Its animal. The angelic ones
Speak of the soul, the mind. It is
An animal. The blue guitar—
On that its claws propound, its fangs
Articulate its desert days.
The blue guitar a mould? That shell?
Well, after all, the north wind blows
A horn, on which its victory
Is a worm composing on a straw.
XVIII
A dream (to call it a dream) in which
I can believe, in face of the object,
A dream no longer a dream, a thing,
Of things as they are, as the blue guitar
After long strumming on certain nights
Gives the touch of the senses, not of the hand,
But the very senses as they touch
The wind-gloss. Or as daylight comes,
Like light in a mirroring of cliffs,
Rising upward from a sea of ex.
XIX
That I may reduce the monster to
Myself, and then may be myself
In face of the monster, be more than part
Of it, more than the monstrous player of
One of its monstrous lutes, not be
Alone, but reduce the monster and be,
Two things, the two together as one,
And play of the monster and of myself,
Or better not of myself at all,
But of that as its intelligence,
Being the lion in the lute
Before the lion locked in stone.
XX
What is there in life except one’s ideas,
Good air, good friend, what is there in life?
Is it ideas that I believe?
Good air, my only friend, believe,
Believe would be a brother full
Of love, believe would be a friend,
Friendlier than my only friend,
Good air. Poor pale, poor pale guitar…
XXI
A substitute for all the gods:
This self, not that gold self aloft,
Alone, one’s shadow magnified,
Lord of the body, looking down,
As now and called most high,
The shadow of Chocorua
In an immenser heaven, aloft,
Alone, lord of the land and lord
Of the men that live in the land, high lord.
One’s self and the mountains of one’s land,
Without shadows, without magnificence,
The flesh, the bone, the dirt, the stone.
XXII
Poetry is the subject of the poem,
From this the poem issues and
To this returns. Between the two,
Between issue and return, there is
An absence in reality,
Things as they are. Or so we say.
But are these separate? Is it
An absence for the poem, which acquires
Its true appearances there, sun’s green,
Cloud’s red, earth feeling, sky that thinks?
From these it takes. Perhaps it gives,
In the universal intercourse.
XXIII
A few final solutions, like a duet
With the undertaker: a voice in the clouds,
Another on earth, the one a voice
Of ether, the other smelling of drink,
The voice of ether prevailing, the swell
Of the undertaker’s song in the snow
Apostrophizing wreaths, the voice
In the clouds serene and final, next
The grunted breath serene and final,
The imagined and the real, thought
And the truth, Dichtung und Wahrheit, all
Confusion solved, as in a refrain
One keeps on playing year by year,
Concerning the nature of things as they are.
XXIV
A poem like a missal found
In the mud, a missal for that young man,
That scholar hungriest for that book,
The very book, or, less, a page
Or, at the least, a phrase, that phrase,
A hawk of life, that latined phrase:
To know; a missal for brooding-sight.
To meet that hawk’s eye and to flinch
Not at the eye but at the joy of it.
I play. But this is what I think.
XXV
He held the world upon his nose
And this-a-way he gave a fling.
His robes and symbols, ai-yi-yi—
And that-a-way he twirled the thing.
Sombre as fir-trees, liquid cats
Moved in the grass without a sound.
They did not know the grass went round.
The cats had cats and the grass turned gray
And the world had worlds, ai, this-a-way:
The grass turned green and the grass turned gray.
And the nose is eternal, that-a-way.
Things as they were, things as they are,
Things as they will be by and by…
A fat thumb beats out ai-yi-yi.
XXVI
The world washed in his imagination,
The world was a shore, whether sound or form
Or light, the relic of farewells,
Rock, of valedictory echoings,
To which his imagination returned,
From which it sped, a bar in space,
Sand heaped in the clouds, giant that fought
Against the murderous alphabet:
The swarm of thoughts, the swarm of dreams
Of inaccessible Utopia.
A mountainous music always seemed
To be falling and to be passing away.
XXVII
It is the sea that whitens the roof.
The sea drifts through the winter air.
It is the sea that the north wind makes.
The sea is in the falling snow.
This gloom is the darkness of the sea.
Geographers and philosophers,
Regard. But for that salty cup,
But for the icicles on the eaves—
The sea is a form of ridicule.
The iceberg settings satirize
The demon that cannot be himself,
That tours to shift the shifting scene.
XXVIII
I am a native in this world
And think in it as a native thinks,
Gesu, not native of a mind
Thinking the thoughts I call my own,
Native, a native in the world
And like a native think in it.
It could not be a mind, the wave
In which the watery grasses flow
And yet are fixed as a photograph,
The wind in which the dead leaves blow.
Here I inhale profounder strength
And as I am, I speak and move
And things are as I think they are
And say they are on the blue guitar.
XXIX
In the cathedral, I sat there, and read,
Alone, a lean Review and said,
“These degustations in the vaults
Oppose the past and the festival,
What is beyond the cathedral, outside,
Balances with nuptial song.
So it is to sit and to balance things
To and to and to the point of still,
To say of one mask it is like,
To say of another it is like,
To know that the balance does not quite rest,
That the mask is strange, however like.”
The shapes are wrong and the sounds are false.
The bells are the bellowing of bulls.
Yet Franciscan don was never more
Himself than in this fertile glass.
XXX
From this I shall evolve a man.
This is his essence: the old fantoche
Hanging his shawl upon the wind,
&nb
sp; Like something on the stage, puffed out,
His strutting studied through centuries.
At last, in spite of his manner, his eye
A-cock at the cross-piece on a pole
Supporting heavy cables, slung
Through Oxidia, banal suburb,
One-half of all its installments paid.
