The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

by Wallace Stevens

  The way a look or a touch reveals its unexpected magnitudes.

  LOOKING ACROSS THE FIELDS AND WATCHING THE BIRDS FLY

  Among the more irritating minor ideas

  Of Mr. Homburg during his visits home

  To Concord, at the edge of things, was this:

  To think away the grass, the trees, the clouds,

  Not to transform them into other things,

  Is only what the sun does every day,

  Until we say to ourselves that there may be

  A pensive nature, a mechanical

  And slightly detestable operandum, free

  From man’s ghost, larger and yet a little like,

  Without his literature and without his gods…

  No doubt we live beyond ourselves in air,

  In an element that does not do for us,

  So well, that which we do for ourselves, too big,

  A thing not planned for imagery or belief,

  Not one of the masculine myths we used to make,

  A transparency through which the swallow weaves,

  Without any form or any sense of form,

  What we know in what we see, what we feel in what

  We hear, what we are, beyond mystic disputation,

  In the tumult of integrations out of the sky,

  And what we think, a breathing like the wind,

  A moving part of a motion, a discovery

  Part of a discovery, a change part of a change,

  A sharing of color and being part of it.

  The afternoon is visibly a source,

  Too wide, too irised, to be more than calm,

  Too much like thinking to be less than thought,

  Obscurest parent, obscurest patriarch,

  A daily majesty of meditation,

  That comes and goes in silences of its own.

  We think, then, as the sun shines or does not.

  We think as wind skitters on a pond in a field

  Or we put mantles on our words because

  The same wind, rising and rising, makes a sound

  Like the last muting of winter as it ends.

  A new scholar replacing an older one reflects

  A moment on this fantasia. He seeks

  For a human that can be accounted for.

  The spirit comes from the body of the world,

  Or so Mr. Homburg thought: the body of a world

  Whose blunt laws make an affectation of mind,

  The mannerism of nature caught in a glass

  And there become a spirit’s mannerism,

  A glass aswarm with things going as far as they can.

  SONG OF FIXED ACCORD

  Rou-cou spoke the dove,

  Like the sooth lord of sorrow,

  Of sooth love and sorrow,

  And a hail-bow, hail-bow,

  To this morrow.

  She lay upon the roof,

  A little wet of wing and woe,

  And she rou-ed there,

  Softly she piped among the suns

  And their ordinary glare,

  The sun of five, the sun of six,

  Their ordinariness,

  And the ordinariness of seven,

  Which she accepted,

  Like a fixed heaven,

  Not subject to change…

  Day’s invisible beginner,

  The lord of love and of sooth sorrow,

  Lay on the roof

  And made much within her.

  THE WORLD AS MEDITATION

  J’ai passé trop de temps à travailler mon violon, à voyager. Mais l’exercice essentiel du compositeur—la méditation—rien ne l’a jamais suspendu en moi … Je vis un rêve permanent, qui ne s’arrête ni nuit ni jour.

  GEORGES ENESCO

  Is it Ulysses that approaches from the east,

  The interminable adventurer? The trees are mended.

  That winter is washed away. Someone is moving

  On the horizon and lifting himself up above it.

  A form of fire approaches the cretonnes of Penelope,

  Whose mere savage presence awakens the world in which she dwells.

  She has composed, so long, a self with which to welcome him,

  Companion to his self for her, which she imagined,

  Two in a deep-founded sheltering, friend and dear friend.

  The trees had been mended, as an essential exercise

  In an inhuman meditation, larger than her own.

  No winds like dogs watched over her at night.

  She wanted nothing he could not bring her by coming alone.

  She wanted no fetchings. His arms would be her necklace

  And her belt, the final fortune of their desire.

  But was it Ulysses? Or was it only the warmth of the sun

  On her pillow? The thought kept beating in her like her heart.

  The two kept beating together. It was only day.

  It was Ulysses and it was not. Yet they had met,

  Friend and dear friend and a planet’s encouragement.

  The barbarous strength within her would never fail.

  She would talk a little to herself as she combed her hair,

  Repeating his name with its patient syllables,

  Never forgetting him that kept coming constantly so near.

  LONG AND SLUGGISH LINES

  It makes so little difference, at so much more

  Than seventy, where one looks, one has been there before.

