The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

by Wallace Stevens

  The greatest poverty is not to live

  In a physical world, to feel that one’s desire

  Is too difficult to tell from despair. Perhaps,

  After death, the non-physical people, in paradise,

  Itself non-physical, may, by chance, observe

  The green corn gleaming and experience

  The minor of what we feel. The adventurer

  In humanity has not conceived of a race

  Completely physical in a physical world.

  The green corn gleams and the metaphysicals

  Lie sprawling in majors of the August heat,

  The rotund emotions, paradise unknown.

  This is the thesis scrivened in delight,

  The reverberating psalm, the right chorale.

  One might have thought of sight, but who could think

  Of what it sees, for all the ill it sees?

  Speech found the ear, for all the evil sound,

  But the dark italics it could not propound.

  And out of what one sees and hears and out

  Of what one feels, who could have thought to make

  So many selves, so many sensuous worlds,

  As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming

  With the metaphysical changes that occur,

  Merely in living as and where we live.

  THE BED OF OLD JOHN ZELLER

  This structure of ideas, these ghostly sequences

  Of the mind, result only in disaster. It follows,

  Casual poet, that to add your own disorder to disaster

  Makes more of it. It is easy to wish for another structure

  Of ideas and to say as usual that there must be

  Other ghostly sequences and, it would be, luminous

  Sequences, thought of among spheres in the old peak of night:

  This is the habit of wishing, as if one’s grandfather lay

  In one’s heart and wished as he had always wished, unable

  To sleep in that bed for its disorder, talking of ghostly

  Sequences that would be sleep and ting-tang tossing, so that

  He might slowly forget. It is more difficult to evade

  That habit of wishing and to accept the structure

  Of things as the structure of ideas. It was the structure

  Of things at least that was thought of in the old peak of night.

  LESS AND LESS HUMAN, O SAVAGE SPIRIT

  If there must be a god in the house, must be,

  Saying things in the rooms and on the stair,

  Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,

  Or moonlight, silently, as Plato’s ghost

  Or Aristotle’s skeleton. Let him hang out

  His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.

  He must be incapable of speaking, closed,

  As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;

  As color, even the closest to us, is;

  As shapes, though they portend us, are.

  It is the human that is the alien,

  The human that has no cousin in the moon.

  It is the human that demands his speech

  From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.

  If there must be a god in the house, let him be one

  That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness,

  A vermilioned nothingness, any stick of the mass

  Of which we are too distantly a part.

  WILD DUCKS, PEOPLE AND DISTANCES

  The life of the world depends on that he is

  Alive, on that people are alive, on that

  There is village and village of them, without regard

  To that be-misted one and apart from her.

  Did we expect to live in other lives?

  We grew used so soon, too soon, to earth itself,

  As an element; to the sky, as an element.

  People might share but were never an element,

  Like earth and sky. Then he became nothing else

  And they were nothing else. It was late in the year.

  The wild ducks were enveloped. The weather was cold.

  Yet, under the migrations to solitude,

  There remained the smoke of the villages. Their fire

  Was central in distances the wild ducks could

  Not span, without any weather at all, except

  The weather of other lives, from which there could

  Be no migrating. It was that they were there

  That held the distances off: the villages

  Held off the final, fatal distances,

  Between us and the place in which we stood.

  THE PURE GOOD OF THEORY

  I

  All the Preludes to Felicity

  It is time that beats in the breast and it is time

  That batters against the mind, silent and proud,

  The mind that knows it is destroyed by time.

  Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse

  Without a rider on a road at night.

  The mind sits listening and hears it pass.

  It is someone walking rapidly in the street.

  The reader by the window has finished his book

  And tells the hour by the lateness of the sounds.

  Even breathing is the beating of time, in kind:

  A retardation of its battering,

  A horse grotesquely taut, a walker like

  A shadow in mid-earth … If we propose

  A large-sculptured, platonic person, free from time,

  And imagine for him the speech he cannot speak,

  A form, then, protected from the battering, may

  Mature: A capable being may replace

  Dark horse and walker walking rapidly.

  Felicity, ah! Time is the hooded enemy,

  The inimical music, the enchantered space

  In which the enchanted preludes have their place.

