The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

  This was the glass in which she used to look

  At the moment’s being, without history,

  The self of summer perfectly perceived,

  And feel its country gayety and smile

  And be surprised and tremble, hand and lip.

  This is the chair from which she gathered up

  Her dress, the carefulest, commodious weave

  Inwoven by a weaver to twelve bells…

  The dress is lying, cast-off, on the floor.

  Now, the first tutoyers of tragedy

  Speak softly, to begin with, in the eaves.

  THE COUNTRYMAN

  Swatara, Swatara, black river,

  Descending, out of the cap of midnight,

  Toward the cape at which

  You enter the swarthy sea,

  Swatara, Swatara, heavy the hills

  Are, hanging above you, as you move,

  Move blackly and without crystal.

  A countryman walks beside you.

  He broods of neither cap nor cape,

  But only of your swarthy motion,

  But always of the swarthy water,

  Of which Swatara is the breathing,

  The name. He does not speak beside you.

  He is there because he wants to be

  And because being there in the heavy hills

  And along the moving of the water—

  Being there is being in a place,

  As of a character everywhere,

  The place of a swarthy presence moving,

  Slowly, to the look of a swarthy name.

  THE ULTIMATE POEM IS ABSTRACT

  This day writhes with what? The lecturer

  On This Beautiful World Of Ours composes himself

  And hems the planet rose and haws it ripe,

  And red, and right. The particular question—here

  The particular answer to the particular question

  Is not in point—the question is in point.

  If the day writhes, it is not with revelations.

  One goes on asking questions. That, then, is one

  Of the categories. So said, this placid space

  Is changed. It is not so blue as we thought. To be blue,

  There must be no questions. It is an intellect

  Of windings round and dodges to and fro,

  Writhings in wrong obliques and distances,

  Not an intellect in which we are fleet: present

  Everywhere in space at once, cloud-pole

  Of communication. It would be enough

  If we were ever, just once, at the middle, fixed

  In This Beautiful World Of Ours and not as now,

  Helplessly at the edge, enough to be

  Complete, because at the middle, if only in sense,

  And in that enormous sense, merely enjoy.

  BOUQUET OF ROSES IN SUNLIGHT

  Say that it is a crude effect, black reds,

  Pink yellows, orange whites, too much as they are

  To be anything else in the sunlight of the room,

  Too much as they are to be changed by metaphor,

  Too actual, things that in being real

  Make any imaginings of them lesser things.

  And yet this effect is a consequence of the way

  We feel and, therefore, is not real, except

  In our sense of it, our sense of the fertilest red,

  Of yellow as first color and of white,

  In which the sense lies still, as a man lies,

  Enormous, in a completing of his truth.

  Our sense of these things changes and they change,

  Not as in metaphor, but in our sense

  Of them. So sense exceeds all metaphor.

  It exceeds the heavy changes of the light.

  It is like a flow of meanings with no speech

  And of as many meanings as of men.

  We are two that use these roses as we are,

  In seeing them. This is what makes them seem

  So far beyond the rhetorician’s touch.

  THE OWL IN THE SARCOPHAGUS

  I

  Two forms move among the dead, high sleep

  Who by his highness quiets them, high peace

  Upon whose shoulders even the heavens rest,

  Two brothers. And a third form, she that says

  Good-by in the darkness, speaking quietly there,

  To those that cannot say good-by themselves.

  These forms are visible to the eye that needs,

  Needs out of the whole necessity of sight.

  The third form speaks, because the ear repeats,

  Without a voice, inventions of farewell.

  These forms are not abortive figures, rocks,

  Impenetrable symbols, motionless. They move

  About the night. They live without our light,

  In an element not the heaviness of time,

  In which reality is prodigy.

  There sleep the brother is the father, too,

  And peace is cousin by a hundred names

  And she that in the syllable between life

  And death cries quickly, in a flash of voice,

  Keep you, keep you, I am gone, oh keep you as

  My memory, is the mother of us all,

  The earthly mother and the mother of

  The dead. Only the thought of those dark three

  Is dark, thought of the forms of dark desire.

