In flat appearance we should be and be,
Except for delicate clinkings not explained.
These are the actual seemings that we see,
Hear, feel and know. We feel and know them so.
III
There are potential seemings, arrogant
To be, as on the youngest poet’s page,
Or in the dark musician, listening
To hear more brightly the contriving chords.
There are potential seemings turbulent
In the death of a soldier, like the utmost will,
The more than human commonplace of blood,
The breath that gushes upward and is gone,
And another breath emerging out of death,
That speaks for him such seemings as death gives.
There might be, too, a change immenser than
A poet’s metaphors in which being would
Come true, a point in the fire of music where
Dazzle yields to a clarity and we observe,
And observing is completing and we are content,
In a world that shrinks to an immediate whole,
That we do not need to understand, complete
Without secret arrangements of it in the mind.
There might be in the curling-out of spring
A purple-leaping element that forth
Would froth the whole heaven with its seeming-so,
The intentions of a mind as yet unknown,
The spirit of one dwelling in a seed,
Itself that seed’s ripe, unpredictable fruit.
Things are as they seemed to Calvin or to Anne
Of England, to Pablo Neruda in Ceylon,
To Nietzsche in Basel, to Lenin by a lake.
But the integrations of the past are like
A Museo Olimpico, so much
So little, our affair, which is the affair
Of the possible: seemings that are to be,
Seemings that it is possible may be.
IV
Nietzsche in Basel studied the deep pool
Of these discolorations, mastering
The moving and the moving of their forms
In the much-mottled motion of blank time.
His revery was the deepness of the pool,
The very pool, his thoughts the colored forms,
The eccentric souvenirs of human shapes,
Wrapped in their seemings, crowd on curious crowd,
In a kind of total affluence, all first,
All final, colors subjected in revery
To an innate grandiose, an innate light,
The sun of Nietzsche gildering the pool,
Yes: gildering the swarm-like manias
In perpetual revolution, round and round…
Lenin on a bench beside a lake disturbed
The swans. He was not the man for swans.
The slouch of his body and his look were not
In suavest keeping. The shoes, the clothes, the hat
Suited the decadence of those silences,
In which he sat. All chariots were drowned. The swans
Moved on the buried water where they lay.
Lenin took bread from his pocket, scattered it—
The swans fled outward to remoter reaches,
As if they knew of distant beaches; and were
Dissolved. The distances of space and time
Were one and swans far off were swans to come.
The eye of Lenin kept the far-off shapes.
His mind raised up, down-drowned, the chariots.
And reaches, beaches, tomorrow’s regions became
One thinking of apocalyptic legions.
V
If seeming is description without place,
The spirit’s universe, then a summer’s day,
Even the seeming of a summer’s day,
Is description without place. It is a sense
To which we refer experience, a knowledge
Incognito, the column in the desert,
On which the dove alights. Description is
Composed of a sight indifferent to the eye.
It is an expectation, a desire,
A palm that rises up beyond the sea,
A little different from reality:
The difference that we make in what we see
And our memorials of that difference,
Sprinklings of bright particulars from the sky.
The future is description without place,
The categorical predicate, the arc.
It is a wizened starlight growing young,
In which old stars are planets of morning, fresh
In the brilliantest descriptions of new day,
Before it comes, the just anticipation
Of the appropriate creatures, jubilant,
The forms that are attentive in thin air.
VI
Description is revelation. It is not
The thing described, nor false facsimile.
It is an artificial thing that exists,
In its own seeming, plainly visible,
Yet not too closely the double of our lives,
Intenser than any actual life could be,
A text we should be born that we might read,
More explicit than the experience of sun
And moon, the book of reconciliation,
Book of a concept only possible
In description, canon central in itself,
The thesis of the plentifullest John.
VII
Thus the theory of description matters most.
It is the theory of the word for those
For whom the word is the making of the world,
The buzzing world and lisping firmament.
It is a world of words to the end of it,
In which nothing solid is its solid self.
As, men make themselves their speech: the hard hidalgo
Lives in the mountainous character of his speech;
And in that mountainous mirror Spain acquires
The knowledge of Spain and of the hidalgo’s hat—
A seeming of the Spaniard, a style of life,
The invention of a nation in a phrase,
In a description hollowed out of hollow-bright,
The artificer of subjects still half night.
It matters, because everything we say
Of the past is description without place, a cast
Of the imagination, made in sound;
And because what we say of the future must portend,
Be alive with its own seemings, seeming to be
Like rubies reddened by rubies reddening.
TWO TALES OF LIADOFF
I
Do you remember how the rocket went on
And on, at night, exploding finally
In an ovation of resplendent forms—
Ovation on ovation of large blue men
In pantaloons of fire and of women hatched,
Like molten citizens of the vacuum?
Do you remember the children there like wicks,
That constantly sparkled their small gold? The town
Had crowded into the rocket and touched the fuse.
That night, Liadoff, a long time after his death,
At a piano in a cloud sat practicing,
On a black piano practiced epi-tones.
Do you remember what the townsmen said,
As they fell down, as they heard Liadoff’s cloud
And its tragical, its haunted arpeggios?
And is it true that what they said, as they fell,
Was repeated by Liadoff in a narration
Of incredible colors ex, ex and ex and out?
II
The feeling of Liadoff was changed. It is
The instant of the change that was the poem,
When the cloud pressed suddenly the whole return
From thought, like a violent pulse in the cloud itself,
As if Liadoff no l
onger remained a ghost
And, being straw, turned green, lived backward, shared
The fantastic fortune of fantastic blood,
Until his body smothered him, until
His being felt the need of soaring, the need
Of air … But then that cloud, that piano placed
Just where it was, oh beau caboose … It was part
Of the instant to perceive, after the shock,
That the rocket was only an inferior cloud.