  Wood-smoke rises through trees, is caught in an upper flow

  Of air and whirled away. But it has been often so.

  The trees have a look as if they bore sad names

  And kept saying over and over one same, same thing,

  In a kind of uproar, because an opposite, a contradiction,

  Has enraged them and made them want to talk it down.

  What opposite? Could it be that yellow patch, the side

  Of a house, that makes one think the house is laughing;

  Or these—escent—issant pre-personae: first fly,

  A comic infanta among the tragic drapings,

  Babyishness of forsythia, a snatch of belief,

  The spook and makings of the nude magnolia?

  …Wanderer, this is the pre-history of February.

  The life of the poem in the mind has not yet begun.

  You were not born yet when the trees were crystal

  Nor are you now, in this wakefulness inside a sleep.

  A QUIET NORMAL LIFE

  His place, as he sat and as he thought, was not

  In anything that he constructed, so frail,

  So barely lit, so shadowed over and naught,

  As, for example, a world in which, like snow,

  He became an inhabitant, obedient

  To gallant notions on the part of cold.

  It was here. This was the setting and the time

  Of year. Here in his house and in his room,

  In his chair, the most tranquil thought grew peaked

  And the oldest and the warmest heart was cut

  By gallant notions on the part of night—

  Both late and alone, above the crickets’ chords,

  Babbling, each one, the uniqueness of its sound.

  There was no fury in transcendent forms.

  But his actual candle blazed with artifice.

  FINAL SOLILOQUY OF THE INTERIOR PARAMOUR

  Light the first light of evening, as in a room

  In which we rest and, for small reason, think

  The world imagined is the ultimate good.

  This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.

  It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,

  Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

  Within a single thing, a single shawl

  Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,

  A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

  Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.

  We feel the ob
scurity of an order, a whole,

  A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

  Within its vital boundary, in the mind.

  We say God and the imagination are one…

  How high that highest candle lights the dark.

  Out of this same light, out of the central mind,

  We make a dwelling in the evening air,

  In which being there together is enough.

  THE ROCK

  I

  Seventy Years Later

  It is an illusion that we were ever alive,

  Lived in the houses of mothers, arranged ourselves

  By our own motions in a freedom of air.

  Regard the freedom of seventy years ago.

  It is no longer air. The houses still stand,

  Though they are rigid in rigid emptiness.

  Even our shadows, their shadows, no longer remain.

  The lives these lived in the mind are at an end.

  They never were … The sounds of the guitar

  Were not and are not. Absurd. The words spoken

  Were not and are not. It is not to be believed.

  The meeting at noon at the edge of the field seems like

  An invention, an embrace between one desperate clod

  And another in a fantastic consciousness,

  In a queer assertion of humanity:

  A theorem proposed between the two—

  Two figures in a nature of the sun,

  In the sun’s design of its own happiness,

  As if nothingness contained a métier,

  A vital assumption, an impermanence

  In its permanent cold, an illusion so desired

  That the green leaves came and covered the high rock,

  That the lilacs came and bloomed, like a blindness cleaned,

  Exclaiming bright sight, as it was satisfied,

  In a birth of sight. The blooming and the musk

  Were being alive, an incessant being alive,

  A particular of being, that gross universe.

  II

  The Poem as Icon

  It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves.

  We must be cured of it by a cure of the ground

  Or a cure of ourselves, that is equal to a cure

  Of the ground, a cure beyond forgetfulness.

  And yet the leaves, if they broke into bud,

  If they broke into bloom, if they bore fruit,

  And if we ate the incipient colorings

  Of their fresh culls might be a cure of the ground.

  The fiction of the leaves is the icon

  Of the poem, the figuration of blessedness,

  And the icon is the man. The pearled chaplet of spring,

  The magnum wreath of summer, time’s autumn snood,

  Its copy of the sun, these cover the rock.

  These leaves are the poem, the icon and the man.

  These are a cure of the ground and of ourselves,

  In the predicate that there is nothing else.

  They bud and bloom and bear their fruit without change.

  They are more than leaves that cover the barren rock

  They bud the whitest eye, the pallidest sprout,

  New senses in the engenderings of sense,

  The desire to be at the end of distances,

  The body quickened and the mind in root.

  They bloom as a man loves, as he lives in love.

