The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

  Of propositions about life. The human

  Revery is a solitude in which

  We compose these propositions, torn by dreams,

  By the terrible incantations of defeats

  And by the fear that defeats and dreams are one.

  The whole race is a poet that writes down

  The eccentric propositions of its fate.

  THINKING OF A RELATION BETWEEN THE IMAGES OF METAPHORS

  The wood-doves are singing along the Perkiomen.

  The bass lie deep, still afraid of the Indians.

  In the one ear of the fisherman, who is all

  One ear, the wood-doves are singing a single song.

  The bass keep looking ahead, upstream, in one

  Direction, shrinking from the spit and splash

  Of waterish spears. The fisherman is all

  One eye, in which the dove resembles the dove.

  There is one dove, one bass, one fisherman.

  Yet coo becomes rou-coo, rou-coo. How close

  To the unstated theme each variation comes…

  In that one ear it might strike perfectly:

  State the disclosure. In that one eye the dove

  Might spring to sight and yet remain a dove.

  The fisherman might be the single man

  In whose breast, the dove, alighting, would grow still.

  CHAOS IN MOTION AND NOT IN MOTION

  Oh, that this lashing wind was something more

  Than the spirit of Ludwig Richter…

  The rain is pouring down. It is July.

  There is lightning and the thickest thunder.

  It is a spectacle. Scene 10 becomes 11,

  In Series X, Act IV, et cetera.

  People fall out of windows, trees tumble down,

  Summer is changed to winter, the young grow old,

  The air is full of children, statues, roofs

  And snow. The theatre is spinning round,

  Colliding with deaf-mute churches and optical trains.

  The most massive sopranos are singing songs of scales.

  And Ludwig Richter, turbulent Schlemihl,

  Has lost the whole in which he was contained,

  Knows desire without an object of desire,

  All mind and violence and nothing felt.

  He knows he has nothing more to think about,

  Like the wind that lashes everything at once.

  THE HOUSE WAS QUIET AND THE WORLD WAS CALM

  The house was quiet and the world was calm.

  The reader became the book; and summer night

  Was like the conscious being of the book.

  The house was quiet and the world was calm.

  The words were spoken as if there was no book,

  Except that the reader leaned above the page,

  Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be

  The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

  The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

  The house was quiet because it had to be.

  The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:

  The access of perfection to the page.

  And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,

  In which there is no other meaning, itself

  Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself

  Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

  CONTINUAL CONVERSATION WITH A SILENT MAN

  The old brown hen and the old blue sky,

  Between the two we live and die—

  The broken cartwheel on the hill.

  As if, in the presence of the sea,

  We dried our nets and mended sail

  And talked of never-ending things,

  Of the never-ending storm of will,

  One will and many wills, and the wind,

  Of many meanings in the leaves,

  Brought down to one below the eaves,

  Link, of that tempest, to the farm,

  The chain of the turquoise hen and sky

  And the wheel that broke as the cart went by.

  It is not a voice that is under the eaves.

  It is not speech, the sound we hear

  In this conversation, but the sound

  Of things and their motion: the other man,

  A turquoise monster moving round.

  A WOMAN SINGS A SONG FOR A SOLDIER COME HOME

  The wound kills that does not bleed.

  It has no nurse nor kin to know

  Nor kin to care.

  And the man dies that does not fall.

  He walks and dies. Nothing survives

  Except what was,

  Under the white clouds piled and piled

  Like gathered-up forgetfulness,

  In sleeping air.

  The clouds are over the village, the town,

  To which the walker speaks

  And tells of his wound,

  Without a word to the people, unless

  One person should come by chance,

  This man or that,

  So much a part of the place, so little

  A person he knows, with whom he might

  Talk of the weather—

  And let it go, with nothing lost,

  Just out of the village, at its edge,

  In the quiet there.

  THE PEDIMENT OF APPEARANCE

  Young men go walking in the woods,

  Hunting for the great ornament,

  The pediment of appearance.