  II

  There came a day, there was a day—one day

  A man walked living among the forms of thought

  To see their lustre truly as it is

  And in harmonious prodigy to be,

  A while, conceiving his passage as into a time

  That of itself stood still, perennial,

  Less time than place, less place than thought of place

  And, if of substance, a likeness of the earth,

  That by resemblance twanged him through and through,

  Releasing an abysmal melody,

  A meeting, an emerging in the light,

  A dazzle of remembrance and of sight.

  III

  There he saw well the foldings in the height

  Of sleep, the whiteness folded into less,

  Like many robings, as moving masses are,

  As a moving mountain is, moving through day

  And night, colored from distances, central

  Where luminous agitations come to rest,

  In an ever-changing, calmest unity,

  The unique composure, harshest streakings joined

  In a vanishing-vanished violet that wraps round

  The giant body the meanings of its folds,

  The weaving and the crinkling and the vex,

  As on water of an afternoon in the wind

  After the wind has passed. Sleep realized

  Was the whiteness that is the ultimate intellect,

  A diamond jubilance beyond the fire,

  That gives its power to the wild-ringed eye.

  Then he breathed deeply the deep atmosphere

  Of sleep, the accomplished, the fulfilling air.

  IV

  There peace, the godolphin and fellow, estranged, estranged,

  Hewn in their middle as the beam of leaves,

  The prince of shither-shade and tinsel lights,

  Stood flourishing the world. The brilliant height

  And hollow of him by its brilliance calmed,

  Its brightness burned the way good solace seethes.

  This was peace after death, the brother of sleep,

  The inhuman brother so much like, so near,

  Yet vested in a foreign absolute,

  Adorned with cryptic stones and sliding shines,

  An immaculate personage in nothingness,

  With the whole spirit sparkling in its cloth,

  Generations of the imagination piled

  In the manner of its stitchings, of its thread,

  In the weaving round the wonder of its nee
d,

  And the first flowers upon it, an alphabet

  By which to spell out holy doom and end,

  A bee for the remembering of happiness.

  Peace stood with our last blood adorned, last mind,

  Damasked in the originals of green,

  A thousand begettings of the broken bold.

  This is that figure stationed at our end,

  Always, in brilliance, fatal, final, formed

  Out of our lives to keep us in our death,

  To watch us in the summer of Cyclops

  Underground, a king as candle by our beds

  In a robe that is our glory as he guards.

  V

  But she that says good-by losing in self

  The sense of self, rosed out of prestiges

  Of rose, stood tall in self not symbol, quick

  And potent, an influence felt instead of seen.

  She spoke with backward gestures of her hand.

  She held men closely with discovery,

  Almost as speed discovers, in the way

  Invisible change discovers what is changed,

  In the way what was has ceased to be what is.

  It was not her look but a knowledge that she had.

  She was a self that knew, an inner thing,

  Subtler than look’s declaiming, although she moved

  With a sad splendor, beyond artifice,

  Impassioned by the knowledge that she had,

  There on the edges of oblivion.

  O exhalation, O fling without a sleeve

  And motion outward, reddened and resolved

  From sight, in the silence that follows her last word—

  VI

  This is the mythology of modern death

  And these, in their mufflings, monsters of elegy,

  Of their own marvel made, of pity made,

  Compounded and compounded, life by life,

  These are death’s own supremest images,

  The pure perfections of parental space,

  The children of a desire that is the will,

  Even of death, the beings of the mind

  In the light-bound space of the mind, the floreate flare…

  It is a child that sings itself to sleep,

  The mind, among the creatures that it makes,

  The people, those by which it lives and dies.

  SAINT JOHN AND THE BACK-ACHE

  The Back-Ache

  The mind is the terriblest force in the world, father,

  Because, in chief, it, only, can defend

  Against itself. At its mercy, we depend

  Upon it.

  Saint John

  The world is presence and not force.

  Presence is not mind.

  The Back-Ache

  Presence is Kinder-Scenen.

  Saint John

  It fills the being before the mind can think.

  The effect of the object is beyond the mind’s

  Extremest pinch and, easily, as in

  A sudden color on the sea. But it is not

  That big-brushed green. Or in a tragic mode,

  As at the moment of the year when, tick,

  Autumn howls upon half-naked summer. But

  It is not the unravelling of her yellow shift.

  Presence is not the woman, come upon,

  Not yet accustomed, yet, at sight, humane

  To most incredible depths. I speak below

  The tension of the lyre. My point is that

  These illustrations are neither angels, no,

  Nor brilliant blows thereof, ti-rill-a-roo,

  Nor all one’s luck at once in a play of strings.

