The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

by Wallace Stevens

  As one that is strong in the bushes of his eyes.

  He says no to no and yes to yes. He says yes

  To no; and in saying yes he says farewell.

  He measures the velocities of change.

  He leaps from heaven to heaven more rapidly

  Than bad angels leap from heaven to hell in flames.

  But now he sits in quiet and green-a-day.

  He assumes the great speeds of space and flutters them

  From cloud to cloudless, cloudless to keen clear

  In flights of eye and ear, the highest eye

  And the lowest ear, the deep ear that discerns,

  At evening, things that attend it until it hears

  The supernatural preludes of its own,

  At the moment when the angelic eye defines

  Its actors approaching, in company, in their masks.

  Master O master seated by the fire

  And yet in space and motionless and yet

  Of motion the ever-brightening origin,

  Profound, and yet the king and yet the crown,

  Look at this present throne. What company,

  In masks, can choir it with the naked wind?

  V

  The mother invites humanity to her house

  And table. The father fetches tellers of tales

  And musicians who mute much, muse much, on the tales.

  The father fetches negresses to dance,

  Among the children, like curious ripenesses

  Of pattern in the dance’s ripening.

  For these the musicians make insidious tones,

  Clawing the sing-song of their instruments.

  The children laugh and jangle a tinny time.

  The father fetches pageants out of air,

  Scenes of the theatre, vistas and blocks of woods

  And curtains like a naive pretence of sleep.

  Among these the musicians strike the instinctive poem.

  The father fetches his unherded herds,

  Of barbarous tongue, slavered and panting halves

  Of breath, obedient to his trumpet’s touch.

  This then is Chatillon or as you please.

  We stand in the tumult of a festival.

  What festival? This loud, disordered mooch?

  These hospitaliers? These brute-like guests?

  These musicians dubbing at a tragedy,

  A-dub, a-dub, which is made up of this:

  That there are no lines to speak? There is no play.

  Or, the persons act one merely by being here.

  VI

  It is a theatre floating through the clouds,

  Itself a cloud, although of misted rock

  And mountains running like water, wave on wave,

  Through waves of light. It is of cloud transformed

  To cloud transformed again, idly, the way

  A season changes color to no end,

  Except the lavishing of itself in change,

  As light changes yellow into gold and gold

  To its opal elements and fire’s delight,

  Splashed wide-wise because it likes magnificence

  And the solemn pleasures of magnificent space.

  The cloud drifts idly through half-thought-of forms.

  The theatre is filled with flying birds,

  Wild wedges, as of a volcano’s smoke, palm-eyed

  And vanishing, a web in a corridor

  Or massive portico. A capitol,

  It may be, is emerging or has just

  Collapsed. The denouement has to be postponed…

  This is nothing until in a single man contained,

  Nothing until this named thing nameless is

  And is destroyed. He opens the door of his house

  On flames. The scholar of one candle sees

  An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame

  Of everything he is. And he feels afraid.

  VII

  Is there an imagination that sits enthroned

  As grim as it is benevolent, the just

  And the unjust, which in the midst of summer stops

  To imagine winter? When the leaves are dead,

  Does it take its place in the north and enfold itself,

  Goat-leaper, crystalled and luminous, sitting

  In highest night? And do these heavens adorn

  And proclaim it, the white creator of black, jetted

  By extinguishings, even of planets as may be,

  Even of earth, even of sight, in snow,

  Except as needed by way of majesty,

  In the sky, as crown and diamond cabala?

  It leaps through us, through all our heavens leaps,

  Extinguishing our planets, one by one,

  Leaving, of where we were and looked, of where

  We knew each other and of each other thought,

  A shivering residue, chilled and foregone,

  Except for that crown and mystical cabala.

  But it dare not leap by chance in its own dark.

  It must change from destiny to slight caprice.

  And thus its jetted tragedy, its stele

  And shape and mournful making move to find

  What must unmake it and, at last, what can,

  Say, a flippant communication under the moon.

  VIII

  There may be always a time of innocence.

  There is never a place. Or if there is no time,

  If it is not a thing of time, nor of place,

  Existing in the idea of it, alone,

  In the sense against calamity, it is not

  Less real. For the oldest and coldest philosopher,

  There is or may be a time of innocence

  As pure principle. Its nature is its end,

  That it should be, and yet not be, a thing

  That pinches the pity of the pitiful man,

  Like a book at evening beautiful but untrue,

  Like a book on rising beautiful and true.