  They hunt for a form which by its form alone,

  Without diamond—blazons or flashing or

  Chains of circumstance,

  By its form alone, by being right,

  By being high, is the stone

  For which they are looking:

  The savage transparence. They go crying

  The world is myself, life is myself,

  Breathing as if they breathed themselves,

  Full of their ugly lord,

  Speaking the phrases that follow the sight

  Of this essential ornament

  In the woods, in this full-blown May,

  The months of understanding. The pediment

  Lifts up its heavy scowl before them.

  BURGHERS OF PETTY DEATH

  These two by the stone wall

  Are a slight part of death.

  The grass is still green.

  But there is a total death,

  A devastation, a death of great height

  And depth, covering all surfaces,

  Filling the mind.

  These are the small townsmen of death,

  A man and a woman, like two leaves

  That keep clinging to a tree,

  Before winter freezes and grows black—

  Of great height and depth

  Without any feeling, an imperium of quiet,

  In which a wasted figure, with an instrument,

  Propounds blank final music.

  HUMAN ARRANGEMENT

  Place-bound and time-bound in evening rain

  And bound by a sound which does not change,

  Except that it begins and ends,

  Begins again and ends again—

  Rain without change within or from

  Without. In this place and in this time

  And in this sound, which do not change,

  In which the rain is all one thing,

  In the sky, an imagined, wooden chair

  Is the clear-point of an edifice,

  Forced up from nothing, evening’s chair,

  Blue-strutted curule, true—unreal,

  The centre of transformations that

  Transform for transformation’s self,

  In a glitter that is a life, a gold

  That is a being, a will, a fate.

  THE GOOD MAN HAS NO SHAPE

  Through centuries he lived in poverty.

  God only was his only elegance.

  Then generation by generation he grew

  Stronger and freer, a li
ttle better off.

  He lived each life because, if it was bad,

  He said a good life would be possible.

  At last the good life came, good sleep, bright fruit,

  And Lazarus betrayed him to the rest,

  Who killed him, sticking feathers in his flesh

  To mock him. They placed with him in his grave

  Sour wine to warn him, an empty book to read;

  And over it they set a jagged sign,

  Epitaphium to his death, which read,

  The Good Man Has No Shape, as if they knew.

  THE RED FERN

  The large-leaved day grows rapidly,

  And opens in this familiar spot

  Its unfamiliar, difficult fern,

  Pushing and pushing red after red.

  There are doubles of this fern in clouds,

  Less firm than the paternal flame,

  Yet drenched with its identity,

  Reflections and off-shoots, mimic-motes

  And mist-mites, dangling seconds, grown

  Beyond relation to the parent trunk:

  The dazzling, bulging, brightest core,

  The furiously burning father-fire…

  Infant, it is enough in life

  To speak of what you see. But wait

  Until sight wakens the sleepy eye

  And pierces the physical fix of things.

  FROM THE PACKET OF ANACHARSIS

  In his packet Anacharsis found the lines:

  “The farm was fat and the land in which it —,

  Seemed in the morning like a holiday.”

  He had written them near Athens. The farm was white.

  The buildings were of marble and stood in marble light.

  It was his clarity that made the vista bright.

  A subject for Puvis. He would compose

  The scene in his gray-rose with violet rocks.

  And Bloom would see what Puvis did, protest

  And speak of the floridest reality…

  In the punctual centre of all circles white

  Stands truly. The circles nearest to it share

  Its color, but less as they recede, impinged

  By difference and then by definition

  As a tone defines itself and separates

  And the circles quicken and crystal colors come

  And flare and Bloom with his vast accumulation

  Stands and regards and repeats the primitive lines.

  THE DOVE IN THE BELLY

  The whole of appearance is a toy. For this,

  The dove in the belly builds his nest and coos,

  Selah, tempestuous bird. How is it that

  The rivers shine and hold their mirrors up,

  Like excellence collecting excellence?

  How is it that the wooden trees stand up

  And live and heap their panniers of green

  And hold them round the sultry day? Why should

  These mountains being high be, also, bright,

  Fetched up with snow that never falls to earth?

  And this great esplanade of corn, miles wide,

  Is something wished for made effectual

  And something more. And the people in costumes,

  Though poor, though raggeder than ruin, have that

  Within them right for terraces—oh, brave salut!

  Deep dove, placate you in your hiddenness.

