The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

by Wallace Stevens

Of rankest trivia, tests of the strength

  Of his æsthetic, his philosophy,

  The more invidious, the more desired:

  The florist asking aid from cabbages,

  The rich man going bare, the paladin

  Afraid, the blind man as astronomer,

  The appointed power unwielded from disdain.

  His western voyage ended and began.

  The torment of fastidious thought grew slack,

  Another, still more bellicose, came on.

  He, therefore, wrote his prolegomena,

  And, being full of the caprice, inscribed

  Commingled souvenirs and prophecies.

  He made a singular collation. Thus:

  The natives of the rain are rainy men.

  Although they paint effulgent, azure lakes,

  And April hillsides wooded white and pink,

  Their azure has a cloudy edge, their white

  And pink, the water bright that dogwood bears.

  And in their music showering sounds intone.

  On what strange froth does the gross Indian dote,

  What Eden sapling gum, what honeyed gore,

  What pulpy dram distilled of innocence,

  That streaking gold should speak in him

  Or bask within his images and words?

  If these rude instances impeach themselves

  By force of rudeness, let the principle

  Be plain. For application Crispin strove,

  Abhorring Turk as Esquimau, the lute

  As the marimba, the magnolia as rose.

  Upon these premises propounding, he

  Projected a colony that should extend

  To the dusk of a whistling south below the south,

  A comprehensive island hemisphere.

  The man in Georgia waking among pines

  Should be pine-spokesman. The responsive man,

  Planting his pristine cores in Florida,

  Should prick thereof, not on the psaltery,

  But on the banjo’s categorical gut,

  Tuck, tuck, while the flamingoes flapped his bays.

  Sepulchral señors, bibbling pale mescal,

  Oblivious to the Aztec almanacs,

  Should make the intricate Sierra scan.

  And dark Brazilians in their cafés,

  Musing immaculate, pampean dits,

  Should scrawl a vigilant anthology,

  To be their latest, lucent paramour.

  These are the broadest instances. Crispin,

  Progenitor of such extensive scope,

  Was not indifferent to smart detail.

  The melon should have apposite ritual,

  Performed in verd apparel, and the peach,

  When its black branches came to bud, belle day,

  Should have an incantation. And again,

  When piled on salvers its aroma steeped

  The summer, it should have a sacrament

  And celebration. Shrewd novitiates

  Should be the clerks of our experience.

  These bland excursions into time to come,

  Related in romance to backward flights,

  However prodigal, however proud,

  Contained in their afflatus the reproach

  That first drove Crispin to his wandering.

  He could not be content with counterfeit,

  With masquerade of thought, with hapless words

  That must belie the racking masquerade,

  With fictive flourishes that preordained

  His passion’s permit, hang of coat, degree

  Of buttons, measure of his salt. Such trash

  Might help the blind, not him, serenely sly.

  It irked beyond his patience. Hence it was,

  Preferring text to gloss, he humbly served

  Grotesque apprenticeship to chance event,

  A clown, perhaps, but an aspiring clown.

  There is a monotonous babbling in our dreams

  That makes them our dependent heirs, the heirs

  Of dreamers buried in our sleep, and not

  The oncoming fantasies of better birth.

  The apprentice knew these dreamers. If he dreamed

  Their dreams, he did it in a gingerly way.

  All dreams are vexing. Let them be expunged.

  But let the rabbit run, the cock declaim.

  Trinket pasticcio, flaunting skyey sheets,

  With Crispin as the tiptoe cozener?

  No, no: veracious page on page, exact.

  v

  A Nice Shady Home

  Crispin as hermit, pure and capable,

  Dwelt in the land. Perhaps if discontent

  Had kept him still the prickling realist,

  Choosing his element from droll confect

  Of was and is and shall or ought to be,

  Beyond Bordeaux, beyond Havana, far

  Beyond carked Yucatan, he might have come

  To colonize his polar planterdom

  And jig his chits upon a cloudy knee.

  But his emprize to that idea soon sped.

  Crispin dwelt in the land and dwelling there

  Slid from his continent by slow recess

  To things within his actual eye, alert

  To the difficulty of rebellious thought

  When the sky is blue. The blue infected will.

  It may be that the yarrow in his fields

  Sealed pensive purple under its concern.

  But day by day, now this thing and now that

  Confined him, while it cosseted, condoned,

  Little by little, as if the suzerain soil

  Abashed him by carouse to humble yet

  Attach. It seemed haphazard denouement.

  He first, as realist, admitted that

  Whoever hunts a matinal continent

  May, after all, stop short before a plum

  And be content and still be realist.

  The words of things entangle and confuse.

  The plum survives its poems. It may hang

  In the sunshine placidly, colored by ground

  Obliquities of those who pass beneath,

  Harlequined and mazily dewed and mauved

  In bloom. Yet it survives in its own form,

  Beyond these changes, good, fat, guzzly fruit.

