The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

  Never the naked politician taught

  By the wise. There are not leaves enough to crown,

  To cover, to crown, to cover—let it go—

  The actor that will at last declaim our end.

  COUNTRY WORDS

  I sang a canto in a canton,

  Cunning-coo, O, cuckoo cock,

  In a canton of Belshazzar

  To Belshazzar, putrid rock,

  Pillar of a putrid people,

  Underneath a willow there

  I stood and sang and filled the air.

  It was an old rebellious song,

  An edge of song that never clears;

  But if it did … If the cloud that hangs

  Upon the heart and round the mind

  Cleared from the north and in that height

  The sun appeared and reddened great

  Belshazzar’s brow, O, ruler, rude

  With rubies then, attend me now.

  What is it that my feeling seeks?

  I know from all the things it touched

  And left beside and left behind.

  It wants the diamond pivot bright.

  It wants Belshazzar reading right

  The luminous pages on his knee,

  Of being, more than birth or death.

  It wants words virile with his breath.

  THE DWARF

  Now it is September and the web is woven.

  The web is woven and you have to wear it.

  The winter is made and you have to bear it,

  The winter web, the winter woven, wind and wind,

  For all the thoughts of summer that go with it

  In the mind, pupa of straw, moppet of rags.

  It is the mind that is woven, the mind that was jerked

  And tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun.

  It is all that you are, the final dwarf of you,

  That is woven and woven and waiting to be worn,

  Neither as mask nor as garment but as a being,

  Torn from insipid summer, for the mirror of cold,

  Sitting beside your lamp, there citron to nibble

  And coffee dribble … Frost is in the stubble.

  A RABBIT AS KING OF THE GHOSTS

  The difficulty to think at the end of day,

  When the shapeless shadow covers the sun

  And nothing is left except light on your fur—

  There was the cat slopping its milk all day,

  Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk

  And August the most peaceful month.

  To be, in the grass, in the peacefulest time,

  Without that monument of cat,

  The cat forgotten in the moon;

  And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,

  In which everything is meant for you

  And nothing need be explained;

  Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;

  And east rushes west and west rushes down,

  No matter. The grass is full

  And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,

  The whole of the wideness of night is for you,

  A self that touches all edges,

  You become a self that fills the four corners of night.

  The red cat hides away in the fur-light

  And there you are humped high, humped up,

  You are humped higher and higher, black as stone—

  You sit with your head like a carving in space

  And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.

  LONELINESS IN JERSEY CITY

  The deer and the dachshund are one.

  Well, the gods grow out of the weather.

  The people grow out of the weather;

  The gods grow out of the people.

  Encore, encore, encore les dieux…

  The distance between the dark steeple

  And cobble ten thousand and three

  Is more than a seven-foot inchworm

  Could measure by moonlight in June.

  Kiss, cats: for the deer and the dachshund

  Are one. My window is twenty-nine three

  And plenty of window for me.

  The steeples are empty and so are the people,

  There’s nothing whatever to see

  Except Polacks that pass in their motors

  And play concertinas all night.

  They think that things are all right,

  Since the deer and the dachshund are one.

  ANYTHING IS BEAUTIFUL IF YOU SAY IT IS

  Under the eglantine

  The fretful concubine

  Said, “Phooey! Phoo!”

  She whispered, “Pfui!”

  The demi-monde

  On the mezzanine

  Said, “Phooey!” too,

  And a “Hey-de-i-do!”

  The bee may have all sweet

  For his honey-hive-o,

  From the eglantine-o.

  And the chandeliers are neat…

  But their mignon, marblish glare!

  We are cold, the parrots cried,

  In a place so debonair.

  The Johannisberger, Hans.

  I love the metal grapes,

  The rusty, battered shapes

  Of the pears and of the cheese

  And the window’s lemon light,

  The very will of the nerves,

  The crack across the pane,

  The dirt along the sill.

  A WEAK MIND IN THE MOUNTAINS

  There was the butcher’s hand.

  He squeezed it and the blood

  Spurted from between the fingers

  And fell to the floor.

  And then the body fell.

  So afterward, at night,

  The wind of Iceland and

  The wind of Ceylon,

  Meeting, gripped my mind,

  Gripped it and grappled my thoughts.

