The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

by Wallace Stevens

The winds batter it. The water curls. The leaves

  Return to their original illusion.

  The sun stands like a Spaniard as he departs,

  Stepping from the foyer of summer into that

  Of the past, the rodomontadean emptiness.

  Mother was afraid I should freeze in the Parisian hotels.

  She had heard of the fate of an Argentine writer. At night,

  He would go to bed, cover himself with blankets—

  Protruding from the pile of wool, a hand,

  In a black glove, holds a novel by Camus. She begged

  That I stay away. These are the words of José…

  He is sitting by the fidgets of a fire,

  The first red of red winter, winter-red,

  The late, least foyer in a qualm of cold.

  How tranquil it was at vividest Varadero,

  While the water kept running through the mouth of the speaker,

  Saying: Olalla blanca en el blanco,

  Lol-lolling the endlessness of poetry.

  But here tranquillity is what one thinks.

  The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

  The mirror melts and moulds itself and moves

  And catches from nowhere brightly-burning breath.

  It blows a glassy brightness on the fire

  And makes flame flame and makes it bite the wood

  And bite the hard-bite, barking as it bites.

  The arrangement of the chairs is so and so,

  Not as one would have arranged them for oneself,

  But in the style of the novel, its tracing

  Of an unfamiliar in the familiar room,

  A retrato that is strong because it is like,

  A second that grows first, a black unreal

  In which a real lies hidden and alive.

  Day’s arches are crumbling into the autumn night.

  The fire falls a little and the book is done.

  The stillness is the stillness of the mind.

  Slowly the room grows dark. It is odd about

  That Argentine. Only the real can be

  Unreal today, be hidden and alive.

  It is odd, too, how that Argentine is oneself,

  Feeling the fear that creeps beneath the wool,

  Lies on the breast and pierces into the heart,

  Straight from the Arcadian imagination,

  Its being beating heavily in the veins,

  Its knowledge cold within one as one’s own;

  And one trembles to be so understood and, at last,

  To understand, as if to know became

  The fatality of seeing things too well.

  WHAT WE SEE IS WHAT WE THINK

  At twelve, the disintegration of afternoon

  Began, the return to phantomerei, if not

  To phantoms. Till then, it had been the other way:

  One imagined the violet trees but the trees stood green,

  At twelve, as green as ever they would be.

  The sky was blue beyond the vaultiest phrase.

  Twelve meant as much as: the end of normal time,

  Straight up, an élan without harrowing,

  The imprescriptible zenith, free of harangue,

  Twelve and the first gray second after, a kind

  Of violet gray, a green violet, a thread

  To weave a shadow’s leg or sleeve, a scrawl

  On the pedestal, an ambitious page dog-eared

  At the upper right, a pyramid with one side

  Like a spectral cut in its perception, a tilt

  And its tawny caricature and tawny life,

  Another thought, the paramount ado…

  Since what we think is never what we see.

  A GOLDEN WOMAN IN A SILVER MIRROR

  Suppose this was the root of everything.

  Suppose it turned out to be or that it touched

  An image that was mistress of the world.

  For example: Au Château. Un Salon. A glass

  The sun steps into, regards and finds itself;

  Or: Gawks of hay … Augusta Moon, before

  An attic glass, hums of the old Lutheran bells

  At home; or: In the woods, belle Belle alone

  Rattles with fear in unreflecting leaves.

  Abba, dark death is the breaking of a glass.

  The dazzled flakes and splinters disappear.

  The seal is as relaxed as dirt, perdu.

  But the images, disembodied, are not broken.

  They have, or they may have, their glittering crown,

  Sound-soothing pearl and omni-diamond,

  Of the most beautiful, the most beautiful maid

  And mother. How long have you lived and looked,

  Ababba, expecting this king’s queen to appear?

  THE OLD LUTHERAN BELLS AT HOME

  These are the voices of the pastors calling

  In the names of St. Paul and of the halo-John

  And of other holy and learned men, among them

  Great choristers, propounders of hymns, trumpeters,

  Jerome and the scrupulous Francis and Sunday women,

  The nurses of the spirit’s innocence.

  These are the voices of the pastors calling

  Much rough-end being to smooth Paradise,

  Spreading out fortress walls like fortress wings.

  Deep in their sound the stentor Martin sings.