  They help us face the dumbfoundering abyss

  Between us and the object, external cause,

  The little ignorance that is everything,

  The possible nest in the invisible tree,

  Which in a composite season, now unknown,

  Denied, dismissed, may hold a serpent, loud

  In our captious hymns, erect and sinuous,

  Whose venom and whose wisdom will be one.

  Then the stale turtle will grow limp from age.

  We shall be heavy with the knowledge of that day.

  The Back-Ache

  It may be, may be. It is possible.

  Presence lies far too deep, for me to know

  Its irrational reaction, as from pain.

  CELLE QUI FÛT HÉAULMIETTE

  Out of the first warmth of spring,

  And out of the shine of the hemlocks,

  Among the bare and crooked trees,

  She found a helping from the cold,

  Like a meaning in nothingness,

  Like the snow before it softened

  And dwindled into patches,

  Like a shelter not in an arc

  But in a circle, not in the arc

  Of winter, in the unbroken circle

  Of summer, at the windy edge,

  Sharp in the ice shadow of the sky,

  Blue for all that and white and hard,

  And yet with water running in the sun,

  Entinselled and gilderlinged and gone,

  Another American vulgarity.

  Into that native shield she slid,

  Mistress of an idea, child

  Of a mother with vague severed arms

  And of a father bearded in his fire.

  IMAGO

  Who can pick up the weight of Britain,

  Who can move the German load

  Or say to the French here is France again?

  Imago. Imago. Imago.

  It is nothing, no great thing, nor man

  Of ten brilliancies of battered gold

  And fortunate stone. It moves its parade

  Of motions in the mind and heart,

  A gorgeous fortitude. Medium man

  In February hears the imagination’s hymns

  And sees its images, its motions

  And multitude of motions

  And feels the imagination’s mercies,

  In a season more than sun and south wind,

  Something returning from a deeper quarter,

  A glacier running through delirium,

  Making this heavy rock a place,

  Which is not of our lives composed…

  Lightly and lightly, O my land,

  Move lightly through the air again.

  A PRIMITIVE LIKE AN ORB

  I

  The essential poem at the centre of things,

  The arias that spiritual fiddlings make,

  Have gorged the cast-iron of our lives with good

  And the cast-iron of our works. But it is, dear sirs,

  A difficult apperception, this gorging good,

  Fetched by such slick-eyed nymphs, this essential gold,

  This fortune’s finding, disposed and re-disposed

  By such slight genii in such pale air.

  II

  We do not prove the existence of the poem.

  It is something seen and known in lesser poems.

  It is the huge, high harmony that sounds

  A little and a little, suddenly,

  By means of a separate sense. It is and it

  Is not and, therefore, is. In the instant of speech,

  The breadth of an accelerando moves,

  Captives the being, widens—and was there.

  III

  What milk there is in such captivity,

  What wheaten bread and oaten cake and kind,

  Green guests and table in the woods and songs

  At heart, within an instant’s motion, within

  A space grown wide, the inevitable blue

  Of secluded thunder, an illusion, as it was,

  Oh as, always too heavy for the sense

  To seize, the obscurest as, the distant was…

  IV

  One poem proves another and the whole,

  For the clairvoyant men that need no proof:

  The lover, the believer and the
poet.

  Their words are chosen out of their desire,

  The joy of language, when it is themselves.

  With these they celebrate the central poem,

  The fulfillment of fulfillments, in opulent,

  Last terms, the largest, bulging still with more,

  V

  Until the used-to earth and sky, and the tree

  And cloud, the used-to tree and used-to cloud,

  Lose the old uses that they made of them,

  And they: these men, and earth and sky, inform

  Each other by sharp informations, sharp,

  Free knowledges, secreted until then,

  Breaches of that which held them fast. It is

  As if the central poem became the world,

  VI

  And the world the central poem, each one the mate

  Of the other, as if summer was a spouse,

  Espoused each morning, each long afternoon,

  And the mate of summer: her mirror and her look,

  Her only place and person, a self of her

  That speaks, denouncing separate selves, both one.

  The essential poem begets the others. The light

  Of it is not a light apart, up-hill.

  VII

  The central poem is the poem of the whole,

  The poem of the composition of the whole,