The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

  And I taste at the root of the tongue the unreal of what is real.

  ESTHÉTIQUE DU MAL

  I

  He was at Naples writing letters home

  And, between his letters, reading paragraphs

  On the sublime. Vesuvius had groaned

  For a month. It was pleasant to be sitting there,

  While the sultriest fulgurations, flickering,

  Cast corners in the glass. He could describe

  The terror of the sound because the sound

  Was ancient. He tried to remember the phrases: pain

  Audible at noon, pain torturing itself,

  Pain killing pain on the very point of pain.

  The volcano trembled in another ether,

  As the body trembles at the end of life.

  It was almost time for lunch. Pain is human.

  There were roses in the cool café. His book

  Made sure of the most correct catastrophe.

  Except for us, Vesuvius might consume

  In solid fire the utmost earth and know

  No pain (ignoring the cocks that crow us up

  To die). This is a part of the sublime

  From which we shrink. And yet, except for us,

  The total past felt nothing when destroyed.

  II

  At a town in which acacias grew, he lay

  On his balcony at night. Warblings became

  Too dark, too far, too much the accents of

  Afflicted sleep, too much the syllables

  That would form themselves, in time, and communicate

  The intelligence of his despair, express

  What meditation never quite achieved.

  The moon rose up as if it had escaped

  His meditation. It evaded his mind.

  It was part of a supremacy always

  Above him. The moon was always free from him,

  As night was free from him. The shadow touched

  Or merely seemed to touch him as he spoke

  A kind of elegy he found in space:

  It is pain that is indifferent to the sky

  In spite of the yellow of the acacias, the scent

  Of them in the air still hanging heavily

  In the hoary-hanging night. It does not regard

  This freedom, this supremacy, and in

  Its own hallucination never sees

  How that which rejects it saves it in the end.

  III

  His firm stanzas hang like hives in hell

  Or what hell was, since now both heaven and hell

  Are one, and here, O terra infidel.

  The fault lies with an over-human god,

  Who by sympathy has made himself a man

  And is not to be distinguished, when we cry

  Because we suffer, our oldest parent, peer

  Of the populace of the heart, the reddest lord,

  Who has gone before us in experience.

  If only he would not pity us so much,

  Weaken our fate, relieve us of woe both great

  And small, a constant fellow of destiny,

  A too, too human god, self-pity’s kin

  And uncourageous genesis … It seems

  As if the health of the world might be enough.

  It seems as if the honey of common summer

  Might be enough, as if the golden combs

  Were part of a sustenance itself enough,

  As if hell, so modified, had disappeared,

  As if pain, no longer satanic mimicry,

  Could be borne, as if we were sure to find our way.

  IV

  Livre de Toutes Sortes de Fleurs d’après Nature.

  All sorts of flowers. That’s the sentimentalist.

  When B. sat down at the piano and made

  A transparence in which we heard music, made music,

  In which we heard transparent sounds, did he play

  All sorts of notes? Or did he play only one

  In an ecstasy of its associates,

  Variations in the tones of a single sound,

  The last, or sounds so single they seemed one?

  And then that Spaniard of the rose, itself

  Hot-hooded and dark-blooded, rescued the rose

  From nature, each time he saw it, making it,

  As he saw it, exist in his own especial eye.

  Can we conceive of him as rescuing less,

  As muffing the mistress for her several maids,

  As foregoing the nakedest passion for barefoot

  Philandering? … The genius of misfortune

  Is not a sentimentalist. He is

  That evil, that evil in the self, from which

  In desperate hallow, rugged gesture, fault

  Falls out on everything: the genius of

  The mind, which is our being, wrong and wrong,

  The genius of the body, which is our world,

  Spent in the false engagements of the mind.

  V

  Softly let all true sympathizers come,

  Without the inventions of sorrow or the sob

  Beyond invention. Within what we permit,

  Within the actual, the warm, the near,

  So great a unity, that it is bliss,

  Ties us to those we love. For this familiar,

  This brother even in the father’s eye,

  This brother half-spoken in the mother’s throat

  And these regalia, these things disclosed,

  These nebulous brilliancies in the smallest look

  Of the being’s deepest darling, we forego

  Lament, willingly forfeit the ai-ai

  Of parades in the obscurer selvages.

  Be near me, come closer, touch my hand, phrases

  Compounded of dear relation, spoken twice,

  Once by the lips, once by the services

  Of central sense, these minutiae mean more

  Than clouds, benevolences, distant heads.