  II

  Description of a Platonic Person

  Then came Brazil to nourish the emaciated

  Romantic with dreams of her avoirdupois, green glade

  Of serpents like z rivers simmering,

  Green glade and holiday hotel and world

  Of the future, in which the memory had gone

  From everything, flying the flag of the nude,

  The flag of the nude above the holiday hotel.

  But there was one invalid in that green glade

  And beneath that handkerchief drapeau, severe,

  Signal, a character out of solitude,

  Who was what people had been and still were,

  Who lay in bed on the west wall of the sea,

  Ill of a question like a malady,

  Ill of a constant question in his thought,

  Unhappy about the sense of happiness.

  Was it that—a sense and beyond intelligence?

  Could the future rest on a sense and be beyond

  Intelligence? On what does the present rest?

  This platonic person discovered a soul in the world

  And studied it in his holiday hotel.

  He was a Jew from Europe or might have been.

  III

  Fire-monsters in the Milky Brain

  Man, that is not born of woman but of air,

  That comes here in the solar chariot,

  Like rhetoric in a narration of the eye—

  We knew one parent must have been divine,

  Adam of beau regard, from fat Elysia,

  Whose mind malformed this morning metaphor,

  While all the leaves leaked gold. His mind made morning,

  As he slept. He woke in a metaphor: this was

  A metamorphosis of paradise,

  Malformed, the world was paradise malformed…

  Now, closely the ear attends the varying

  Of this precarious music, the change of key

  Not quite detected at the moment of change

  And, now, it attends the difficult difference.

  To
say the solar chariot is junk

  Is not a variation but an end.

  Yet to speak of the whole world as metaphor

  Is still to stick to the contents of the mind

  And the desire to believe in a metaphor.

  It is to stick to the nicer knowledge of

  Belief, that what it believes in is not true.

  IV

  Dry Birds Are Fluttering in Blue Leaves

  It is never the thing but the version of the thing:

  The fragrance of the woman not her self,

  Her self in her manner not the solid block,

  The day in its color not perpending time,

  Time in its weather, our most sovereign lord,

  The weather in words and words in sounds of sound.

  These devastations are the divertissements

  Of a destroying spiritual that digs-a-dog,

  Whines in its hole for puppies to come see,

  Springs outward, being large, and, in the dust,

  Being small, inscribes ferocious alphabets,

  Flies like a bat expanding as it flies,

  Until its wings bear off night’s middle witch;

  And yet remains the same, the beast of light,

  Groaning in half-exploited gutturals

  The need of its element, the final need

  Of final access to its element—

  Of access like the page of a wiggy book,

  Touched suddenly by the universal flare

  For a moment, a moment in which we read and repeat

  The eloquences of light’s faculties.

  A WORD WITH JOSÉ RODRÍGUEZ-FEO

  As one of the secretaries of the moon,

  The queen of ignorance, you have deplored

  How she presides over imbeciles. The night

  Makes everything grotesque. Is it because

  Night is the nature of man’s interior world?

  Is lunar Habana the Cuba of the self?

  We must enter boldly that interior world

  To pick up relaxations of the known.

  For example, this old man selling oranges

  Sleeps by his basket. He snores. His bloated breath

  Bursts back. What not quite realized transit

  Of ideas moves wrinkled in a motion like

  The cry of an embryo? The spirit tires,

  It has, long since, grown tired, of such ideas.

  It says there is an absolute grotesque.

  There is a nature that is grotesque within

  The boulevards of the generals. Why should

  We say that it is man’s interior world

  Or seeing the spent, unconscious shapes of night,

  Pretend they are shapes of another consciousness?

  The grotesque is not a visitation. It is

  Not apparition but appearance, part

  Of that simplified geography, in which

  The sun comes up like news from Africa.

  PAISANT CHRONICLE

  What are the major men? All men are brave.

  All men endure. The great captain is the choice

  Of chance. Finally, the most solemn burial

  Is a paisant chronicle.

  Men live to be

  Admired by men and all men, therefore, live

  To be admired by all men. Nations live

  To be admired by nations. The race is brave.

