most miserable, most victorious,

  Does not see these separate figures one by one,

  And yet see only one, in his old coat,

  His slouching pantaloons, beyond the town,

  Looking for what was, where it used to be?

  Cloudless the morning. It is he. The man

  In that old coat, those sagging pantaloons,

  It is of him, ephebe, to make, to confect

  The final elegance, not to console

  Nor sanctify, but plainly to propound.

  It Must Change

  I

  The old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets

  Inhaled the appointed odor, while the doves

  Rose up like phantoms from chronologies.

  The Italian girls wore jonquils in their hair

  And these the seraph saw, had seen long since,

  In the bandeaux of the mothers, would see again.

  The bees came booming as if they had never gone,

  As if hyacinths had never gone. We say

  This changes and that changes. Thus the constant

  Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths

  Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause

  In a universe of inconstancy. This means

  Night-blue is an inconstant thing. The seraph

  Is satyr in Saturn, according to his thoughts.

  It means the distaste we feel for this withered scene

  Is that it has not changed enough. It remains,

  It is a repetition. The bees come booming

  As if—The pigeons clatter in the air.

  An erotic perfume, half of the body, half

  Of an obvious acid is sure what it intends

  And the booming is blunt, not broken in subtleties.

  II

  The President ordains the bee to be

  Immortal. The President ordains. But does

  The body lift its heavy wing, take up,

  Again, an inexhaustible being, rise

  Over the loftiest antagonist

  To drone the green phrases of its juvenal?

  Why should the bee recapture a lost blague,

  Find a deep echo in a horn and buzz

  The bottomless trophy, new hornsman after old?

  The President has apples on the table

  And barefoot servants round him, who adjust

  The curtains to a metaphysical t

  And the banners of the nation flutter, burst

  On the flag-poles in a red-blue dazzle, whack

  At the halyards. Why, then, when in golden fury

  Spring vanishes the scraps of winter, why

  Should there be a question of returning or

  Of death in memory’s dream? Is spring a sleep?

  This warmth is for lovers at last accomplishing

  Their love, this beginning, not resuming, this

  Booming and booming of the new-come bee.

  III

  The great statue of the General Du Puy

  Rested immobile, though neighboring catafalques

  Bore off the residents of its noble Place.

  The right, uplifted foreleg of the horse

  Suggested that, at the final funeral,

  The music halted and the horse stood still.

  On Sundays, lawyers in their promenades

  Approached this strongly-heightened effigy

  To study the past, and doctors, having bathed

  Themselves with care, sought out the nerveless frame

  Of a suspension, a permanence, so rigid

  That it made the General a bit absurd,
<
br />   Changed his true flesh to an inhuman bronze.

  There never had been, never could be, such

  A man. The lawyers disbelieved, the doctors

  Said that as keen, illustrious ornament,

  As a setting for geraniums, the General,

  The very Place Du Puy, in fact, belonged

  Among our more vestigial states of mind.

  Nothing had happened because nothing had changed.

  Yet the General was rubbish in the end.

  IV

  Two things of opposite natures seem to depend

  On one another, as a man depends

  On a woman, day on night, the imagined

  On the real. This is the origin of change.

  Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace

  And forth the particulars of rapture come.

  Music falls on the silence like a sense,

  A passion that we feel, not understand.

  Morning and afternoon are clasped together

  And North and South are an intrinsic couple

  And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers

  That walk away as one in the greenest body.

  In solitude the trumpets of solitude

  Are not of another solitude resounding;

  A little string speaks for a crowd of voices.

  The partaker partakes of that which changes him.

  The child that touches takes character from the thing,

  The body, it touches. The captain and his men

  Are one and the sailor and the sea are one.

  Follow after, O my companion, my fellow, my self,

  Sister and solace, brother and delight.

  V

  On a blue island in a sky-wide water

  The wild orange trees continued to bloom and to bear,

  Long after the planter’s death. A few limes remained,

  Where his house had fallen, three scraggy trees weighted

  With garbled green. These were the planter’s turquoise

  And his orange blotches, these were his zero green,

  A green baked greener in the greenest sun.

  These were his beaches, his sea-myrtles in

  White sand, his patter of the long sea-slushes.

  There was an island beyond him on which rested,

  An island to the South, on which rested like

  A mountain, a pineapple pungent as Cuban summer.

  And là-bas, là-bas, the cool bananas grew,

  Hung heavily on the great banana tree,

  Which pierces clouds and bends on half the world.

  He thought often of the land from which he came,

  How that whole country was a melon, pink

  If seen rightly and yet a possible red.

  An unaffected man in a negative light

  Could not have borne his labor nor have died

  Sighing that he should leave the banjo’s twang.

