The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

by Wallace Stevens

  This is a facile exercise. Jerome

  Begat the tubas and the fire-wind strings,

  The golden fingers picking dark-blue air:

  For companies of voices moving there,

  To find of sound the bleakest ancestor,

  To find of light a music issuing

  Whereon it falls in more than sensual mode.

  But the difficultest rigor is forthwith,

  On the image of what we see, to catch from that

  Irrational moment its unreasoning,

  As when the sun comes rising, when the sea

  Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall

  Of heaven-haven. These are not things transformed.

  Yet we are shaken by them as if they were.

  We reason about them with a later reason.

  II

  The blue woman, linked and lacquered, at her window

  Did not desire that feathery argentines

  Should be cold silver, neither that frothy clouds

  Should foam, be foamy waves, should move like them,

  Nor that the sexual blossoms should repose

  Without their fierce addictions, nor that the heat

  Of summer, growing fragrant in the night,

  Should strengthen her abortive dreams and take

  In sleep its natural form. It was enough

  For her that she remembered: the argentines

  Of spring come to their places in the grape leaves

  To cool their ruddy pulses; the frothy clouds

  Are nothing but frothy clouds; the frothy blooms

  Waste without puberty; and afterward,

  When the harmonious heat of August pines

  Enters the room, it drowses and is the night.

  It was enough for her that she remembered.

  The blue woman looked and from her window named

  The corals of the dogwood, cold and clear,

  Cold, coldly delineating, being real,

  Clear and, except for the eye, without intrusion.

  III

  A lasting visage in a lasting bush,

  A face of stone in an unending red,

  Red-emerald, red-slitted-blue, a face of slate,

  An ancient forehead hung with heavy hair,

  The channel slots of rain, the red-rose-red

  And weathered and the ruby-water-worn,

  The vines around the throat, the shapeless lips,

  The frown like serpents basking on the brow,

  The spent feeling leaving nothing of itself,

  Red-in-red repetitions never going

  Away, a little rusty, a little rouged,

  A little roughened and ruder, a crown

  The eye could not escape, a red renown

  Blowing itself upon the tedious ear.

  An effulgence faded, dull cornelian

  Too venerably used. That might have been.

  It might and might have been. But as it was,

  A dead shepherd brought tremendous chords from hell

  And bade the sheep carouse. Or so they said.

  Children in love with them brought early flowers

  And scattered them about, no two alike.

  IV

  We reason of these things with later reason

  And we make of what we see, what we see clearly

  And have seen, a place dependent on ourselves.

  There was a mystic marriage in Catawba,

  At noon it was on the mid-day of the year

  Between a great captain and the maiden Bawda.

  This was their ceremonial hymn: Anon

  We loved but would no marriage make. Anon

  The one refused the other one to take,

  Foreswore the sipping of the marriage wine.

  Each must the other take not for his high,

  His puissant front nor for her subtle sound,

  The shoo-shoo-shoo of secret cymbals round.

  Each must the other take as sign, short sign

  To stop the whirlwind, balk the elements.

  The great captain loved the ever-hill Catawba

  And therefore married Bawda, whom he found there,

  And Bawda loved the captain as she loved the sun.

  They married well because the marriage-place

  Was what they loved. It was neither heaven nor hell.

  They were love’s characters come face to face.

  V

  We drank Meursault, ate lobster Bombay with mango

  Chutney. Then the Canon Aspirin declaimed

  Of his sister, in what a sensible ecstasy

  She lived in her house. She had two daughters, one

  Of four, and one of seven, whom she dressed

  The way a painter of pauvred color paints.

  But still she painted them, appropriate to

  Their poverty, a gray-blue yellowed out

  With ribbon, a rigid statement of them, white,

  With Sunday pearls, her widow’s gayety.

  She hid them under simple names. She held

  Them closelier to her by rejecting dreams.

  The words they spoke were voices that she heard.

  She looked at them and saw them as they were

  And what she felt fought off the barest phrase.

  The Canon Aspirin, having said these things,

  Reflected, humming an outline of a fugue

  Of praise, a conjugation done by choirs.

  Yet when her children slept, his sister herself

  Demanded of sleep, in the excitements of silence

  Only the unmuddled self of sleep, for them.