  It is like a thing of ether that exists

  Almost as predicate. But it exists,

  It exists, it is visible, it is, it is.

  So, then, these lights are not a spell of light,

  A saying out of a cloud, but innocence.

  An innocence of the earth and no false sign

  Or symbol of malice. That we partake thereof,

  Lie down like children in this holiness,

  As if, awake, we lay in the quiet of sleep,

  As if the innocent mother sang in the dark

  Of the room and on an accordion, half-heard,

  Created the time and place in which we breathed…

  IX

  And of each other thought—in the idiom

  Of the work, in the idiom of an innocent earth,

  Not of the enigma of the guilty dream.

  We were as Danes in Denmark all day long

  And knew each other well, hale-hearted landsmen,

  For whom the outlandish was another day

  Of the week, queerer than Sunday. We thought alike

  And that made brothers of us in a home

  In which we fed on being brothers, fed

  And fattened as on a decorous honeycomb.

  This drama that we live—We lay sticky with sleep.

  This sense of the activity of fate—

  The rendezvous, when she came alone,

  By her coming became a freedom of the two,

  An isolation which only the two could share.

  Shall we be found hanging in the trees next spring?

  Of what disaster is this the imminence:

  Bare limbs, bare trees and a wind as sharp as salt?

  The stars are putting on their glittering belts.

  They throw around their shoulders cloaks that flash

  Like a great shadow’s last embellishment.

  It may come tomorrow in the simplest word,

  Almost as part of innocence, almost,

  Almost as the tenderest and the truest par
t.

  X

  An unhappy people in a happy world—

  Read, rabbi, the phases of this difference.

  An unhappy people in an unhappy world—

  Here are too many mirrors for misery.

  A happy people in an unhappy world—

  It cannot be. There’s nothing there to roll

  On the expressive tongue, the finding fang.

  A happy people in a happy world—

  Buffo! A ball, an opera, a bar.

  Turn back to where we were when we began:

  An unhappy people in a happy world.

  Now, solemnize the secretive syllables.

  Read to the congregation, for today

  And for tomorrow, this extremity,

  This contrivance of the spectre of the spheres,

  Contriving balance to contrive a whole,

  The vital, the never-failing genius,

  Fulfilling his meditations, great and small.

  In these unhappy he meditates a whole,

  The full of fortune and the full of fate,

  As if he lived all lives, that he might know,

  In hall harridan, not hushful paradise,

  To a haggling of wind and weather, by these lights

  Like a blaze of summer straw, in winter’s nick.

  PAGE FROM A TALE

  In the hard brightness of that winter day

  The sea was frozen solid and Hans heard,

  By his drift-fire, on the shore, the difference

  Between loud water and loud wind, between that

  Which has no accurate syllables and that

  Which cries so blau and cries again so lind

  Und so lau, between sound without meaning and speech,

  Of clay and wattles made as it ascends

  And hear it as it falls in the deep heart’s core.

  A steamer lay near him, foundered in the ice.

  So blau, so blau…Hans listened by the fire.

  New stars that were a foot across came out

  And shone. And a small cabin build there.

  So lind. The wind blazed as they sang. So lau.

  The great ship, Balayne, lay frozen in the sea.

  The one-foot stars were couriers of its death

  To the wild limits of its habitation.

  These were not tepid stars of torpid places

  But bravest at midnight and in lonely spaces,

  They looked back at Hans’ look with savage faces.

  The wet weed sputtered, the fire died down, the cold

  Was like a sleep. The sea was a sea he dreamed.

  Yet Hans lay wide awake. And live alone

  In the bee-loud glade. Lights on the steamer moved.

  Men would be starting at dawn to walk ashore.

  They would be afraid of the sun: what it might be,

  Afraid of the country angels of those skies,

  The finned flutterings and gaspings of the ice,

  As if whatever in water strove to speak

  Broke dialect in a break of memory.

  The sun might rise and it might not and if

  It rose, ashen and red and yellow, each

  Opaque, in orange circlet, nearer than it

  Had ever been before, no longer known,

  No more that which most of all brings back the known,

  But that which destroys it completely by this light

  For that, or a motion not in the astronomies,

  Beyond the habit of sense, anarchic shape

  Afire—it might and it might not in that

  Gothic blue, speed home its portents to their ends.