  Dark Juan looks outward through his mystic brow…

  Each sexton has his sect. The bells have none.

  These are the voices of the pastors calling

  And calling like the long echoes in long sleep,

  Generations of shepherds to generations of sheep.

  Each truth is a sect though no bells ring for it.

  And the bells belong to the sextons, after all,

  As they jangle and dangle and kick their feet.

  QUESTIONS ARE REMARKS

  In the weed of summer comes this green sprout why.

  The sun aches and ails and then returns halloo

  Upon the horizon amid adult enfantillages.

  Its fire fails to pierce the vision that beholds it,

  Fails to destroy the antique acceptances,

  Except that the grandson sees it as it is,

  Peter the voyant, who says “Mother, what is that”—

  The object that rises with so much rhetoric,

  But not for him. His question is complete.

  It is the question of what he is capable.

  It is the extreme, the expert aetat. 2.

  He will never ride the red horse she describes.

  His question is complete because it contains

  His utmost statement. It is his own array,

  His own pageant and procession and display,

  As far as nothingness permits … Hear him.

  He does not say, “Mother, my mother, who are you,”

  The way the drowsy, infant, old men do.

  STUDY OF IMAGES I

  It does no good to speak of the big, blue bush

  Of day. If the study of his images

  Is the study of man, this image of Saturday,

  This Italian symbol, this Southern landscape, is like

  A waking, as in images we awake,

  Within the very object that we seek,

  Participants of its being. It is, we are.

  He is, we are. Ah, bella! He is, we are,

  Within the big, blue bush and its vast shade

  At evening and at night. It does no good.

  Stop at the terraces of mandolins,

  False, faded and yet inextricably there,

  The pulse of the object, the heat of the body grown cold

  Or cooling in late leaves, not false except

  When the image itself is false, a mere desire,

  Not faded, if images are all we have.

  They can be no more faded than ourselves.

  The blood refreshes with its stale demands.

  STUDY OF IMAGES
II

  The frequency of images of the moon

  Is more or less. The pearly women that drop

  From heaven and float in air, like animals

  Of ether, exceed the excelling witches, whence

  They came. But, brown, the ice-bear sleeping in ice-month

  In his cave, remains dismissed without a dream,

  As if the centre of images had its

  Congenial mannequins, alert to please,

  Beings of other beings manifold—

  The shadowless moon wholly composed of shade,

  Women with other lives in their live hair,

  Rose—women as half-fishes of salt shine,

  As if, as if, as if the disparate halves

  Of things were waiting in a bethrothal known

  To none, awaiting espousal to the sound

  Of right joining, a music of ideas, the burning

  And breeding and bearing birth of harmony,

  The final relation, the marriage of the rest.

  AN ORDINARY EVENING IN NEW HAVEN

  I

  The eye’s plain version is a thing apart,

  The vulgate of experience. Of this,

  A few words, an and yet, and yet, and yet—

  As part of the never-ending meditation,

  Part of the question that is a giant himself:

  Of what is this house composed if not of the sun,

  These houses, these difficult objects, dilapidate

  Appearances of what appearances,

  Words, lines, not meanings, not communications,

  Dark things without a double, after all,

  Unless a second giant kills the first—

  A recent imagining of reality,

  Much like a new resemblance of the sun,

  Down-pouring, up-springing and inevitable,

  A larger poem for a larger audience,

  As if the crude collops came together as one,

  A mythological form, a festival sphere,

  A great bosom, beard and being, alive with age.

  II

  Suppose these houses are composed of ourselves,

  So that they become an impalpable town, full of

  Impalpable bells, transparencies of sound,

  Sounding in transparent dwellings of the self,

  Impalpable habitations that seem to move

  In the movement of the colors of the mind,

  The far-fire flowing and the dim-coned bells

  Coming together in a sense in which we are poised,

  Without regard to time or where we are,

  In the perpetual reference, object

  Of the perpetual meditation, point

  Of the enduring, visionary love,

  Obscure, in colors whether of the sun

  Or mind, uncertain in the clearest bells,

  The spirit’s speeches, the indefinite,

  Confused illuminations and sonorities,

  So much ourselves, we cannot tell apart

  The idea and the bearer-being of the idea.

  III

  The point of vision and desire are the same.

  It is to the hero of midnight that we pray

  On a hill of stones to make beau mont thereof.