  VI

  When at long midnight the Canon came to sleep

  And normal things had yawned themselves away,

  The nothingness was a nakedness, a point,

  Beyond which fact could not progress as fact.

  Thereon the learning of the man conceived

  Once more night’s pale illuminations, gold

  Beneath, far underneath, the surface of

  His eye and audible in the mountain of

  His ear, the very material of his mind.

  So that he was the ascending wings he saw

  And moved on them in orbits’ outer stars

  Descending to the children’s bed, on which

  They lay. Forth then with huge pathetic force

  Straight to the utmost crown of night he flew.

  The nothingness was a nakedness, a point

  Beyond which thought could not progress as thought.

  He had to choose. But it was not a choice

  Between excluding things. It was not a choice

  Between, but of. He chose to include the things

  That in each other are included, the whole,

  The complicate, the amassing harmony.

  VII

  He imposes orders as he thinks of them,

  As the fox and snake do. It is a brave affair.

  Next he builds capitols and in their corridors,

  Whiter than wax, sonorous, fame as it is,

  He establishes statues of reasonable men,

  Who surpassed the most literate owl, the most erudite

  Of elephants. But to impose is not

  To discover. To discover an order as of

  A season, to discover summer and know it,

  To discover winter and know it well, to find,

  Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all,

  Out of nothing to have come on major weather,

  It is possible, possible, possible. It must

  Be possible. It must be that in time

  The real will from its crude compoundings come,

  Seeming, at first, a beast disgorged, unlike,

  Warmed by a desperate milk. To find the real,

  To be stripped of every fiction except one,

  The fiction of an absolute—Angel,

  Be silent in your luminous cloud and hear

  The luminous melody of proper sound.

  VI
II

  What am I to believe? If the angel in his cloud,

  Serenely gazing at the violent abyss,

  Plucks on his strings to pluck abysmal glory,

  Leaps downward through evening’s revelations, and

  On his spredden wings, needs nothing but deep space,

  Forgets the gold centre, the golden destiny.

  Grows warm in the motionless motion of his flight,

  Am I that imagine this angel less satisfied?

  Are the wings his, the lapis-haunted air?

  Is it he or is it I that experience this?

  Is it I then that keep saying there is an hour

  Filled with expressible bliss, in which I have

  No need, am happy, forget need’s golden hand,

  Am satisfied without solacing majesty,

  And if there is an hour there is a day,

  There is a month, a year, there is a time

  In which majesty is a mirror of the self:

  I have not but I am and as I am, I am.

  These external regions, what do we fill them with

  Except reflections, the escapades of death,

  Cinderella fulfilling herself beneath the roof?

  IX

  Whistle aloud, too weedy wren. I can

  Do all that angels can. I enjoy like them,

  Like men besides, like men in light secluded,

  Enjoying angels. Whistle, forced bugler,

  That bugles for the mate, nearby the nest,

  Cock bugler, whistle and bugle and stop just short,

  Red robin, stop in your preludes, practicing

  Mere repetitions. These things at least comprise

  An occupation, an exercise, a work,

  A thing final in itself and, therefore, good:

  One of the vast repetitions final in

  Themselves and, therefore, good, the going round

  And round and round, the merely going round,

  Until merely going round is a final good,

  The way wine comes at a table in a wood.

  And we enjoy like men, the way a leaf

  Above the table spins its constant spin,

  So that we look at it with pleasure, look

  At it spinning its eccentric measure. Perhaps,

  The man-hero is not the exceptional monster,

  But he that of repetition is most master.

  X

  Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night,

  How is it I find you in difference, see you there

  In a moving contour, a change not quite completed?

  You are familiar yet an aberration.

  Civil, madam, I am, but underneath

  A tree, this unprovoked sensation requires

  That I should name you flatly, waste no words,

  Check your evasions, hold you to yourself.

  Even so when I think of you as strong or tired,

  Bent over work, anxious, content, alone,

  You remain the more than natural figure. You

  Become the soft-footed phantom, the irrational

  Distortion, however fragrant, however dear.

  That’s it: the more than rational distortion,

  The fiction that results from feeling. Yes, that.

  They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.

