The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

  XIII

  In spite of this, the gigantic bulk of him

  Grew strong, as if doubt never touched his heart.

  Of what was this the force? From what desire

  And from what thinking did his radiance come?

  In what new spirit had his body birth?

  XIV

  He was more than an external majesty,

  Beyond the sleep of those that did not know,

  More than a spokesman of the night to say

  Now, time stands still. He came from out of sleep.

  He rose because men wanted him to be.

  XV

  They wanted him by day to be, image,

  But not the person, of their power, thought,

  But not the thinker, large in their largeness, beyond

  Their form, beyond their life, yet of themselves,

  Excluding by his largeness their defaults.

  XVI

  Last night at the end of night his starry head,

  Like the head of fate, looked out in darkness, part

  Thereof and part desire and part the sense

  Of what men are. The collective being knew

  There were others like him safely under roof:

  XVII

  The captain squalid on his pillow, the great

  Cardinal, saying the prayers of earliest day;

  The stone, the categorical effigy;

  And the mother, the music, the name; the scholar,

  Whose green mind bulges with complicated hues:

  XVIII

  True transfigurers fetched out of the human mountain,

  True genii for the diminished, spheres,

  Gigantic embryos of populations,

  Blue friends in shadows, rich conspirators,

  Confiders and comforters and lofty kin.

  XIX

  To say more than human things with human voice,

  That cannot be; to say human things with more

  Than human voice, that, also, cannot be;

  To speak humanly from the height or from the depth

  Of human things, that is acutest speech.

  XX

  Now, I, Chocorua, speak of this shadow as

  A human thing. It is an eminence,

  But of nothing, trash of sleep that will disappear

  With the special things of night, little by little,

  In day’s constellation, and yet remain, yet be,

  XXI

  Not father, but bare brother, megalfrere,

  Or by whatever boorish name a man

  Might call the common self, interior fons.

  And fond, the total man of glubbal glub,

  Political tramp with an heraldic air,

  XXII

  Cloud-casual, metaphysical metaphor,

  But resting on me, thinking in my snow,

  Physical if the eye is quick enough,

  So that, where he was, there is an enkindling, where

  He is, the air changes and grows fresh to breathe.

  XXIII

  The air changes, creates and re-creates, like strength,

  And to breathe is a fulfilling of desire,

  A clearing, a detecting, a completing,

  A largeness lived and not conceived, a space

  That is an instant nature, brilliantly.

  XXIV

  Integration for integration, the great arms

  Of the armies, the solid men, make big the fable.

  This is their captain and philosopher,

  He that is fortelleze, though he be

  Hard to perceive and harder still to touch.

  XXV

  Last night at the end of night and in the sky,

  The lesser night, the less than morning light,

  Fell on him, high and cold, searching for what

  Was native to him in that height, searching

  The pleasure of his spirit in the cold.

  XXVI

  How singular he was as man, how large,

  If nothing more than that, for the moment, large

  In my presence, the companion of presences

  Greater than mine, of his demanding, head

  And, of human realizings, rugged roy…

  POESIE ABRUTIE

  The brooks are bristling in the field,

  Now, brooks are bristling in the fields

  And gelid Januar has gone to hell.

  II

  The water puddles puddles are

  And ice is still in Februar.

  It still is ice in Februar.

  III

  The figures of the past go cloaked.

  They walk in mist and rain and snow

  And go, go slowly, but they go.

  IV

  The greenhouse on the village green

  Is brighter than the sun itself.

  Cinerarias have a speaking sheen.

  THE LACK OF REPOSE

  A young man seated at his table

  Holds in his hand a book you have never written

  Staring at the secretions of the words as

  They reveal themselves.

  It is not midnight. It is mid-day,

  The young man is well-disclosed, one of the gang,

  Andrew Jackson Something. But this book

  Is a cloud in which a voice mumbles.

  It is a ghost that inhabits a cloud,

  But a ghost for Andrew, not lean, catarrhal

  And pallid. It is the grandfather he liked,

  With an understanding compounded by death

  And the associations beyond death, even if only

  Time. What a thing it is to believe that

  One understands, in the intense disclosures

  Of a parent in the French sense.

