We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns
That fall upon it out of the wind. We seek
The poem of pure reality, untouched
By trope or deviation, straight to the word,
Straight to the transfixing object, to the object
At the exactest point at which it is itself,
Transfixing by being purely what it is,
A view of New Haven, say, through the certain eye,
The eye made clear of uncertainty, with the sight
Of simple seeing, without reflection. We seek
Nothing beyond reality. Within it,
Everything, the spirit’s alchemicana
Included, the spirit that goes roundabout
And through included, not merely the visible,
The solid, but the movable, the moment,
The coming on of feasts and the habits of saints,
The pattern of the heavens and high, night air.
X
It is fatal in the moon and empty there.
But, here, allons. The enigmatical
Beauty of each beautiful enigma
Becomes amassed in a total double-thing.
We do not know what is real and what is not.
We say of the moon, it is haunted by the man
Of bronze whose mind was made up and who, therefore, died.
We are not men of bronze and we are not dead.
His spirit is imprisoned in constant change.
But ours is not imprisoned. It resides
In a permanence composed of impermanence,
In a faithfulness as against the lunar light,
So that morning and evening are like promises kept,
So that the approaching sun and its arrival,
Its evening feast and the following festival,
This faithfulness of reality, this mode,
This tendance and venerable holding-in
Make gay the hallucinations in surfaces.
XI
In the metaphysical streets of the physical town
We remember the lion of Juda and we save
The phrase … Say of each lion of the spirit
It is a cat of a sleek transparency
That shines with a nocturnal shine alone.
The great cat must stand potent in the sun.
The phrase grows weak. The fact takes up the strength
Of the phrase. It contrives the self-same evocations
And Juda becomes New Haven or else must.
In the metaphysical streets, the profoundest forms
Go with the walker subtly walking there.
These he destroys with wafts of wakening,
Free from their majesty and yet in need
Of majesty, of an invincible clou,
A minimum of making in the mind,
A verity of the most veracious men,
The propounding of four seasons and twelve months.
The brilliancy at the central of the earth.
XII
The poem is the cry of its occasion,
Part of the res itself and not about it.
The poet speaks the poem as it is,
Not as it was: part of the reverberation
Of a windy night as it is, when the marble statues
Are like newspapers blown by the wind. He speaks
By sight and insight as they are. There is no
Tomorrow for him. The wind will have passed by,
The statues will have gone back to be things about.
The mobile and the immobile flickering
In the area between is and was are leaves,
Leaves burnished in autumnal burnished trees
And leaves in whirlings in the gutters, whirlings
Around and away, resembling the presence of thought,
Resembling the presences of thoughts, as if,
In the end, in the whole psychology, the self,
The town, the weather, in a casual litter,
Together, said words of the world are the life of the world.
XIII
The ephebe is solitary in his walk.
He skips the journalism of subjects, seeks out
The perquisites of sanctity, enjoys
A strong mind in a weak neighborhood and is
A serious man without the serious,
Inactive in his singular respect.
He is neither priest nor proctor at low eve,
Under the birds, among the perilous owls,
In the big X of the returning primitive.
It is a fresh spiritual that he defines,
A coldness in a long, too-constant warmth,
A thing on the side of a house, not deep in a cloud,
A difficulty that we predicate:
The difficulty of the visible
To the nations of the clear invisible,
The actual landscape with its actual horns
Of baker and butcher blowing, as if to hear,
Hear hard, gets at an essential integrity.
XIV
The dry eucalyptus seeks god in the rainy cloud.
Professor Eucalyptus of New Haven seeks him
In New Haven with an eye that does not look
Beyond the object. He sits in his room, beside
The window, close to the ramshackle spout in which
The rain falls with a ramshackle sound. He seeks
God in the object itself, without much choice.