  MOUNTAINS COVERED WITH CATS

  The sea full of fishes in shoals, the woods that let

  One seed alone grow wild, the railway-stops

  In Russia at which the same statue of Stalin greets

  The same railway passenger, the ancient tree

  In the centre of its cones, the resplendent flights

  Of red facsimiles through related trees,

  White houses in villages, black communicants—

  The catalogue is too commodious.

  Regard the invalid personality

  Instead, outcast, without the will to power

  And impotent, like the imagination seeking

  To propagate the imagination or like

  War’s miracle begetting that of peace.

  Freud’s eye was the microscope of potency.

  By fortune, his gray ghost may meditate

  The spirits of all the impotent dead, seen clear,

  And quickly understand, without their flesh,

  How truly they had not been what they were.

  THE PREJUDICE AGAINST THE PAST

  Day is the children’s friend.

  It is Marianna’s Swedish cart.

  It is that and a very big hat.

  Confined by what they see,

  Aquiline pedants treat the cart,

  As one of the relics of the heart.

  They treat the philosopher’s hat,

  Left thoughtlessly behind,

  As one of the relics of the mind…

  Of day, then, children make

  What aquiline pedants take

  For souvenirs of time, lost time,

  Adieux, shapes, images—

  No, not of day, but of themselves,

  Not of perpetual time.

  And, therefore, aquiline pedants find

  The philosopher’s hat to be part of the mind,

  The Swedish cart to be part of the heart.

  EXTRAORDINARY REFERENCES

  The mother ties the hair-ribbons of the child

  And she has peace. My Jacomyntje!

  Your great-grandfather was an Indian fighter.

  The cool sun of the Tulpehocken refers

  To its barbed, barbarous rising and has peace.

  These earlier dissipations of the blood

  And brain, as the extraordinary references

  Of ordinary people, places, things,

  Compose us in a kind of eulogy.

  My Jacomyntje! This first spring after the war,

  In which your father died, still breathes for him

  And breathes again for us a fragile breath.

  In the inherited garden, a second-hand

  Vertumnus creates an equilibrium.

  The child’s three ribbons are in her plaited hair.

  ATTEMPT TO DISCOVER LIFE

  At San Miguel de los Baños,

  The waitress heaped up black Hermosas

  In the magnificence of a volcano.

  Round them she spilled the roses

  Of the place, blue and green, both streaked.

  And white roses shaded emerald on petals

  Out of the deadliest heat.

  There entered a cadaverous person,

  Who bowed and, bowing, brought, in her mantilla,

  A woman brilliant and pallid-skinned,

  Of fiery eyes and long thin arms.

  She stood with him at the table,

  Smiling and wetting her lips

  In the heavy air.

  The green roses drifted up from the table

  In smoke. The blue petals became

  The yellowing fomentations of effulgence,

  Among fomentations of black bloom and of white bloom.

  The cadaverous persons were dispelled.

  On the table near which they stood

  Two coins were lying—dos centavos.

  A LOT OF PEOPLE BATHING IN A STREAM

  It was like passing a boundary to dive

  Into the sun-filled water, brightly leafed

  And limbed and lighted out from bank to bank.

  That’s how the stars shine during the day. There, then,

  The yellow that was yesterday, refreshed,

  Became to-day, among our children and

  Ourselves, in the clearest green—well, call it green.

  We bathed in yellow green and yellow blue

  And in these comic colors dangled down,

  Like their particular characters, addicts

  To blotches, angular anonymids

  Gulping for shape among the reeds. No doubt,

  We were the appropriate conceptions,
less

  Than creatures, of the sky between the banks,

  The water flowing in the flow of space.

  It was passing a boundary, floating without a head

  And naked, or almost so, into the grotesque

  Of being naked, or almost so, in a world

  Of nakedness, in the company of the sun,

  Good-fortuner of the grotesque, patroon,

  A funny foreigner of meek address.

  How good it was at home again at night

  To prepare for bed, in the frame of the house, and move

  Round the rooms, which do not ever seem to change…

  CREDENCES OF SUMMER

  I

  Now in midsummer come and all fools slaughtered

  And spring’s infuriations over and a long way

  To the first autumnal inhalations, young broods

  Are in the grass, the roses are heavy with a weight

  Of fragrance and the mind lays by its trouble.