The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

  On the ground, fixed fast in a profound defeat.

  III

  What had this star to do with the world it lit,

  With the blank skies over England, over France

  And above the German camps? It looked apart.

  Yet it is this that shall maintain—Itself

  Is time, apart from any past, apart

  From any future, the ever-living and being,

  The ever-breathing and moving, the constant fire,

  IV

  The present close, the present realized,

  Not the symbol but that for which the symbol stands,

  The vivid thing in the air that never changes,

  Though the air change. Only this evening I saw it again,

  At the beginning of winter, and I walked and talked

  Again, and lived and was again, and breathed again

  And moved again and flashed again, time flashed again.

  MAN AND BOTTLE

  The mind is the great poem of winter, the man,

  Who, to find what will suffice,

  Destroys romantic tenements

  Of rose and ice

  In the land of war. More than the man, it is

  A man with the fury of a race of men,

  A light at the centre of many lights,

  A man at the centre of men.

  It has to content the reason concerning war,

  It has to persuade that war is part of itself,

  A manner of thinking, a mode

  Of destroying, as the mind destroys,

  An aversion, as the world is averted

  From an old delusion, an old affair with the sun,

  An impossible aberration with the moon,

  A grossness of peace.

  It is not the snow that is the quill, the page.

  The poem lashes more fiercely than the wind,

  As the mind, to find what will suffice, destroys

  Romantic tenements of rose and ice.

  OF MODERN POETRY

  The poem of the mind in the act of finding

  What will suffice. It has not always had

  To find: the scene was set; it repeated what

  Was in the script.

  Then the theatre was changed

  To something else. Its past was a souvenir.

  It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.

  It has to face the men of the time and to meet

  The women of the time. It has to think about war

  And it has to find what will suffice. It has

  To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage

  And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and

  With meditation, speak words that in the ear,

  In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,

  Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound

  Of which, an invisible audience listens,

  Not to the play, but to itself, expressed

  In an emotion as of two people, as of two

  Emotions becoming one. The actor is

  A metaphysician in the dark, twanging

  An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives

  Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly

  Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,

  Beyond which it has no will to rise.

  It must

  Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may

  Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman

  Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.

  ARRIVAL AT THE WALDORF

  Home from Guatemala, back at the Waldorf.

  This arrival in the wild country of the soul,

  All approaches gone, being completely there,

  Where the wild poem is a substitute

  For the woman one loves or ought to love,

  One wild rhapsody a fake for another.

  You touch the hotel the way you touch moonlight

  Or sunlight and you hum and the orchestra

  Hums and you say “The world in a verse,

  A generation sealed, men remoter than mountains,

  Women invisible in music and motion and color,”

  After that alien, point-blank, green and actual Guatemala.

  LANDSCAPE WITH BOAT

  An anti-master-man, floribund ascetic.

  He brushed away the thunder, then the clouds,

  Then the colossal illusion of heaven. Yet still

  The sky was blue. He wanted imperceptible air.

  He wanted to see. He wanted the eye to see

  And not be touched by blue. He wanted to know,

  A naked man who regarded himself in the glass

  Of air, who looked for the world beneath the blue,

  Without blue, without any turquoise tint or phase,

  Any azure under-side or after-color. Nabob

  Of bones, he rejected, he denied, to arrive

  At the neutral centre, the ominous element,

  The single-colored, colorless, primitive.

  It was not as if the truth lay where he thought,

  Like a phantom, in an uncreated night.

  It was easier to think it lay there. If

  It was nowhere else, it was there and because

  It was nowhere else, its place had to be supposed,

  Itself had to be supposed, a thing supposed

  In a place supposed, a thing that he reached

  In a place that he reached, by rejecting what he saw

  And denying what he heard. He would arrive.

  He had only not to live, to walk in the dark,

  To be projected by one void into

  Another.

  It was his nature to suppose,

  To receive what others had supposed, without

  Accepting. He received what he denied.

  But as truth to be accepted, he supposed

  A truth beyond all truths.

  He never supposed

  That he might be truth, himself, or part of it,

  That the things that he rejected might be part

  And the irregular turquoise, part, the perceptible blue

  Grown denser, part, the eye so touched, so played

  Upon by clouds, the ear so magnified

  By thunder, parts, and all these things together,

  Parts, and more things, parts. He never supposed divine

  Things might not look divine, nor that if nothing

  Was divine then all things were, the world itself,

  And that if nothing was the truth, then all

  Things were the truth, the world itself was the truth.