  The black wind of the sea

  And the green wind

  Whirled upon me.

  The blood of the mind fell

  To the floor. I slept.

  Yet there was a man within me

  Could have risen to the clouds,

  Could have touched these winds,

  Bent and broken them down,

  Could have stood up sharply in the sky.

  THE BAGATELLES THE MADRIGALS

  Where do you think, serpent,

  Where do you lie, beneath snow,

  And with eyes closed

  Breathe in a crevice of earth?

  In what camera do you taste

  Poison, in what darkness set

  Glittering scales and point

  The tipping tongue?

  And where is it, you, people,

  Where is it that you think, baffled

  By the trash of life,

  Through winter’s meditative light?

  In what crevice do you find

  Forehead’s cold, spite of the eye

  Seeing that which is refused,

  Vengeful, shadowed by gestures

  Of the life that you will not live,

  Of days that will be wasted,

  Of nights that will not be more than

  Surly masks and destroyers?

  (This is one of the thoughts

  Of the mind that forms itself

  Out of all the minds,

  One of the songs of that dominance.)

  GIRL IN A NIGHTGOWN

  Lights out. Shades up.

  A look at the weather.

  There has been a booming all the spring,

  A refrain from the end of the boulevards.

  This is the silence of night,

  This is what could not be shaken,

  Full of stars and the images of stars—

  And that booming wintry and dull,

  Like a tottering, a falling and an end,

  Again and again, always there,

  Massive drums and leaden trumpets,

  Perceived by feeling instead of sense,
br />   A revolution of things colliding.

  Phrases! But of fear and of fate.

  The night should be warm and fluters’ fortune

  Should play in the trees when morning comes.

  Once it was, the repose of night,

  Was a place, strong place, in which to sleep.

  It is shaken now. It will burst into flames,

  Either now or tomorrow or the day after that.

  CONNOISSEUR OF CHAOS

  I

  A. A violent order is disorder; and

  B. A great disorder is an order. These

  Two things are one. (Pages of illustrations.)

  II

  If all the green of spring was blue, and it is;

  If the flowers of South Africa were bright

  On the tables of Connecticut, and they are;

  If Englishmen lived without tea in Ceylon, and they do;

  And if it all went on in an orderly way,

  And it does; a law of inherent opposites,

  Of essential unity, is as pleasant as port,

  As pleasant as the brush-strokes of a bough,

  An upper, particular bough in, say, Marchand.

  III

  After all the pretty contrast of life and death

  Proves that these opposite things partake of one,

  At least that was the theory, when bishops’ books

  Resolved the world. We cannot go back to that.

  The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,

  If one may say so. And yet relation appears,

  A small relation expanding like the shade

  Of a cloud on sand, a shape on the side of a hill.

  IV

  A. Well, an old order is a violent one.

  This proves nothing. Just one more truth, one more

  Element in the immense disorder of truths.

  B. It is April as I write. The wind

  Is blowing after days of constant rain.

  All this, of course, will come to summer soon.

  But suppose the disorder of truths should ever come

  To an order, most Plantagenet, most fixed…

  A great disorder is an order. Now, A

  And B are not like statuary, posed

  For a vista in the Louvre. They are things chalked

  On the sidewalk so that the pensive man may see.

  V

  The pensive man … He sees that eagle float

  For which the intricate Alps are a single nest.

  THE BLUE BUILDINGS IN THE SUMMER AIR

  I

  Cotton Mather died when I was a boy. The books

  He read, all day, all night and all the nights,

  Had got him nowhere. There was always the doubt,

  That made him preach the louder, long for a church

  In which his voice would roll its cadences,

  After the sermon, to quiet that mouse in the wall.

  II

  Over wooden Boston, the sparkling Byzantine

  Was everything that Cotton Mather was

  And more. Yet the eminent thunder from the mouse,

  The grinding in the arches of the church,

  The plaster dropping, even dripping, down,

  The mouse, the moss, the woman on the shore…

  III

  If the mouse should swallow the steeple, in its time…

  It was a theologian’s needle, much

  Too sharp for that. The shore, the sea, the sun,

  Their brilliance through the lattices, crippled

  The chandeliers, their morning glazes spread

  In opal blobs along the walls and floor.

  IV

  Look down now, Cotton Mather, from the blank.