  If it is misery that infuriates our love,

  If the black of night stands glistening on beau mont,

  Then, ancientest saint ablaze with ancientest truth,

  Say next to holiness is the will thereto,

  And next to love is the desire for love,

  The desire for its celestial ease in the heart,

  Which nothing can frustrate, that most secure,

  Unlike love in possession of that which was

  To be possessed and is. But this cannot

  Possess. It is desire, set deep in the eye,

  Behind all actual seeing, in the actual scene,

  In the street, in a room, on a carpet or a wall,

  Always in emptiness that would be filled,

  In denial that cannot contain its blood,

  A porcelain, as yet in the bats thereof.

  IV

  The plainness of plain things is savagery,

  As: the last plainness of a man who has fought

  Against illusion and was, in a great grinding

  Of growling teeth, and falls at night, snuffed out

  By the obese opiates of sleep. Plain men in plain towns

  Are not precise about the appeasement they need.

  They only know a savage assuagement cries

  With a savage voice; and in that cry they hear

  Themselves transposed, muted and comforted

  In a savage and subtle and simple harmony,

  A matching and mating of surprised accords,

  A responding to a diviner opposite.

  So lewd spring comes from winter’s chastity.

  So, after summer, in the autumn air,

  Comes the cold volume of forgotten ghosts,

  But soothingly, with pleasant instruments,

  So that this cold, a children’s tale of ice,

  Seems like a sheen of heat romanticized.

  V

  Inescapable romance, inescapable choice

  Of dreams, disillusion as the last illusion,

  Reality as a thing seen by the mind,

  Not that which is but that which is apprehended,

  A mirror, a lake of reflections in a room,

  A glassy ocean lying at the door,

  A great town hanging pendent in a shade,

  An enormous nation happy in a style,

  Everything as unreal as real can be,

  In the inexquisite eye. Why, then, inquire

  Who has divided the world, what entrepreneur?

  No man. The self, the chrysalis of all men

  Became divided in the leisure of blue day

  And more, in branchings after day. One part

  Held fast tenaciously in common earth

  And one from central earth to central sky

  And in moonlit extensions of them in the mind

  Searched out such majesty as it could find.

  VI

  Reality is the beginning not the end,

  Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega,

  Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals.

  It is the infant A standing on infant legs,

  Not twisted, stooping, polymathic Z,

  He that kneels always on the edge of space

  In the pallid perceptions of its distances.

  Alpha fears men or else Omega’s men

  Or else his prolongations of the human.

  These characters are around us in the scene.

  For one it is enough; for one it is not;

  For neither is it profound absentia,

  Since both alike appoint themselves the choice

  Custodians of the glory of the scene,

  The immaculate interpreters of life.

  But that’s the difference: in the end and the way

  To the end. Alpha continues to begin.

  Omega is refreshed at every end.

  VII

  In the presence of such chapels and such schools,

  The impoverished architects appear to be

  Much richer, more fecund, sportive and alive.

  The objects tingle and the spectator moves

  With the objects. But the spectator also moves

  With lesser things, with things exteriorized

  Out of rigid realists. It is as if

  Men turning into things, as comedy,

  Stood, dressed in antic symbols, to display

  The truth about themselves, having lost, as things,

  That power to conceal they had as men,

  Not merely as to depth but as to height

  As well, not merely as to the commonplace

  But, also, as to their miraculous,

  Conceptions of new mornings of new worlds,

  The tips of cock-cry pinked out pastily,

  As
that which was incredible becomes,

  In misted contours, credible day again.

  VIII

  We fling ourselves, constantly longing, on this form.

  We descend to the street and inhale a health of air

  To our sepulchral hollows. Love of the real

  Is soft in three-four cornered fragrances

  From five-six cornered leaves, and green, the signal

  To the lover, and blue, as of a secret place

  In the anonymous color of the universe.

  Our breath is like a desperate element

  That we must calm, the origin of a mother tongue

  With which to speak to her, the capable

  In the midst of foreignness, the syllable

  Of recognition, avowal, impassioned cry,

  The cry that contains its converse in itself,

  In which looks and feelings mingle and are part

  As a quick answer modifies a question,

  Not wholly spoken in a conversation between

  Two bodies disembodied in their talk,

  Too fragile, too immediate for any speech.

  IX