It is a choice of the commodious adjective
For what he sees, it comes in the end to that:
The description that makes it divinity, still speech
As it touches the point of reverberation—not grim
Reality but reality grimly seen
And spoken in paradisal parlance new
And in any case never grim, the human grim
That is part of the indifference of the eye
Indifferent to what it sees. The tink-tonk
Of the rain in the spout is not a substitute.
It is of the essence not yet well perceived.
XV
He preserves himself against the repugnant rain
By an instinct for a rainless land, the self
Of his self, come at upon wide delvings of wings.
The instinct for heaven had its counterpart:
The instinct for earth, for New Haven, for his room,
The gay tournamonde as of a single world
In which he is and as and is are one.
For its counterpart a kind of counterpoint
Irked the wet wallows of the water-spout.
The rain kept falling loudly in the trees
And on the ground. The hibernal dark that hung
In primavera, the shadow of bare rock,
Becomes the rock of autumn, glittering,
Ponderable source of each imponderable,
The weight we lift with the finger of a dream,
The heaviness we lighten by light will,
By the hand of desire, faint, sensitive, the soft
Touch and trouble of the touch of the actual hand.
XVI
Among time’s images, there is not one
Of this present, the venerable mask above
The dilapidation of dilapidations.
The oldest-newest day is the newest alone.
The oldest-newest night does not creak by,
With lanterns, like a celestial ancientness.
Silently it heaves its youthful sleep from the sea—
The Oklahoman—the Italian blue
Beyond the horizon with its masculine,
Their eyes closed, in a young palaver of lips.
And yet the wind whimpers oldly of old age
In the western night. The venerable mask,
In this perfection, occasionally speaks
And something of death’s poverty is heard.
This should be tragedy’s most moving face.
<
br /> It is a bough in the electric light
And exhalations in the eaves, so little
To indicate the total leaflessness.
XVII
The color is almost the color of comedy,
Not quite. It comes to the point and at the point,
It fails. The strength at the centre is serious.
Perhaps instead of failing it rejects
As a serious strength rejects pin-idleness.
A blank underlies the trials of device,
The dominant blank, the unapproachable.
This is the mirror of the high serious:
Blue verdured into a damask’s lofty symbol,
Gold easings and ouncings and fluctuations of thread
And beetling of belts and lights of general stones,
Like blessed beams from out a blessed bush
Or the wasted figurations of the wastes
Of night, time and the imagination,
Saved and beholden, in a robe of rays.
These fitful sayings are, also, of tragedy:
The serious reflection is composed
Neither of comic nor tragic but of commonplace.
XVIII
It is the window that makes it difficult
To say good-by to the past and to live and to be
In the present state of things as, say, to paint
In the present state of painting and not the state
Of thirty years ago. It is looking out
Of the window and walking in the street and seeing,
As if the eyes were the present or part of it,
As if the ears heard any shocking sound,
As if life and death were ever physical.
The life and death of this carpenter depend
On a fuchsia in a can—and iridescences
Of petals that will never be realized,
Things not yet true which he perceives through truth,
Or thinks he does, as he perceives the present,
Or thinks he does, a carpenter’s iridescences,
Wooden, the model for astral apprentices,
A city slapped up like a chest of tools,
The eccentric exterior of which the clocks talk.
XIX
The moon rose in the mind and each thing there
Picked up its radial aspect in the night,
Prostrate below the singleness of its will.
That which was public green turned private gray.
At another time, the radial aspect came
From a different source. But there was always one:
A century in which everything was part
Of that century and of its aspect, a personage,
A man who was the axis of his time,
An image that begot its infantines,
Imaginary poles whose intelligence
Streamed over chaos their civilities.
What is the radial aspect of this place,
This present colony of a colony
Of colonies, a sense in the changing sense
Of things? A figure like Ecclesiast,
Rugged and luminous, chants in the dark
A text that is an answer, although obscure.
XX
The imaginative transcripts were like clouds,
Today; and the transcripts of feeling, impossible
To distinguish. The town was a residuum,
A neuter shedding shapes in an absolute.
