The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
Page 26
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,