Dew-dapper clapper-traps, blazing
From crusty stacks above machines.
Ecce, Oxidia is the seed
Dropped out of this amber-ember pod,
Oxidia is the soot of fire,
Oxidia is Olympia.
XXXI
How long and late the pheasant sleeps…
The employer and employee contend,
Combat, compose their droll affair.
The bubbling sun will bubble up,
Spring sparkle and the cock-bird shriek.
The employer and employee will hear
And continue their affair. The shriek
Will rack the thickets. There is no place,
Here, for the lark fixed in the mind,
In the museum of the sky. The cock
Will claw sleep. Morning is not sun,
It is this posture of the nerves,
As if a blunted player clutched
The nuances of the blue guitar.
It must be this rhapsody or none,
The rhapsody of things as they aré.
XXXII
Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark
That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.
How should you walk in that space and know
Nothing of the madness of space,
Nothing of its jocular procreations?
Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand
Between you and the shapes you take
When the crust of shape has been destroyed.
You as you are? You are yourself.
The blue guitar surprises you.
XXXIII
That generation’s dream, aviled
In the mud, in Monday’s dirty light,
That’s it, the only dream they knew,
Time in its final block, not time
To come, a wrangling of two dreams.
Here is the bread of time to come,
Here is its actual stone. The bread
Will be our bread, the stone will be
Our bed and we shall sleep by night.
We shall forget by day, except
The moments when we choose to play
The imagined pine, the imagined jay.
A THOUGHT REVOLVED
I
The Mechanical Optimist
A lady dying of diabetes
Listened to the radio,
Catching the lesser dithyrambs.
So heaven collects its bleating lambs.
Her useless bracelets fondly fluttered,
Paddling the melodic swirls,
The idea of god no longer sputtered
At the roots of her indifferent curls.
The idea of the Alps grew large,
Not yet, however, a thing to die in.
It seemed serener just to die,
To float off in the floweriest barge,
Accompanied by the exegesis
Of familiar things in a cheerful voice,
Like the night before Christmas and all the carols.
Dying lady, rejoice, rejoice!
II
Mystic Garden & Middling Beast
The poet striding among the cigar stores,
Ryan’s lunch, hatters, insurance and medicines,
Denies that abstraction is a vice except
To the fatuous. These are his infernal walls,
A space of stone, of inexplicable base
And peaks outsoaring possible adjectives.
One man, the idea of man, that is the space,
The true abstract in which he promenades.
The era of the idea of man, the cloak
And speech of Virgil dropped, that’s where he walks,
That’s where his hymns come crowding, hero-hymns,
Chorals for mountain voices and the moral chant,
Happy rather than holy but happy-high,
Day hymns instead of constellated rhymes,
Hymns of the struggle of the idea of god
And the idea of man, the mystic garden and
The middling beast, the garden of paradise
And he that created the garden and peopled it.
III
Romanesque Affabulation
He sought an earthly leader who could stand
Without panache, without cockade,
Son only of man and sun of men,
The outer captain, the inner saint,
The pine, the pillar and the priest,
The voice, the book, the hidden well,
The faster’s feast and heavy-fruited star,
The father, the beater of the rigid drums,
He that at midnight touches the guitar,
The solitude, the barrier, the Pole
In Paris, celui qui chante et pleure,
Winter devising summer in its breast,
Summer assaulted, thundering, illumed,
Shelter yet thrower of the summer spear,
With all his attributes no god but man
Of men whose heaven is in themselves,
Or else whose hell, foamed with their blood
And the long echo of their dying cry,
A fate intoned, a death before they die,
The race that sings and weeps and knows not why.
IV
The Leader
Behold the moralist hidalgo
Whose whore is Morning Star
Dressed in metal, silk and stone,
Syringa, cicada, his flea.
In how severe a book he read,
Until his nose grew thin and taut
And knowledge dropped upon his heart
Its pitting poison, half the night.
He liked the nobler works of man,
The gold façade round early squares,
The bronzes liquid through gay light.
He hummed to himself at such a plan.
He sat among beggars wet with dew,
Heard the dogs howl at barren bone,
Sat alone, his great toe like a horn,
The central flaw in the solar morn.
THE MEN THAT ARE FALLING
God and all angels sing the world to sleep,
Now that the moon is rising in the heat
And crickets are loud again in the grass. The moon
Burns in the mind on lost remembrances.
He lies down and the night wind blows upon him here.
The bells grow longer. This is not sleep. This is desire.
Ah! Yes, desire … this leaning on his bed,
This leaning on his elbows on his bed,
Staring, at midnight, at the pillow that is black
In the catastrophic room … beyond despair,
Like an intenser instinct. What is it he desires?
But this he cannot know, the man that thinks,
Yet life itself, the fulfilment of desire
In the grinding ric-rac, staring steadily
At a head upon the pillow in the dark,
More than sudarium, speaking the speech
Of absolutes, bodiless, a head
Thick-lipped from riot and rebellious cries,
The head of one of the men that are falling, placed
Upon the pillow to repose and speak,
Speak and say the immaculate syllables
That he spoke only by doing what he did.
God and all angels, this was his desire,
Whose head lies blurring here, for this he died.
Taste of the blood upon his martyred lips,
O pensioners, O demagogues and pay-men!
This death was his belief though d
eath is a stone.
This man loved earth, not heaven, enough to die.
The night wind blows upon the dreamer, bent
Over words that are life’s voluble utterance.
PARTS OF A WORLD
PAROCHIAL THEME
Long-tailed ponies go nosing the pine-lands,
Ponies of Parisians shooting on the hill.
The wind blows. In the wind, the voices
Have shapes that are not yet fully themselves,
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens Page 12
