The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
The starry voluptuary will be born.
XXXVII
Yesterday the roses were rising upward,
Pushing their buds above the dark green leaves,
Noble in autumn, yet nobler than autumn.
XXXVIII
The album of Corot is premature,
A little later when the sky is black.
Mist that is golden is not wholly mist.
XXXIX
Not the ocean of the virtuosi
But the ugly alien, the mask that speaks
Things unintelligible, yet understood.
XL
Always the standard repertoire in line
And that would be perfection, if each began
Not by beginning but at the last man’s end.
XLI
The chrysanthemums’ astringent fragrance comes
Each year to disguise the clanking mechanism
Of machine within machine within machine.
XLII
God of the sausage-makers, sacred guild,
Or possibly, the merest patron saint
Ennobled as in a mirror to sanctity.
XLIII
It is curious that the density of life
On a given plane is ascertainable
By dividing the number of legs one sees by two.
At least the number of people may thus be fixed.
XLIV
Freshness is more than the east wind blowing round one.
There is no such thing as innocence in autumn,
Yet, it may be, innocence is never lost.
XLV
Encore un instant de bonheur. The words
Are a woman’s words, unlikely to satisfy
The taste of even a country connoisseur.
XLVI
Everything ticks like a clock. The cabinet
Of a man gone mad, after all, for time, in spite
Of the cuckoos, a man with a mania for clocks.
XLVII
The sun is seeking something bright to shine on.
The trees are wooden, the grass is yellow and thin.
The ponds are not the surfaces it seeks.
It must create its colors out of itself.
XLVIII
Music is not yet written but is to be.
The preparation is long and of long intent
For the time when sound shall be subtler than we ourselves.
XLIX
It needed the heavy nights of drenching weather
To make him return to people, to find among them
Whatever it was that he found in their absence,
A pleasure, an indulgence, an infatuation.
L
Union of the weakest develops strength
Not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge
One of the leaves that have fallen in autumn?
But the wise man avenges by building his city in snow.
A POSTCARD FROM THE VOLCANO
Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;
And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;
And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt
At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion-house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky
Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion’s look
And what we said of it became
A part of what it is … Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,
Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,
A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.
AUTUMN REFRAIN
The skreak and skritter of evening gone
And grackles gone and sorrows of the sun,
The sorrows of sun, too, gone … the moon and moon,
The yellow moon of words about the nightingale
In measureless measures, not a bird for me
But the name of a bird and the name of a nameless air
I have never—shall never hear. And yet beneath
The stillness of everything gone, and being still,
Being and sitting still, something resides,
Some skreaking and skrittering residuum,
And grates these evasions of the nightingale
Though I have never—shall never hear that bird.
And the stillness is in the key, all of it is,
The stillness is all in the key of that desolate sound.
A FISH-SCALE SUNRISE
Melodious skeletons, for all of last night’s music
Today is today and the dancing is done.
Dew lies on the instruments of straw that you were playing,
The ruts in your empty road are red.
You Jim and you Margaret and you singer of La Paloma,
The cocks are crowing and crowing loud,
And although my mind perceives the force behind the moment,
The mind is smaller than the eye.
The sun rises green and blue in the fields and in the heavens.
The clouds foretell a swampy rain.
GALLANT CHTEAU
Is it bad to have come here
And to have found the bed empty?
One might have found tragic hair,
Bitter eyes, hands hostile and cold.
There might have been a light on a book
Lighting a pitiless verse or two.
There might have been the immense solitude
Of the wind upon the curtains.
Pitiless verse? A few words tuned
And tuned and tuned and tuned.
It is good. The bed is empty,
The curtains are stiff and prim and still.
DELIGHTFUL EVENING
A very felicitous eve,
Herr Doktor, and that’s enough,
Though the brow in your palm may grieve
At the vernacular of light
(Omitting reefs of cloud):
Empurpled garden grass;
The spruces’ outstretched hands;
The twilight overfull
Of wormy metaphors.
THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR
THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR
I
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”
The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”
And they said then, “But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.”
II
I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.
I sing a hero’s head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,
Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.
If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,
Say that it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.
III
Ah, but to play man number one,
To drive the dagger in his heart,
To lay his brain upon the board
And pick the acrid colors out,
To nail his thought across the door,
Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,
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To strike his living hi and ho,
To tick it, tock it, turn it true,
To bang it from a savage blue,
Jangling the metal of the strings…
IV
So that’s life, then: things as they are?
It picks its way on the blue guitar.
A million people on one string?
And all their manner in the thing,
And all their manner, right and wrong,
And all their manner, weak and strong?
The feelings crazily, craftily call,
Like a buzzing of flies in autumn air,
And that’s life, then: things as they are,
This buzzing of the blue guitar.
V
Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry,
Of the torches wisping in the underground,
Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light.
There are no shadows in our sun,
Day is desire and night is sleep.
There are no shadows anywhere.