  These are within what we permit, in-bar

  Exquisite in poverty against the suns

  Of ex-bar, in-bar retaining attributes

  With which we vested, once, the golden forms

  And the damasked memory of the golden forms

  And ex-bar’s flower and fire of the festivals

  Of the damasked memory of the golden forms,

  Before we were wholly human and knew ourselves.

  VI

  The sun, in clownish yellow, but not a clown,

  Brings the day to perfection and then fails. He dwells

  In a consummate prime, yet still desires

  A further consummation. For the lunar month

  He makes the tenderest research, intent

  On a transmutation which, when seen, appears

  To be askew. And space is filled with his

  Rejected years. A big bird pecks at him

  For food. The big bird’s bony appetite

  Is as insatiable as the sun’s. The bird

  Rose from an imperfection of its own

  To feed on the yellow bloom of the yellow fruit

  Dropped down from turquoise leaves. In the landscape of

  The sun, its grossest appetite becomes less gross,

  Yet, when corrected, has its curious lapses,

  Its glitters, its divinations of serene

  Indulgence out of all celestial sight.

  The sun is the country wherever he is. The bird

  In the brightest landscape downwardly revolves

  Disdaining each astringent ripening,

  Evading the point of redness, not content

  To repose in an hour or season or long era

  Of the country colors crowding against it, since

  The yellow grassman’s mind is still immense,

  Still promises perfections cast away.

  VII

  How red the rose that is the soldier’s wound,

  The wounds of many soldiers, the wounds of all

  The soldiers that hav
e fallen, red in blood,

  The soldier of time grown deathless in great size.

  A mountain in which no ease is ever found,

  Unless indifference to deeper death

  Is ease, stands in the dark, a shadows’ hill,

  And there the soldier of time has deathless rest.

  Concentric circles of shadows, motionless

  Of their own part, yet moving on the wind,

  Form mystical convolutions in the sleep

  Of time’s red soldier deathless on his bed.

  The shadows of his fellows ring him round

  In the high night, the summer breathes for them

  Its fragrance, a heavy somnolence, and for him,

  For the soldier of time, it breathes a summer sleep,

  In which his wound is good because life was.

  No part of him was ever part of death.

  A woman smoothes her forehead with her hand

  And the soldier of time lies calm beneath that stroke.

  VIII

  The death of Satan was a tragedy

  For the imagination. A capital

  Negation destroyed him in his tenement

  And, with him, many blue phenomena.

  It was not the end he had foreseen. He knew

  That his revenge created filial

  Revenges. And negation was eccentric.

  It had nothing of the Julian thunder-cloud:

  The assassin flash and rumble … He was denied.

  Phantoms, what have you left? What underground?

  What place in which to be is not enough

  To be? You go, poor phantoms, without place

  Like silver in the sheathing of the sight,

  As the eye closes … How cold the vacancy

  When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist

  First sees reality. The mortal no

  Has its emptiness and tragic expirations.

  The tragedy, however, may have begun,

  Again, in the imagination’s new beginning,

  In the yes of the realist spoken because he must

  Say yes, spoken because under every no

  Lay a passion for yes that had never been broken.

  IX

  Panic in the face of the moon—round effendi

  Or the phosphored sleep in which he walks abroad

  Or the majolica dish heaped up with phosphored fruit

  That he sends ahead, out of the goodness of his heart,

  To anyone that comes—panic, because

  The moon is no longer these nor anything

  And nothing is left but comic ugliness

  Or a lustred nothingness. Effendi, he

  That has lost the folly of the moon becomes

  The prince of the proverbs of pure poverty.

  To lose sensibility, to see what one sees,

  As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift,

  To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone,

  As if the paradise of meaning ceased

  To be paradise, it is this to be destitute.

  This is the sky divested of its fountains.

  Here in the west indifferent crickets chant

  Through our indifferent crises. Yet we require

  Another chant, an incantation, as in

  Another and later genesis, music

  That buffets the shapes of its possible halcyon

  Against the haggardie … A loud, large water

  Bubbles up in the night and drowns the crickets’ sound.

  It is a declaration, a primitive ecstasy,

  Truth’s favors sonorously exhibited.

  X

  He had studied the nostalgias. In these

  He sought the most grossly maternal, the creature

  Who most fecundly assuaged him, the softest

  Woman with a vague moustache and not the mauve

  Maman. His anima liked its animal

  And liked it unsubjugated, so that home

  Was a return to birth, a being born

  Again in the savagest severity,

  Desiring fiercely, the child of a mother fierce

  In his body, fiercer in his mind, merciless

  To accomplish the truth in his intelligence.