  Was heaven where you thought? It must be there.

  It must be where you think it is, in the light

  On bed-clothes, in an apple on a plate.

  It is the honey-comb of the seeing man.

  It is the leaf the bird brings back to the boat.

  V

  Go, mouse, go nibble at Lenin in his tomb.

  Are you not le plus pur, you ancient one?

  Cut summer down to find the honey-comb.

  You are one … Go hunt for honey in his hair.

  You are one of the not-numberable mice

  Searching all day, all night, for the honey-comb.

  DEZEMBRUM

  I

  Tonight there are only the winter stars.

  The sky is no longer a junk-shop,

  Full of javelins and old fire-balls,

  Triangles and the names of girls.

  II

  Over and over again you have said,

  This great world, it divides itself in two,

  One part is man, the other god:

  Imagined man, the monkish mask, the face.

  III

  Tonight the stars are like a crowd of faces

  Moving round the sky and singing

  And laughing, a crowd of men,

  Whose singing is a mode of laughter,

  IV

  Never angels, nothing of the dead,

  Faces to people night’s brilliancy,

  Laughing and singing and being happy,

  Filling the imagination’s need.

  V

  In this rigid room, an intenser love,

  Not toys, not thing-a-ma-jigs—

  The reason can give nothing at all

  Like the response to desire.

  POEM WRITTEN AT MORNING

  A sunny day’s complete Poussiniana

  Divide it from itself. It is this or that

  And it is not.

  By metaphor you paint

  A thing. Thus, the pineapple was a leather fruit,

  A fruit for pewter, thorned and palmed and blue,

  To be served by men of ice.

  The senses paint

  By metaphor. The juice was fragranter

  Than wettest cinnamon. It was cribled pears

  Dripping a morning sap.

  The truth must be

  That you do not see, you experience, you feel,

  That the buxom eye brings merely its element

  To the total thing, a shapeless giant forced

  Upward.

  Green were the curls upon that head.

  THUNDER BY THE MUSICIAN

  Sure enough, moving, the thunder became men,

  Ten thousand, men hewn and tumbling,

  Mobs of ten thousand, clashing together,

  This way and that.

  Slowly, one man, savager than the rest,

  Rose up, tallest, in the black sun,

  Stood up straight in the air, struck off

  The clutch of the others.

  And, according to the composer, this butcher,

  Held in his hand the suave egg-diamond

  That had flashed (like vicious music that ends

  In transparent accords).

  It would have been better, the time conceived,

  To have had him holding—what?

  His arm would be trembling, he would be weak,

  Even though he shouted.

  The sky would be full of bodies like wood.

  There would have been the cries of the dead

  And the living would be speaking,

  As a self that lives on itself.

  It would have been better for his hands

  To be convulsed, to have remained the hands

  Of one wilder than the rest (like music blunted,

  Yet the sound of that).

  THE COMMON LIFE

  That’s the down-town frieze,

  Principally the church steeple,

  A black line beside a white line;

  And the stack of the electric plant,

  A black line drawn on flat air.

  It is a morbid light

  In which they stand,

  Like an electric lamp

  On a page of Euclid.

  In this light a man is a result,

 
A demonstration, and a woman,

  Without rose and without violet,

  The shadows that are absent from Euclid,

  Is not a woman for a man.

  The paper is whiter

  For these black lines.

  It glares beneath the webs

  Of wire, the designs of ink,

  The planes that ought to have genius,

  The volumes like marble ruins

  Outlined and having alphabetical

  Notations and footnotes.

  The paper is whiter.

  The men have no shadows

  And the women have only one side.

  THE SENSE OF THE SLEIGHT-OF-HAND MAN

  One’s grand flights, one’s Sunday baths,

  One’s tootings at the weddings of the soul

  Occur as they occur. So bluish clouds

  Occurred above the empty house and the leaves

  Of the rhododendrons rattled their gold,

  As if someone lived there. Such floods of white

  Came bursting from the clouds. So the wind

  Threw its contorted strength around the sky.

  Could you have said the bluejay suddenly

  Would swoop to earth? It is a wheel, the rays

  Around the sun. The wheel survives the myths.

  The fire eye in the clouds survives the gods.

  To think of a dove with an eye of grenadine

  And pines that are cornets, so it occurs,