  And not yet to have written a book in which

  One is already a grandfather and to have put there

  A few sounds of meaning, a momentary end

  To the complication, is good, is a good.

  SOMNAMBULISMA

  On an old shore, the vulgar ocean rolls

  Noiselessly, noiselessly, resembling a thin bird,

  That thinks of settling, yet never settles, on a nest.

  The wings keep spreading and yet are never wings.

  The claws keep scratching on the shale, the shallow shale,

  The sounding shallow, until by water washed away.

  The generations of the bird are all

  By water washed away. They follow after.

  They follow, follow, follow, in water washed away.

  Without this bird that never settles, without

  Its generations that follow in their universe,

  The ocean, falling and falling on the hollow shore,

  Would be a geography of the dead: not of that land

  To which they may have gone, but of the place in which

  They lived, in which they lacked a pervasive being,

  In which no scholar, separately dwelling,

  Poured forth the fine fins, the gawky beaks, the personalia,

  Which, as a man feeling everything, were his.

  CRUDE FOYER

  Thought is false happiness: the idea

  That merely by thinking one can,

  Or may, penetrate, not may,

  But can, that one is sure to be able—

  That there lies at the end of thought

  A foyer of the spirit in a landscape

  Of the mind, in which we sit

  And wear humanity’s bleak crown;

  In which we read the critique of paradise

  And say it is the work

  Of a comedian, this critique;

  In which we sit and breathe

  An innocence of an absolute,

  False happiness, since we know that we use

  Only the eye as faculty, that the mind

  Is the eye, and that this landscape of the mind

  Is a landscape only of the eye; and that

  We are ignorant men incapable

  Of the le
ast, minor, vital metaphor, content,

  At last, there, when it turns out to be here.

  REPETITIONS OF A YOUNG CAPTAIN

  I

  A tempest cracked on the theatre. Quickly,

  The wind beat in the roof and half the walls.

  The ruin stood still in an external world.

  It had been real. It was something overseas

  That I remembered, something that I remembered

  Overseas, that stood in an external world.

  It had been real. It was not now. The rip

  Of the wind and the glittering were real now,

  In the spectacle of a new reality.

  II

  The people sat in the theatre, in the ruin,

  As if nothing had happened. The dim actor spoke.

  His hands became his feelings. His thick shape

  Issued thin seconds glibly gapering.

  Then faintly encrusted, a tissue of the moon

  Walked toward him on the stage and they embraced.

  They polished the embracings of a pair

  Born old, familiar with the depths of the heart,

  Like a machine left running, and running down.

  It was a blue scene washing white in the rain,

  Like something I remembered overseas.

  It was something overseas that I remembered.

  III

  Millions of major men against their like

  Make more than thunder’s rural rumbling. They make

  The giants that each one of them becomes

  In a calculated chaos: he that takes form

  From the others, being larger than he was,

  Accoutred in a little of the strength

  That sweats the sun up on its morning way

  To giant red, sweats up a giant sense

  To the make-matter, matter-nothing mind,

  Until this matter-makes in years of war.

  This being in a reality beyond

  The finikin spectres in the memory,

  This elevation, in which he seems to be tall,

  Makes him rise above the houses, looking down.

  His route lies through an image in his mind:

  My route lies through an image in my mind,

  It is the route that milky millions find,

  An image that leaves nothing much behind.

  IV

  If these were only words that I am speaking

  Indifferent sounds and not the heraldic-ho

  Of the clear sovereign that is reality,

  Of the clearest reality that is sovereign,

  How should I repeat them, keep repeating them,

  As if they were desperate with a know-and-know,

  Central responses to a central fear,

  The adobe of the angels? Constantly,

  At the railway station, a soldier steps away,

  Sees a familiar building drenched in cloud

  And goes to an external world, having

  Nothing of place. There is no change of place

  Nor of time. The departing soldier is as he is,

  Yet in that form will not return. But does

  He find another? The giant of sense remains

  A giant without a body. If, as giant,

  He shares a gigantic life, it is because

  The gigantic has a reality of its own.