  So Crispin hasped on the surviving form,

  For him, of shall or ought to be in is.

  Was he to bray this in profoundest brass

  Arointing his dreams with fugal requiems?

  Was he to company vastest things defunct

  With a blubber of tom-toms harrowing the sky?

  Scrawl a tragedian’s testament? Prolong

  His active force in an inactive dirge,

  Which, let the tall musicians call and call,

  Should merely call him dead? Pronounce amen

  Through choirs infolded to the outmost clouds?

  Because he built a cabin who once planned

  Loquacious columns by the ructive sea?

  Because he turned to salad-beds again?

  Jovial Crispin, in calamitous crape?

  Should he lay by the personal and make

  Of his own fate an instance of all fate?

  What is one man among so many men?

  What are so many men in such a world?

  Can one man think one thing and think it long?

  Can one man be one thing and be it long?

  The very man despising honest quilts

  Lies quilted to his poll in his despite.

  For realist, what is is what should be.

  And so it came, his cabin shuffled up,

  His trees were planted, his duenna brought

  Her prismy blonde and clapped her in his hands,

  The curtains flittered and the door was closed.

  Crispin, magister of a single room,

  Latched up the night. So deep a sound fell down

  It was as if the solitude concealed

  And covered him and his congenial
sleep.

  So deep a sound fell down it grew to be

  A long soothsaying silence down and down.

  The crickets beat their tambours in the wind,

  Marching a motionless march, custodians.

  In the presto of the morning, Crispin trod,

  Each day, still curious, but in a round

  Less prickly and much more condign than that

  He once thought necessary. Like Candide,

  Yeoman and grub, but with a fig in sight,

  And cream for the fig and silver for the cream,

  A blonde to tip the silver and to taste

  The rapey gouts. Good star, how that to be

  Annealed them in their cabin ribaldries!

  Yet the quotidian saps philosophers

  And men like Crispin like them in intent,

  If not in will, to track the knaves of thought.

  But the quotidian composed as his,

  Of breakfast ribands, fruits laid in their leaves,

  The tomtit and the cassia and the rose,

  Although the rose was not the noble thorn

  Of crinoline spread, but of a pining sweet,

  Composed of evenings like cracked shutters flung

  Upon the rumpling bottomness, and nights

  In which those frail custodians watched,

  Indifferent to the tepid summer cold,

  While he poured out upon the lips of her

  That lay beside him, the quotidian

  Like this, saps like the sun, true fortuner.

  For all it takes it gives a humped return

  Exchequering from piebald fiscs unkeyed.

  VI

  And Daughters with Curls

  Portentous enunciation, syllable

  To blessed syllable affined, and sound

  Bubbling felicity in cantilene,

  Prolific and tormenting tenderness

  Of music, as it comes to unison,

  Forgather and bell boldly Crispin’s last

  Deduction. Thrum with a proud douceur

  His grand pronunciamento and devise.

  The chits came for his jigging, bluet-eyed,

  Hands without touch yet touching poignantly,

  Leaving no room upon his cloudy knee,

  Prophetic joint, for its diviner young.

  The return to social nature, once begun,

  Anabasis or slump, ascent or chute,

  Involved him in midwifery so dense

  His cabin counted as phylactery,

  Then place of vexing palankeens, then haunt

  Of children nibbling at the sugared void,

  Infants yet eminently old, then dome

  And halidom for the unbraided femes,

  Green crammers of the green fruits of the world,

  Bidders and biders for its ecstasies,

  True daughters both of Crispin and his clay.

  All this with many mulctings of the man,

  Effective colonizer sharply stopped

  In the door-yard by his own capacious bloom.

  But that this bloom grown riper, showing nibs

  Of its eventual roundness, puerile tints

  Of spiced and weathery rouges, should complex

  The stopper to indulgent fatalist

  Was unforeseen. First Crispin smiled upon

  His goldenest demoiselle, inhabitant,

  She seemed, of a country of the capuchins,

  So delicately blushed, so humbly eyed,

  Attentive to a coronal of things

  Secret and singular. Second, upon

  A second similar counterpart, a maid

  Most sisterly to the first, not yet awake

  Excepting to the motherly footstep, but

  Marvelling sometimes at the shaken sleep.

  Then third, a thing still flaxen in the light,

  A creeper under jaunty leaves. And fourth,

  Mere blusteriness that gewgaws jollified,

  All din and gobble, blasphemously pink.

  A few years more and the vermeil capuchin

  Gave to the cabin, lordlier than it was,

  The dulcet omen fit for such a house.

  The second sister dallying was shy

  To fetch the one full-pinioned one himself

  Out of her botches, hot embosomer.