  The race endures. The funeral pomps of the race

  Are a multitude of individual pomps

  And the chronicle of humanity is the sum

  Of paisant chronicles.

  The major men—

  That is different. They are characters beyond

  Reality, composed thereof. They are

  The fictive man created out of men.

  They are men but artificial men. They are

  Nothing in which it is not possible

  To believe, more than the casual hero, more

  Than Tartuffe as myth, the most Molière,

  The easy projection long prohibited.

  The baroque poet may see him as still a man

  As Virgil, abstract. But see him for yourself,

  The fictive man. He may be seated in

  A café. There may be a dish of country cheese

  And a pineapple on the table. It must be so.

  SKETCH OF THE ULTIMATE POLITICIAN

  He is the final builder of the total building,

  The final dreamer of the total dream,

  Or will be. Building and dream are one.

  There is a total building and there is

  A total dream. There are words of this,

  Words, in a storm, that beat around the shapes.

  There is a storm much like the crying of the wind,

  Words that come out of us like words within,

  That have rankled for many lives and made no sound.

  He can hear them, like people on the walls,

  Running in the rises of common speech,

  Crying as that speech falls as if to fail.

  There is a building stands in a ruinous storm,

  A dream interrupted out of the past,

  From beside us, from where we have yet to live.

  FLYER’S FALL

  This man escaped the dirty fates,

  Knowing that he died nobly, as he died.

  Darkness, nothingness of human after-death,

  Receive and keep him in the deepnesses of space—

  Profundum, physical thunder, dimension in which

  We believe without belief, beyond belief.

  JOUGA

  The physical world is meaningless tonight

  And there is no other. There is Ha-eé-me, who sits

  And plays his guitar. Ha-eé-me is a beast.

  Or perhaps his guitar is a beast or perhaps they are

  Two beasts. But of the same kind—two conjugal beasts.

  Ha-eé-me is the male beast … an imbecile,

  Who knocks out a noise. The guitar is another beast

  Beneath his tip-tap-tap. It is she that responds.

  Two beasts but two of a kind and then not beasts.

  Yet two not quite of a kind. It is like that here.

  There are many of these beasts that one never sees,

  Moving so that the foot-falls are slight and almost nothing.

  This afternoon the wind and the sea were like that—

  And after a while, when Ha-eé-me has gone to sleep,

  A great jaguar running will make a little sound.

  DEBRIS OF LIFE AND MIND

  There is so little that is close and warm.

  It is as if we were never children.

  Sit in the room. It is true in the moonlight

  That it is as if we had never been young.

  We ought not to be awake. It is from this

  That a bright red woman will be rising

  And, standing in violent golds, will brush her hair.

  She will speak thoughtfully the words of a line.

  She will think about them not quite able to sing.

  Besides, when the sky is so blue, things sing themselves,

  Even for her, already for her. She will listen

  And feel that her color is a meditation,

  The most gay and yet not so gay as it was.

  Stay here. Speak of familiar things a while.

  DESCRIPTION WITHOUT PLACE

  I

  It is possible that to seem—it is to be,

  As the sun is something seeming and it is.

  The sun is an example. What it seems

  It is and in such seeming all things are.

  Thus things are like a seeming of the sun

  Or like a seeming of the moon or night

  Or sleep. It was a queen that made it seem

  By the illustrious nothing of her name.

  Her green mind made the world around her green.

  The queen is an example … This green queen

  In the seeming of the summer of
her sun

  By her own seeming made the summer change.

  In the golden vacancy she came, and comes,

  And seems to be on the saying of her name.

  Her time becomes again, as it became,

  The crown and week-day coronal of her fame.

  II

  Such seemings are the actual ones: the way

  Things look each day, each morning, or the style

  Peculiar to the queen, this queen or that,

  The lesser seeming original in the blind

  Forward of the eye that, in its backward, sees

  The greater seeming of the major mind.

  An age is a manner collected from a queen.

  An age is green or red. An age believes

  Or it denies. An age is solitude

  Or a barricade against the singular man

  By the incalculably plural. Hence

  Its identity is merely a thing that seems,

  In the seeming of an original in the eye,

  In the major manner of a queen, the green

  The red, the blue, the argent queen. If not,

  What subtlety would apparition have?