  V

  On a few words of what is real in the world

  I nourish myself. I defend myself against

  Whatever remains. Of what is real I say,

  Is it the old, the roseate parent or

  The bride come jingling, kissed and cupped, or else

  The spirit and all ensigns of the self?

  A few words, a memorandum voluble

  Of the giant sense, the enormous harnesses

  And writhing wheels of this world’s business,

  The drivers in the wind-blows cracking whips,

  The pulling into the sky and the setting there

  Of the expanses that are mountainous rock and sea;

  And beyond the days, beyond the slow-foot litters

  Of the nights, the actual, universal strength,

  Without a word of rhetoric—there it is.

  A memorandum of the people sprung

  From that strength, whose armies set their own expanses.

  A few words of what is real or may be

  Or of glistening reference to what is real,

  The universe that supplements the manqué,

  The soldier seeking his point between the two,

  The organic consolation, the complete

  Society of the spirit when it is

  Alone, the half-arc hanging in mid-air

  Composed, appropriate to the incomplete,

  Supported by a half-arc in mid-earth.

  Millions of instances of which I am one.

  VI

  And if it be theatre for theatre,

  The powdered personals against the giants’ rage,

  Blue and its deep inversions in the moon

  Against gold whipped reddened in big-shadowed black,

  Her vague “Secrete me from reality,”

  His “That reality secrete itself,”

  The choice is made. Green is the orator

  Of our passionate height. He wears a tufted green,

  And tosses green for those for whom green speaks.

  Secrete us in reality. It is there

  My orator. Let this giantness fall down

  And come to nothing. Let the rainy arcs

  And pathetic magnificences dry in the sky.

  Secrete us in reality. Discover

  A civil nakedness in which to be,

  In which to bear with the exactest force

  The precisions of fate, nothing fobbed off, nor changed

  In a beau language without a drop of blood.

  THE CREATIONS OF SOUND

  If the poetry of X was music,

  So that it came to him of its own,

  Without understanding, out of the wall

  Or in the ceiling, in sounds not chosen,

  Or chosen quickly, in a freedom

  That was their element, we should not know

  That X is an obstruction, a man

  Too exactly himself, and that there are words

  Better without an author, without a poet,

  Or having a separate author, a different poet,

  An accretion from ourselves, intelligent

  Beyond intelligence, an artificial man

  At a distance, a secondary expositor,

  A being of sound, whom one does not approach

  Through any exaggeration. From him, we collect.

  Tell X that speech is not dirty silence

  Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.

  It is more than an imitation for the ear.

  He lacks this venerable complication.

  His poems are not of the second part of life.

  They do not make the visible a little hard

  To see nor, reverberating, eke out the mind

  On peculiar horns, themselves eked out

  By the spontaneous particulars of sound.

  We do not say ourselves like that in poems.

  We say ourselves in syllables that rise

  From the floor, rising in speech we do not speak.

  HOLIDAY IN REALITY

  I

  It was something to see that their white was different,

  Sharp as white paint in the January sun;

  Something to feel that they needed another yellow,

  Less Aix than Stockholm, hardly a yellow at all,

  A vibrancy not to be taken for granted, from

  A sun in an almost colorless, cold heaven.

  They had known that there was not even a common speech,

  Palabra of a common man who did not exist.

  Why should they not know they had everything of their own

  As each had a particular woman and her touch?


  After all, they knew that to be real each had

  To find for himself his earth, his sky, his sea.

  And the words for them and the colors that they possessed.

  It was impossible to breathe at Durand-Ruel’s.

  II

  The flowering Judas grows from the belly or not at all.

  The breast is covered with violets. It is a green leaf.

  Spring is umbilical or else it is not spring.

  Spring is the truth of spring or nothing, a waste, a fake.

  These trees and their argentines, their dark-spiced branches,

  Grow out of the spirit or they are fantastic dust.

  The bud of the apple is desire, the down-falling gold,

  The catbird’s gobble in the morning half-awake—

  These are real only if I make them so. Whistle

  For me, grow green for me and, as you whistle and grow green,

  Intangible arrows quiver and stick in the skin