  They bear their fruit so that the year is known,

  As if its understanding was brown skin,

  The honey in its pulp, the final found,

  The plenty of the year and of the world.

  In this plenty, the poem makes meanings of the rock,

  Of such mixed motion and such imagery

  That its barrenness becomes a thousand things

  And so exists no more. This is the cure

  Of leaves and of the ground and of ourselves.

  His words are both the icon and the man.

  III

  Forms of the Rock in a Night-Hymn

  The rock is the gray particular of man’s life,

  The stone from which he rises, up—and—ho,

  The step to the bleaker depths of his descents…

  The rock is the stern particular of the air,

  The mirror of the planets, one by one,

  But through man’s eye, their silent rhapsodist,

  Turquoise the rock, at odious evening bright

  With redness that sticks fast to evil dreams;

  The difficult rightness of half-risen day.

  The rock is the habitation of the whole,

  Its strength and measure, that which is near, point A

  In a perspective that begins again

  At B: the origin of the mango’s rind.

  It is the rock where tranquil must adduce

  Its tranquil self, the main of things, the mind,

  The starting point of the human and the end,

  That in which space itself is contained, the gate

  To the enclosure, day, the things illumined

  By day, night and that which night illumines,

  Night and its midnight-minting fragrances,

  Night’s hymn of the rock, as in a vivid sleep.

  ST. ARMORER’S CHURCH FROM THE OUTSIDE

  St. Armorer’s was once an immense success.

  It rose loftily and stood massively; and to lie

  In its church-yard, in the province of St. Armorer’s,

  Fixed one for good in geranium-colored day.

  What is left has the foreign smell of plaster,

  The closed-in smell of hay. A sumac grows

  On the altar, growing toward the lights, inside.

  Reverberations leak and lack among holes…

  Its chapel rises from Terre Ensevelie,

  An ember yes among its cindery noes,

  His own: a chapel of breath, an appearance made

  For a sign of meaning in the meaningless,

  No radiance of dead blaze, but something seen

  In a mystic eye, no sign of life but life,

  Itself, the presence of the intelligible

  In that which is created as its symbol.

  It is like a new account of everything old,

  Matisse at Vence and a great deal more than that,

  A new-colored sun, say, that will soon change forms

  And spread hallucinations on every leaf.

  The chapel rises, his own, his period,

  A civilization formed from the outward blank,

  A sacred syllable rising from sacked speech,

  The first car out of a tunnel en voyage

  Into lands of ruddy-ruby fruits, achieved

  Not merely desired, for sale, and market things

  That press, strong peasants in a peasant world,

  Their purports to a final seriousness—

  Final for him, the acceptance of such prose,

  Time’s given perfections made to seem like less

  Than the need of each generation to be itself,

  The need to be actual and as it is.

  St. Armorer’s has nothing of this present,

  This vif, this dizzle-dazzle of being new

  And of becoming, for which the chapel spreads out

  Its arches in its vivid element,

  In the air of newness of that element,

  In an air of freshness, clearness, greenness, blueness,

  That which is always beginning because it is part

  Of that which is always beginning, over and over.

  The chapel underneath St. Armorer’s walls,

  Stands in a light, its natural light and day,

  The origin and keep of its health and his own.

  And there he walks and does as he lives and likes.

  NOTE ON MOONLIGHT

  The one moonlight, in the simple-colored night,

  Like a plain poet revolving in his mind

  The sameness of his various universe,


  Shines on the mere objectiveness of things.

  It is as if being was to be observed,

  As if, among the possible purposes

  Of what one sees, the purpose that comes first,

  The surface, is the purpose to be seen,

  The property of the moon, what it evokes.

  It is to disclose the essential presence, say,

  Of a mountain, expanded and elevated almost

  Into a sense, an object the less; or else

  To disclose in the figure waiting on the road

  An object the more, an undetermined form

  Between the slouchings of a gunman and a lover,

  A gesture in the dark, a fear one feels

  In the great vistas of night air, that takes this form,

  In the arbors that are as if of Saturn-star.

  So, then, this warm, wide, weatherless quietude

  Is active with a power, an inherent life,

  In spite of the mere objectiveness of things,

  Like a cloud-cap in the corner of a looking-glass,

  A change of color in the plain poet’s mind,

  Night and silence disturbed by an interior sound,

  The one moonlight, the various universe, intended