  The third one gaping at the orioles

  Lettered herself demurely as became

  A pearly poetess, peaked for rhapsody.

  The fourth, pent now, a digit curious.

  Four daughters in a world too intricate

  In the beginning, four blithe instruments

  Of differing struts, four voices several

  In couch, four more personae, intimate

  As buffo, yet divers, four mirrors blue

  That should be silver, four accustomed seeds

  Hinting incredible hues, four selfsame lights

  That spread chromatics in hilarious dark,

  Four questioners and four sure answerers.

  Crispin concocted doctrine from the rout.

  The world, a turnip once so readily plucked,

  Sacked up and carried overseas, daubed out

  Of its ancient purple, pruned to the fertile main,

  And sown again by the stiffest realist,

  Came reproduced in purple, family font,

  The same insoluble lump. The fatalist

  Stepped in and dropped the chuckling down his craw,

  Without grace or grumble. Score this anecdote

  Invented for its pith, not doctrinal

  In form though in design, as Crispin willed,

  Disguised pronunciamento, summary,

  Autumn’s compendium, strident in itself

  But muted, mused, and perfectly revolved

  In those portentous accents, syllables,

  And sounds of music coming to accord

  Upon his lap, like their inherent sphere,

  Seraphic proclamations of the pure

  Delivered with a deluging onwardness.

  Or if the music sticks, if the anecdote

  Is false, if Crispin is a profitless

  Philosopher, beginning with green brag,

  Concluding fadedly, if as a man

  Prone to distemper he abates in taste,

  Fickle and fumbling, variable, obscure,

  Glozing his life with after-shining flicks,

  Illuminating, from a fancy gorged

  By apparition, plain and common things,

  Sequestering the fluster from the year,

  Making gulped potions from obstreperous drops,

  And so distorting, proving what he proves

  Is nothing, what can all this matter since

  The relation comes, benignly, to its end?

  So may the relation of each man be clipped.

  FROM THE MISERY OF DON JOOST

  I have finished my combat with the sun;

  And my body, the old animal,

  Knows nothing more.

  The powerful seasons bred and killed,

  And were themselves the genii

  Of their own ends.

  Oh, but the very self of the storm

  Of sun and slaves, breeding and death,

  The old animal,

  The senses and feeling, the very sound

  And sight, and all there was of the storm,

  Knows nothing more.

  O FLORIDA, VENEREAL SOIL

  A few things for themselves,

  Convolvulus and coral,

  Buzzards and live-moss,

  Tiestas from the keys,

  A few things for themselves,

  Florida, venereal soil,

  Disclose to the lover.

  The dreadful sundry of this world,

  The Cuban, Polodowsky,

  The Mexican women,

  The negro undertaker

  Killing the time between corpses

  Fishing for crayfish…

  Virgin of boorish births,

  Swiftly in the nights
,

  In the porches of Key West,

  Behind the bougainvilleas,

  After the guitar is asleep,

  Lasciviously as the wind,

  You come tormenting,

  Insatiable,

  When you might sit,

  A scholar of darkness,

  Sequestered over the sea,

  Wearing a clear tiara

  Of red and blue and red,

  Sparkling, solitary, still,

  In the high sea-shadow.

  Donna, donna, dark,

  Stooping in indigo gown

  And cloudy constellations,

  Conceal yourself or disclose

  Fewest things to the lover—

  A hand that bears a thick-leaved fruit,

  A pungent bloom against your shade.

  LAST LOOKS AT THE LILACS

  To what good, in the alleys of the lilacs,

  O caliper, do you scratch your buttocks

  And tell the divine ingénue, your companion,

  That this bloom is the bloom of soap

  And this fragrance the fragrance of vegetal?

  Do you suppose that she cares a tick,

  In this hymeneal air, what it is

  That marries her innocence thus,

  So that her nakedness is near,

  Or that she will pause at scurrilous words?

  Poor buffo! Look at the lavender

  And look your last and look still steadily,

  And say how it comes that you see

  Nothing but trash and that you no longer feel

  Her body quivering in the Floréal

  Toward the cool night and its fantastic star,

  Prime paramour and belted paragon,

  Well-booted, rugged, arrogantly male,

  Patron and imager of the gold Don John,

  Who will embrace her before summer comes.

  THE WORMS AT HEAVEN’S GATE

  Out of the tomb, we bring Badroulbadour,

  Within our bellies, we her chariot.

  Here is an eye. And here are, one by one,

  The lashes of that eye and its white lid.

  Here is the cheek on which that lid declined,

  And, finger after finger, here, the hand,

  The genius of that cheek. Here are the lips,

  The bundle of the body and the feet.

  . . . . . . .

  Out of the tomb we bring Badroulbadour.

  THE JACK-RABBIT

  In the morning,

  The jack-rabbit sang to the Arkansaw.

  He carolled in caracoles