The earth, for us, is flat and bare.
There are no shadows. Poetry
Exceeding music must take the place
Of empty heaven and its hymns,
Ourselves in poetry must take their place,
Even in the chattering of your guitar.
VI
A tune beyond us as we are,
Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar;
Ourselves in the tune as if in space,
Yet nothing changed, except the place
Of things as they are and only the place
As you play them, on the blue guitar,
Placed, so, beyond the compass of change,
Perceived in a final atmosphere;
For a moment final, in the way
The thinking of art seems final when
The thinking of god is smoky dew.
The tune is space. The blue guitar
Becomes the place of things as they are,
A composing of senses of the guitar.
VII
It is the sun that shares our works.
The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.
When shall I come to say of the sun,
It is a sea; it shares nothing;
The sun no longer shares our works
And the earth is alive with creeping men,
Mechanical beetles never quite warm?
And shall I then stand in the sun, as now
I stand in the moon, and call it good,
The immaculate, the merciful good,
Detached from us, from things as they are?
Not to be part of the sun? To stand
Remote and call it merciful?
The strings are cold on the blue guitar.
VIII
The vivid, florid, turgid sky,
The drenching thunder rolling by,
The morning deluged still by night,
The clouds tumultuously bright
And the feeling heavy in cold chords
Struggling toward impassioned choirs,
Crying among the clouds, enraged
By gold antagonists in air—
I know my lazy, leaden twang
Is like the reason in a storm;
And yet it brings the storm to bear.
I twang it out and leave it there.
IX
And the color, the overcast blue
Of the air, in which the blue guitar
Is a form, described but difficult,
And I am merely a shadow hunched
Above the arrowy, still strings,
The maker of a thing yet to be made;
The color like a thought that grows
Out of a mood, the tragic robe
Of the actor, half his gesture, half
His speech, the dress of his meaning, silk
Sodden with his melancholy words,
The weather of his stage, himself.
X
Raise reddest columns. Toll a bell
And clap the hollows full of tin.
Throw papers in the streets, the wills
Of the dead, majestic in their seals.
And the beautiful trombones—behold
The approach of him whom none believes,
Whom all believe that all believe,
A pagan in a varnished car.
Roll a drum upon the blue guitar.
Lean from the steeple. Cry aloud,
“Here am I, my adversary, that
Confront you, hoo-ing the slick trombones,
Yet with a petty misery
At heart, a petty misery,
Ever the prelude to your end,
The touch that topples men and rock.”
XI
Slowly the ivy on the stones
Becomes the stones. Women become
The cities, children become the fields
And men in waves become the sea.
It is the chord that falsifies.
The sea returns upon the men,
The fields entrap the children, brick
Is a weed and all the flies are caught,
Wingless and withered, but living alive.
The discord merely magnifies.
Deeper within the belly’s dark
Of time, time grows upon the rock.
XII
Tom-tom, c’est moi. The blue guitar
And I are one. The orchestra
Fills the high hall with shuffling men
High as the hall. The whirling noise
Of a multitude dwindles, all said,
To his breath that lies awake at night.
I know that timid breathing. Where
Do I begin and end? And where,
As I strum the thing, do I pick up
That which momentously declares
Itself not to be I and yet
Must be. It could be nothing else.
XIII
The pale intrusions into blue
Are corrupting pallors … ay di mi,
Blue buds or pitchy blooms. Be content—
Expansions, diffusions—content to be
The unspotted imbecile revery,
The heraldic center of the world
Of blue, blue sleek with a hundred chins,
The amorist Adjective aflame…
XIV
First one beam, then another, then
A thousand are radiant in the sky.
Each is both star and orb; and day
Is the riches of their atmosphere.
The sea appends its tattery hues.
The shores are banks of muffling mist.
One says a German chandelier—
A candle is enough to light the world.
It makes it clear. Even at noon
It glistens in essential dark.
At night, it lights the fruit and wine,
The book and bread, things as they are,
In a chiaroscuro where
One sits and plays the blue guitar.
XV
Is this picture of Picasso’s, this “hoard
Of destructions,” a picture of ourselves,
Now, an image of our society?
Do I sit, deformed, a naked egg,
Catching at Good-bye, harvest moon,
Without seeing the harvest or the moon?
Things as they are have been destroyed.
Have I? Am I a man that is dead
At a table on which the food is cold?
Is my thought a memory, not alive?
Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood
And whichever it may be, is it mine?
XVI
The earth is not earth but a stone,
Not the mother that held men as they fell
But stone, but like a stone, no: not
The mother, but an oppressor, but like
An oppressor that grudges them their death,
As it grudges the living that they live.
To live in w
ar, to live at war,
To chop the sullen psaltery,
To improve the sewers in Jerusalem,
To electrify the nimbuses—
Place honey on the altars and die,
You lovers that are bitter at heart.
XVII
The person has a mould. But not