  It might become a wheel spoked red and white

  In alternate stripes converging at a point

  Of flame on the line, with a second wheel below,

  Just rising, accompanying, arranged to cross,

  Through weltering illuminations, humps

  Of billows, downward, toward the drift-fire shore.

  It might come bearing, out of chaos, kin

  Smeared, smoked, and drunken of thin potencies,

  Lashing at images in the atmosphere,

  Ringed round and barred, with eyes held in their hands,

  And capable of incapably evil thought:

  Slight gestures that could rend the palpable ice,

  Or melt Arcturus to ingots dropping drops,

  Or spill night out in brilliant vanishings,

  Whirlpools of darkness in whirlwinds of light…

  The miff-maff-muff of water, the vocables

  Of the wind, the glassily-sparkling particles

  Of the mind—They would soon climb down the side of the ship.

  They would march single file, with electric lamps, alert

  For a tidal undulation underneath.

  LARGE RED MAN READING

  There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases,

  As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae.

  They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expected more.

  There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of life,

  Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips among them.

  They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality,

  That would have wept and been happy, have shivered in the frost

  And cried out to feel it again, have run fingers over leaves

  And against the most coiled thorn, have seized on what was ugly

  And laughed, as he sat there reading, from out of the purple tabulae,

  The outlines of being and its expressings, the syllables of its law:

  Poesis, poesis, the literal characters, the vatic lines,

  Which in those ears and in those thin, those spended hearts,

  Took on color, took on shape and the size of things as they are

  And spoke the feeling for them, which was what they had lacked.

  THIS SOLITUDE OF CATARACTS

  He never felt twice the same about the flecked river,

  Which kept flowing and never the same way twice, flowing

  Through many places, as if it stood still in one,

  Fixed like a lake on which the wild ducks fluttered,

  Ruffling its common reflections, thought-like Monadnocks.

  There seemed to be an apostrophe that was not spoken.

  There was so much that was real that was not real at all.

  He wanted to feel the same way over and over.

  He wanted the river to go on flowing the same way,

  To keep on flowing. He wanted to walk beside it,

  Under the buttonwoods, beneath a moon nailed fast.

  He wanted his heart to stop beating and his mind to rest

  In a permanent realization, without any wild ducks

  Or mountains that were not mountains, just to know how it would be,

  Just to know how it would feel, released from destruction,

  To be a bronze man breathing under archaic lapis,

  Without the oscillations of planetary pass-pass,

  Breathing his bronzen breath at the azury centre of time.

  IN THE ELEMENT OF ANTAGONISMS

  If it is a world without a genius,

  It is most happily contrived. Here, then,

  We ask which means most, for us, all the genii

  Or one man who, for us, is greater than they,

  On his gold horse striding, like a conjured beast,

  Miraculous in its panache and swish?

  Birds twitter pandemoniums around

  The idea of the chevalier of chevaliers,

  The well-composed in his burnished solitude,

  The tower, the ancient accent, the wintry size.

  And the north wind’s mighty buskin seems to fall

  In an excessive corridor, alas!

  IN A BAD TIME

  How mad would he have to be to say, “He beheld

  An order and thereafter he belonged

 
To it”? He beheld the order of the northern sky.

  But the beggar gazes on calamity

  And thereafter he belongs to it, to bread

  Hard found, and water tasting of misery.

  For him cold’s glacial beauty is his fate.

  Without understanding, he belongs to it

  And the night, and midnight, and after, where it is.

  What has he? What he has he has. But what?

  It is not a question of captious repartee.

  What has he that becomes his heart’s strong core?

  He has his poverty and nothing more.

  His poverty becomes his heart’s strong core—

  A forgetfulness of summer at the pole.

  Sordid Melpomene, why strut bare boards,

  Without scenery or lights, in the theatre’s bricks,

  Dressed high in heliotrope’s inconstant hue,

  The muse of misery? Speak loftier lines.

  Cry out, “I am the purple muse.” Make sure

  The audience beholds you, not your gown.

  THE BEGINNING

  So summer comes in the end to these few stains

  And the rust and rot of the door through which she went.

  The house is empty. But here is where she sat

  To comb her dewy hair, a touchless light,

  Perplexed by its darker iridescences.