  It is true there were other mothers, singular

  In form, lovers of heaven and earth, she-wolves

  And forest tigresses and women mixed

  With the sea. These were fantastic. There were homes

  Like things submerged with their englutted sounds,

  That were never wholly still. The softest woman,

  Because she is as she was, reality,

  The gross, the fecund, proved him against the touch

  Of impersonal pain. Reality explained.

  It was the last nostalgia: that he

  Should understand. That he might suffer or that

  He might die was the innocence of living, if life

  Itself was innocent. To say that it was

  Disentangled him from sleek ensolacings.

  XI

  Life is a bitter aspic. We are not

  At the centre of a diamond. At dawn,

  The paratroopers fall and as they fall

  They mow the lawn. A vessel sinks in waves

  Of people, as big bell-billows from its bell

  Bell-bellow in the village steeple. Violets,

  Great tufts, spring up from buried houses

  Of poor, dishonest people, for whom the steeple,

  Long since, rang out farewell, farewell, farewell.

  Natives of poverty, children of malheur,

  The gaiety of language is our seigneur.

  A man of bitter appetite despises

  A well-made scene in which paratroopers

  Select adieux; and he despises this:

  A ship that rolls on a confected ocean,

  The weather pink, the wind in motion; and this:

  A steeple that tip-tops the classic sun’s

  Arrangements; and the violets’ exhumo.

  The tongue caresses these exacerbations.

  They press it as epicure, distinguishing

  Themselves from its essential savor,

  Like hunger that feeds on its own hungriness.

  XII

  He disposes the world in categories, thus:

  The peopled and the unpeopled. In both, he is

  Alone. But in the peopled world, there is,

  Besides the people, his knowledge of them. In

  The unpeopled, there is his knowledge of himself.

  Which is more desperate in the moments when

  The will demands that what he thinks be true?

  Is it himself in them that he knows or they

  In him? If it is himself in them, they have

  No secret from him. If it is they in him,

  He has no secret from them. This knowledge

  Of them and of himself destroys both worlds,

  Except when he escapes from it. To be

  Alone is not to know them or himself.

  This creates a third world without knowledge,

  In which no one peers, in which the will makes no

  Demands. It accepts whatever is as true,

  Including pain, which, otherwise, is false.

  In the third world, then, there is no pain. Yes, but

  What lover has one in such rocks, what woman,

  However known, at the centre of the heart?

  XIII

  It may be that one life is a punishment

  For another, as the son’s life for the father’s.

  But that concerns the secondary characters.

  It is a fragmentary tragedy

  Within the universal whole. The son

  And the father alike and equally are spent,

  Each one, by the necessity of being

  Himself, the unalterable necessity

  Of being this unalterable animal.

  This force of nature in action is the major

  Traged
y. This is destiny unperplexed,

  The happiest enemy. And it may be

  That in his Mediterranean cloister a man,

  Reclining, eased of desire, establishes

  The visible, a zone of blue and orange

  Versicolorings, establishes a time

  To watch the fire-feinting sea and calls it good,

  The ultimate good, sure of a reality

  Of the longest meditation, the maximum,

  The assassin’s scene. Evil in evil is

  Comparative. The assassin discloses himself,

  The force that destroys us is disclosed, within

  This maximum, an adventure to be endured

  With the politest helplessness. Ay-mi!

  One feels its action moving in the blood.

  XIV

  Victor Serge said, “I followed his argument

  With the blank uneasiness which one might feel

  In the presence of a logical lunatic.”

  He said it of Konstantinov. Revolution

  Is the affair of logical lunatics.

  The politics of emotion must appear

  To be an intellectual structure. The cause

  Creates a logic not to be distinguished

  From lunacy … One wants to be able to walk

  By the lake at Geneva and consider logic:

  To think of the logicians in their graves

  And of the worlds of logic in their great tombs.

  Lakes are more reasonable than oceans. Hence,

  A promenade amid the grandeurs of the mind,

  By a lake, with clouds like lights among great tombs,

  Gives one a blank uneasiness, as if

  One might meet Konstantinov, who would interrupt

  With his lunacy. He would not be aware of the lake.

  He would be the lunatic of one idea

  In a world of ideas, who would have all the people

  Live, work, suffer and die in that idea

  In a world of ideas. He would not be aware of the clouds,

  Lighting the martyrs of logic with white fire.

  His extreme of logic would be illogical.

  XV