There was no difference between the town
And him. Both wanted the same thing. Both sought
His epi-tones, the colors of the ear,
The sounds that soon become a voluble speech—
Voluble but archaic and hard to hear.
ANALYSIS OF A THEME
THEME
How happy I was the day I told the young Blandina of three-legged giraffes…
ANALYSIS
In the conscious world, the great clouds
Potter in the summer sky.
It is a province—
Of ugly, subconscious time, in which
There is no beautiful eye
And no true tree,
There being no subconscious place,
Only Indyterranean
Resemblances
Of place: time’s haggard mongrels.
Yet in time’s middle deep,
In its abstract motion,
Its immaterial monsters move,
Without physical pedantry
Or any name.
Invisible, they move and are,
Not speaking worms, nor birds
Of mutable plume,
Pure coruscations, that lie beyond
The imagination, intact
And unattained,
Even in Paris, in the Gardens
Of Acclimatization,
On a holiday.
The knowledge of bright-ethered things
Bears us toward time, on its
Perfective wings.
We enjoy the ithy oonts and long-haired
Plomets, as the Herr Gott
Enjoys his comets.
LATE HYMN FROM THE MYRRH-MOUNTAIN
Unsnack your snood, madanna, for the stars
Are shining on all brows of Neversink.
Already the green bird of summer has flown
Away. The night-flies acknowledge these planets,
Predestined to this night, this noise and the place
Of summer. Tomorrow will look like today,
Will appear like it. But it will be an appearance,
A shape left behind, with like wings spreading out,
Brightly empowered with like colors, swarmingly,
But not quite molten, not quite the fluid thing,
A little changed by tips of artifice, changed
By the glints of sound from the grass. These are not
The early constellations, from which came the first
Illustrious intimations—uncertain love,
The knowledge of being, sense without sense of time.
Take the diamonds from your hair and lay them down.
The deer-grass is thin. The timothy is brown.
The shadow of an external world comes near.
MAN CARRYING THING
The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully. Illustration:
A brune figure in winter evening resists
Identity. The thing he carries resists
The most necessitous sense. Accept them, then,
As secondary (parts not quite perceived
Of the obvious whole, uncertain particles
Of the certain solid, the primary free from doubt,
Things floating like the first hundred flakes of snow
Out of a storm we must endure all night,
Out of a storm of secondary things),
A horror of thoughts that suddenly are real.
We must endure our thoughts all night, until
The bright obvious stands motionless in cold.
PIECES
Tinsel in February, tinsel in August.
There are things in a man besides his reason.
Come home, wind, he kept crying and crying.
Snow glistens in its instant in the air,
Instant of millefiori bluely magnified—
Come home, wind, he said as he climbed the stair—
Crystal on crystal until crystal clouds
Become an over-crystal out of ice,
Exhaling these creations of itself.
There is a sense in sounds beyond their meaning.
The tinsel of August falling was like a flame
That breathed on ground, more blue than red, more red
Than green, fidgets of all-related fire.
The wind is like a dog that runs away.
But it is like a horse. It is like motion
That lives in space. It is a person at night,
A member of the family, a tie,
An ethereal cousin, another milleman.
A COMPLETELY NEW SET OF OBJECTS
From a Schuylkill in mid-earth there came emerging
Flotillas, willed and wanted, bearing in them
Shadows of friends, of those he knew, each bringing
From the water in which he believed and out of desire
Things made by mid-terrestrial, mid-human
Makers without knowing, or intending, uses.
These figures verdant with time’s buried verdure
Came paddling their canoes, a thousand thousand,
Carrying such shapes, of such alleviation,
That the beholder knew their subtle purpose,
Knew well the shapes were the exactest shaping
Of a vast people old in meditation…
Under Tinicum or small Cohansey,
The fathers of the makers may lie and weather.
ADULT EPIGRAM
The romance of the precise is not the elision
Of the tired romance of imprecision.
It is the ever-never-changing same,
An appearance of Again, the diva-dame.
TWO VERSIONS OF THE SAME POEM
That Which Cannot Be Fixed
I
Once more he turned to that which could not be fixed.
By the sea, insolid rock, stentor, and said:
Lascar, is there a body, turbulent
With time, in wavering water lies, swollen
With thought, through which it cannot see? Does it
Lie lengthwise like the cloud of sleep, not quite
Reposed? And does it have a puissant heart
To toll its pulses, vigors of its self?
Lascar, and water-carcass never-named,
These vigors make, thrice-triple-syllabled,
The difficult images of possible shapes,
That cannot now be fixed. Only there is
A beating and a beating in the centre of
The sea, a strength that tumbles everywhere,
Like more and more becoming less and less,
Like space dividing its blue and by division
Being changed from space to the sailor’s metier,
Or say from that which was conceived to that
Which was realized, like reason’s constant ruin.
Sleep deep, good eel, in your perverse marine.
II
The human ocean beats against this rock
Of earth, rises against it, tide by tide,
Continually. And old John Zeller stands
On his hill, watching the rising and falling, and says:
Of what are these the creatures, what element
Or—yes: what elements, unreconciled
Because there is no golden solvent here?
If they were creatures of the sea alone,
But singular, they would, like water, scale
The uptopping top and tip of things, borne up
By the cadaver of these caverns, half-asle
ep.
But if they are of sea, earth, sky—water
And fire and air and things not discomposed
From ignorance, not an undivided whole,
It is an ocean of watery images
And shapes of fire, and wind that bears them down.
Perhaps these forms are seeking to escape
Cadaverous undulations. Rest, old mould…
MEN MADE OUT OF WORDS
What should we be without the sexual myth,
The human revery or poem of death?
Castratos of moon-mash—Life consists
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens Page 23