  We shall return at twilight from the lecture

  Pleased that the irrational is rational,

  Until flicked by feeling, in a gildered street,

  I call you by name, my green, my fluent mundo.

  You will have stopped revolving except in crystal.

  Soldier, there is a war between the mind

  And sky, between thought and day and night. It is

  For that the poet is always in the sun,

  Patches the moon together in his room

  To his Virgilian cadences, up down,

  Up down. It is a war that never ends.

  Yet it depends on yours. The two are one.

  They are a plural, a right and left, a pair,

  Two parallels that meet if only in

  The meeting of their shadows or that meet

  In a book in a barrack, a letter from Malay.

  But your war ends. And after it you return

  With six meats and twelve wines or else without

  To walk another room … Monsieur and comrade,

  The soldier is poor without the poet’s lines,

  His petty syllabi, the sounds that stick,

  Inevitably modulating, in the blood.

  And war for war, each has its gallant kind.

  How simply the fictive hero becomes the real;

  How gladly with proper words the soldier dies,

  If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech.

  THE AURORAS OF AUTUMN

  THE AURORAS OF AUTUMN

  I

  This is where the serpent lives, the bodiless.

  His head is air. Beneath his tip at night

  Eyes open and fix on us in every sky.

  Or is this another wriggling out of the egg,

  Another image at the end of the cave,

  Another bodiless for the body’s slough?

  This is where the serpent lives. This is his nest,

  These fields, these hills, these tinted distances,

  And the pines above and along and beside the sea.

  This is form gulping after formlessness,

  Skin flashing to wished-for disappearances

  And the serpent body flashing without the skin.

  This is the height emerging and its base

  These lights may finally attain a pole

  In the midmost midnight and find the serpent there,

  In another nest, the master of the maze

  Of body and air and forms and images,

  Relentlessly in possession of happiness.

  This is his poison: that we should disbelieve

  Even that. His meditations in the ferns,

  When he moved so slightly to make sure of sun,

  Made us no less as sure. We saw in his head,

  Black beaded on the rock, the flecked animal,

  The moving grass, the Indian in his glade.

  II

  Farewell to an idea … A cabin stands,

  Deserted, on a beach. It is white,

  As by a custom or according to

  An ancestral theme or as a consequence

  Of an infinite course. The flowers against the wall

  Are white, a little dried, a kind of mark

  Reminding, trying to remind, of a white

  That was different, something else, last year

  Or before, not the white of an aging afternoon,

  Whether fresher or duller, whether of winter cloud

  Or of winter sky, from horizon to horizon.

  The wind is blowing the sand across the floor.

  Here, being visible is being white,

  Is being of the solid of white, the accomplishment

  Of an extremist in an exercise…

  The season changes. A cold wind chills the beach.

  The long lines of it grow longer, emptier,

  A darkness gathers though it does not fall

  And the whiteness grows less vivid on the wall.

  The man who is walking turns blankly on the sand.

  He observes how the north is always enlarging the change,

  With its frigid brilliances, its blue-red sweeps

  And gusts of great enkindlings, its polar green,

  The color of ice and fire and solitude.

  III

  Farewell to an idea … The mother’s face,

  The purpose of the poem, fills the room.

  They are together, here, and it is warm,

  With none of the prescience of oncoming dreams,

  It is evening. The house is evening, half dissolved.

  Only the half they can never possess remains,

  Still-starred. It is the mother they possess,
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br />   Who gives transparence to their present peace.

  She makes that gentler that can gentle be.

  And yet she too is dissolved, she is destroyed.

  She gives transparence. But she has grown old.

  The necklace is a carving not a kiss.

  The soft hands are a motion not a touch.

  The house will crumble and the books will burn.

  They are at ease in a shelter of the mind

  And the house is of the mind and they and time,

  Together, all together. Boreal night

  Will look like frost as it approaches them

  And to the mother as she falls asleep

  And as they say good-night, good-night. Upstairs

  The windows will be lighted, not the rooms.

  A wind will spread its windy grandeurs round

  And knock like a rifle-butt against the door.

  The wind will command them with invincible sound.

  IV

  Farewell to an idea … The cancellings,

  The negations are never final. The father sits

  In space, wherever he sits, of bleak regard,