  VI

  Bethou me, said sparrow, to the crackled blade,

  And you, and you, bethou me as you blow,

  When in my coppice you behold me be.

  Ah, ké! the bloody wren, the felon jay,

  Ké-ké, the jug-throated robin pouring out,

  Bethou, bethou, bethou me in my glade.

  There was such idiot minstrelsy in rain,

  So many clappers going without bells,

  That these bethous compose a heavenly gong.

  One voice repeating, one tireless chorister,

  The phrases of a single phrase, ké-ké,

  A single text, granite monotony,

  One sole face, like a photograph of fate,

  Glass-blower’s destiny, bloodless episcopus,

  Eye without lid, mind without any dream—

  These are of minstrels lacking minstrelsy,

  Of an earth in which the first leaf is the tale

  Of leaves, in which the sparrow is a bird

  Of stone, that never changes. Bethou him, you

  And you, bethou him and bethou. It is

  A sound like any other. It will end.

  VII

  After a lustre of the moon, we say

  We have not the need of any paradise,

  We have not the need of any seducing hymn.

  It is true. Tonight the lilacs magnify

  The easy passion, the ever-ready love

  Of the lover that lies within us and we breathe

  An odor evoking nothing, absolute.

  We encounter in the dead middle of the night

  The purple odor, the abundant bloom.

  The lover sighs as for accessible bliss,

  Which he can take within him on his breath,

  Possess in his heart, conceal and nothing known.

  For easy passion and ever-ready love

  Are of our earthy birth and here and now

  And where we live and everywhere we live,

  As in the top-cloud of a May night-evening,

  As in the courage of the ignorant man,

  Who chants by book, in the heat of the scholar, who writes

  The book, hot for another accessible bliss:

  The fluctuations of certainty, the change

  Of degrees of perception in the scholar’s dark.

  VIII

  On her trip around the world, Nanzia Nunzio

  Confronted Ozymandias. She went

  Alone and like a vestal long-prepared.

  I am the spouse. She took her necklace off

  And laid it in the sand. As I am, I am

  The spouse. She opened her stone-studded belt.

  I am the spouse, divested of bright gold,

  The spouse beyond emerald or amethyst,

  Beyond the burning body that I bear.

  I am the woman stripped more nakedly

  Than nakedness, standing before an inflexible

  Order, saying I am the contemplated spouse.

  Speak to me that, which spoken, will array me

  In its own only precious ornament.

  Set on me the spirit’s diamond coronal.

  Clothe me entire in the final filament,

  So that I tremble with such love so known

  And myself am precious for your perfecting.

  Then Ozymandias said the spouse, the bride

  Is never naked. A fictive covering

  Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind.

  IX

  The poem goes from the poet’s gibberish to

  The gibberish of the vulgate and back again.

  Does it move to and fro or is it of both

  At once? Is it a luminous flittering

  Or the concentration of a cloudy day?

  Is there a poem that never reaches words

  And one that chaffers the time away?

  Is the poem both peculiar and general?

  There’s a meditation there, in which there seems

  To be an evasion, a thing not apprehended or

  Not apprehended well. Does the poet

  Evade us, as in a senseless element?

  Evade, this hot, dependent orator,

  The spokesman at our bluntest barriers,

  Exponent by a form of speech, the speaker

  Of a speech only a little of the tongue?

  It is the gibberish of the vulgate that he seeks.

  He tries by a peculiar speech to speak

  The peculiar potency of the general,

  To compound the imagination’s Latin with

  The lingua franca et jocundissima.

  X

  A bench was his catalepsy, Theatre

  Of Trope. He sat in the park. The water of

  The lake was full of artificial things,

  Like a page of music, like an upper air,

  Like a momentary color, in which swans

  Were seraphs, were saints, were changing essences.

  The west wind was the music, the motion, the force

  To which the swans curveted, a will to change,

 
A will to make iris frettings on the blank.

  There was a will to change, a necessitous

  And present way, a presentation, a kind

  Of volatile world, too constant to be denied,

  The eye of a vagabond in metaphor

  That catches our own. The casual is not

  Enough. The freshness of transformation is

  The freshness of a world. It is our own,

  It is ourselves, the freshness of ourselves,

  And that necessity and that presentation

  Are rubbings of a glass in which we peer.

  Of these beginnings, gay and green, propose

  The suitable amours. Time will write them down.

  It Must Give Pleasure

  I

  To sing jubilas at exact, accustomed times,

  To be crested and wear the mane of a multitude

  And so, as part, to exult with its great throat,

  To speak of joy and to sing of it, borne on

  The shoulders of joyous men, to feel the heart

  That is the common, the bravest fundament,

 

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