  Had he been better able to suppose:

  He might sit on a sofa on a balcony

  Above the Mediterranean, emerald

  Becoming emeralds. He might watch the palms

  Flap green ears in the heat. He might observe

  A yellow wine and follow a steamer’s track

  And say, “The thing I hum appears to be

  The rhythm of this celestial pantomime.”

  ON THE ADEQUACY OF LANDSCAPE

  The little owl flew through the night,

  As if the people in the air

  Were frightened and he frightened them,

  By being there,

  The people that turned off and came

  To avoid the bright, discursive wings,

  To avoid the hap-hallow hallow-ho

  Of central things,

  Nor in their empty hearts to feel

  The blood-red redness of the sun,

  To shrink to an insensible,

  Small oblivion,

  Beyond the keenest diamond day

  Of people sensible to pain,

  When cocks wake, clawing at their beds

  To be again,

  And who, for that, turn toward the cocks

  And toward the start of day and trees

  And light behind the body of night

  And sun, as if these

  Were what they are, th
e sharpest sun:

  The sharpest self, the sensible range,

  The extent of what they are, the strength

  That they exchange,

  So that he that suffers most desires

  The red bird most and the strongest sky—

  Not the people in the air that hear

  The little owl fly.

  LES PLUS BELLES PAGES

  The milkman came in the moonlight and the moonlight

  Was less than moonlight. Nothing exists by itself.

  The moonlight seemed to.

  Two people, three horses, an ox

  And the sun, the waves together in the sea.

  The moonlight and Aquinas seemed to. He spoke,

  Kept speaking, of God. I changed the word to man.

  The automaton, in logic self-contained,

  Existed by itself. Or did the saint survive?

  Did several spirits assume a single shape?

  Theology after breakfast sticks to the eye.

  POEM WITH RHYTHMS

  The hand between the candle and the wall

  Grows large on the wall.

  The mind between this light or that and space,

  (This man in a room with an image of the world,

  That woman waiting for the man she loves,)

  Grows large against space:

  There the man sees the image clearly at last.

  There the woman receives her lover into her heart

  And weeps on his breast, though he never comes.

  It must be that the hand

  Has a will to grow larger on the wall,

  To grow larger and heavier and stronger than

  The wall; and that the mind

  Turns to its own figurations and declares,

  “This image, this love, I compose myself

  Of these. In these, I come forth outwardly.

  In these, I wear a vital cleanliness,

  Not as in air, bright-blue-resembling air,

  But as in the powerful mirror of my wish and will.”

  WOMAN LOOKING AT A VASE OF FLOWERS

  It was as if thunder took form upon

  The piano, that time: the time when the crude

  And jealous grandeurs of sun and sky

  Scattered themselves in the garden, like

  The wind dissolving into birds,

  The clouds becoming braided girls.

  It was like the sea poured out again

  In east wind beating the shutters at night.

  Hoot, little owl within her, how

  High blue became particular

  In the leaf and bud and how the red,

  Flicked into pieces, points of air,

  Became—how the central, essential red

  Escaped its large abstraction, became,

  First, summer, then a lesser time,

  Then the sides of peaches, of dusky pears.

  Hoot how the inhuman colors fell

  Into place beside her, where she was,

  Like human conciliations, more like

  A profounder reconciling, an act,

  An affirmation free from doubt.

  The crude and jealous formlessness

  Became the form and the fragrance of things

  Without clairvoyance, close to her.

  THE WELL DRESSED MAN WITH A BEARD

  After the final no there comes a yes

  And on that yes the future world depends.

  No was the night. Yes is this present sun.

  If the rejected things, the things denied,

  Slid over the western cataract, yet one,

  One only, one thing that was firm, even

  No greater than a cricket’s horn, no more

  Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech

  Of the self that must sustain itself on speech,

  One thing remaining, infallible, would be

  Enough. Ah! douce campagna of that thing!

  Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart,

  Green in the body, out of a petty phrase,

  Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:

  The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,

  The aureole above the humming house…

  It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

  OF BRIGHT & BLUE BIRDS & THE GALA SUN

  Some things, niño, some things are like this,

  That instantly and in themselves they are gay

  And you and I are such things, O most miserable…

  For a moment they are gay and are a part

  Of an element, the exactest element for us,

  In which we pronounce joy like a word of our own.

  It is there, being imperfect, and with these things

  And erudite in happiness, with nothing learned,

  That we are joyously ourselves and we think

  Without the labor of thought, in that element,

  And we feel, in a way apart, for a moment, as if

  There was a bright scienza outside of ourselves,

  A gaiety that is being, not merely knowing,

  The will to be and to be total in belief,

  Provoking a laughter, an agreement, by surprise.

  MRS. ALFRED URUGUAY

  So what said the others and the sun went down

  And, in the brown blues of evening, the lady said,

  In the donkey’s ear, “I fear that elegance

  Must struggle like the rest.” She climbed until

  The moonlight in her lap, mewing her velvet,

  And her dress were one and she said, “I have said no

  To everything, in order to get at myself.

  I have wiped away moonlight like mud. Your innocent ear

  And I, if I rode naked, are what remain.”

  The moonlight crumbled to degenerate forms,

  While she approached the real, upon her mountain,

  With lofty darkness. The donkey was there to ride,

  To hold by the ear, even though it wished for a bell,

  Wished faithfully for a falsifying bell.

  Neither the moonlight could change it. And for her,

  To be, regardless of velvet, could never be more

  Than to be, she could never differently be,

  Her no and no made yes impossible.

  Who was it passed her there on a horse all will,

  What figure of capable imagination?

  Whose horse clattered on the road on which she rose,

  As it descended, blind to her velvet and

  The moonlight? Was it a rider intent on the sun,

  A youth, a lover with phosphorescent hair,

  Dressed poorly, arrogant of his streaming forces,

  Lost in an integration of the martyrs’ bones,

  Rushing from what was real; and capable?

  The villages slept as the capable man went down,

  Time swished on the village clocks and dreams were alive,

  The enormous gongs gave edges to their sounds,

  As the rider, no chevalere and poorly dressed,

  Impatient of the bells and midnight forms,

  Rode over the picket rocks, rode down the road,

  And, capable, created in his mind,

  Eventual victor, out of the martyrs’ bones,

  The ultimate elegance: the imagined land.

  ASIDES ON THE OBOE

  The prologues are over. It is a question, now,

  Of final belief. So, say that final belief

  Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.

  I

  That obsolete fiction of the wide river in

  An empty land; the gods that Boucher killed;

  And the metal heroes that time granulates—

  The philosophers’ man alone still walks in dew,

  Still by the sea-side mutters milky lines

  Concerning an immaculate imagery.

  If you say on the hautboy man is not enough,

  Can never stand as god, is ever wrong

  In
the end, however naked, tall, there is still

  The impossible possible philosophers’ man,

  The man who has had the time to think enough,

  The central man, the human globe, responsive

  As a mirror with a voice, the man of glass,

  Who in a million diamonds sums us up.

  II

  He is the transparence of the place in which

  He is and in his poems we find peace.

  He sets this peddler’s pie and cries in summer,

  The glass man, cold and numbered, dewily cries,

  “Thou art not August unless I make thee so.”

  Clandestine steps upon imagined stairs

  Climb through the night, because his cuckoos call.

  III

  One year, death and war prevented the jasmine scent

  And the jasmine islands were bloody martyrdoms.

  How was it then with the central man? Did we

  Find peace? We found the sum of men. We found,

  If we found the central evil, the central good.

  We buried the fallen without jasmine crowns.

  There was nothing he did not suffer, no; nor we.

  It was not as if the jasmine ever returned.

  But we and the diamond globe at last were one.

  We had always been partly one. It was as we came

  To see him, that we were wholly one, as we heard

  Him chanting for those buried in their blood,

  In the jasmine haunted forests, that we knew

  The glass man, without external reference.

  EXTRACTS FROM ADDRESSES TO THE ACADEMY OF FINE IDEAS

  I

  A crinkled paper makes a brilliant sound.

  The wrinkled roses tinkle, the paper ones,

  And the ear is glass, in which the noises pelt,