Yet the transcripts of it when it was blue remain;
And the shapes that it took in feeling, the persons that
It became, the nameless, flitting characters—
These actors still walk in a twilight muttering lines.
It may be that they mingle, clouds and men, in the air
Or street or about the corners of a man,
Who sits thinking in the corners of a room.
In this chamber the pure sphere escapes the impure.
Because the thinker himself escapes. And yet
To have evaded clouds and men leaves him
A naked being with a naked will
And everything to make. He may evade
Even his own will and in his nakedness
Inhabit the hypnosis of that sphere.
XXI
But he may not. He may not evade his will,
Nor the wills of other men; and he cannot evade
The will of necessity, the will of wills—
Romanza out of the black shepherd’s isle,
Like the constant sound of the water of the sea
In the hearing of the shepherd and his black forms;
Out of the isle, but not of any isle.
Close to the senses there lies another isle
And there the senses give and nothing take,
The opposite of Cythère, an isolation
At the centre, the object of the will, this place,
The things around—the alternate romanza
Out of the surfaces, the windows, the walls,
The bricks grown brittle in time’s poverty,
The clear. A celestial mode is paramount,
If only in the branches sweeping in the rain:
The two romanzas, the distant and the near,
Are a single voice in the boo-ha of the wind.
XXII
Professor Eucalyptus said, “The search
For reality is as momentous as
The search for god.” It is the philosopher’s search
For an interior made exterior
And the poet’s search for the same exterior made
Interior: breathless things broodingly abreath
With the inhalations of original cold
And of original earliness. Yet the sense
Of cold and earliness is a daily sense,
Not the predicate of bright origin.
Creation is not renewed by images
Of lone wanderers. To re-create, to use
The cold and earliness and bright origin
Is to search. Likewise to say of the evening star,
The most ancient light in the most ancient sky,
That it is wholly an inner light, that it shines
From the sleepy bosom of the real, re-creates,
Searches a possible for its possibleness.
XXIII
The sun is half the world, half everything,
The bodiless half. There is always this bodiless half,
This illumination, this elevation, this future
Or, say, the late going colors of that past,
Effete green, the woman in black cassimere.
If, then, New Haven is half sun, what remains,
At evening, after dark, is the other half,
Lighted by space, big over those that sleep,
Of the single future of night, the single sleep,
As of a long, inevitable sound,
A kind of cozening and coaxing sound,
And the goodness of lying in a maternal sound,
Unfretted by day’s separate, several selves,
Being part of everything come together as one.
In this identity, disembodiments
Still keep occurring. What is, uncertainly,
Desire prolongs its adventure to create
Forms of farewell, furtive among green ferns.
XXIV
The consolations of space are nameless things.
It was after the neurosis of winter. It was
In the genius of summer that they blew up
The statue of Jove among the boomy clouds.
It took all day to quieten the sky
And then to refill its emptiness again,
So that at the edge of afternoon, not over,
Before the thought of evening had occurred
Or the sound of Incomincia had been set,
There was a clearing, a readiness for first bells,
An opening for outpouring, the hand was raised:
There was a willingness not yet com
posed,
A knowing that something certain had been proposed,
Which, without the statue, would be new,
An escape from repetition, a happening
In space and the self, that touched them both at once
And alike, a point of the sky or of the earth
Or of a town poised at the horizon’s dip.
XXV
Life fixed him, wandering on the stair of glass,
With its attentive eyes. And, as he stood,
On his balcony, outsensing distances,
There were looks that caught him out of empty air.
C’est toujours la vie qui me regarde…This was
Who watched him, always, for unfaithful thought.
This sat beside his bed, with its guitar,
To keep him from forgetting, without a word,
A note or two disclosing who it was.
Nothing about him ever stayed the same,
Except this hidalgo and his eye and tune,
The shawl across one shoulder and the hat.
The commonplace became a rumpling of blazons.
What was real turned into something most unreal,
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens Page 32