The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

The composition of blue sea and of green,

  Of blue light and of green, as lesser poems,

  And the miraculous multiplex of lesser poems,

  Not merely into a whole, but a poem of

  The whole, the essential compact of the parts,

  The roundness that pulls tight the final ring

  VIII

  And that which in an altitude would soar,

  A vis, a principle or, it may be,

  The meditation of a principle,

  Or else an inherent order active to be

  Itself, a nature to its natives all

  Beneficence, a repose, utmost repose,

  The muscles of a magnet aptly felt,

  A giant, on the horizon, glistening,

  IX

  And in bright excellence adorned, crested

  With every prodigal, familiar fire,

  And unfamiliar escapades: whirroos

  And scintillant sizzlings such as children like,

  Vested in the serious folds of majesty,

  Moving around and behind, a following,

  A source of trumpeting seraphs in the eye,

  A source of pleasant outbursts on the ear.

  X

  It is a giant, always, that is evolved,

  To be in scale, unless virtue cuts him, snips

  Both size and solitude or thinks it does,

  As in a signed photograph on a mantelpiece.

  But the virtuoso never leaves his shape,

  Still on the horizon elongates his cuts,

  And still angelic and still plenteous,

  Imposes power by the power of his form.

  XI

  Here, then, is an abstraction given head,

  A giant on the horizon, given arms,

  A massive body and long legs, stretched out,

  A definition with an illustration, not

  Too exactly labelled, a large among the smalls

  Of it, a close, parental magnitude,

  At the centre on the horizon, concentrum, grave

  And prodigious person, patron of origins.

  XII

  That’s it. The lover writes, the believer hears,

  The poet mumbles and the painter sees,

  Each one, his fated eccentricity,

  As a part, but part, but tenacious particle,

  Of the skeleton of the ether, the total

  Of letters, prophecies, perceptions, clods

  Of color, the giant of nothingness, each one

  And the giant ever changing, living in change.

  METAPHOR AS DEGENERATION

  If there is a man white as marble

  Sits in a wood, in the greenest part,

  Brooding sounds of the images of death,

  So there is a man in black space

  Sits in nothing that we know,

  Brooding sounds of river noises;

  And these images, these reverberations,

  And others, make certain how being

  Includes death and the imagination.

  The marble man remains himself in space.

  The man in the black wood descends unchanged.

  It is certain that the river

  Is not Swatara. The swarthy water

  That flows round the earth and through the skies,

  Twisting among the universal spaces,

  Is not Swatara. It is being.

  That is the flock-flecked river, the water,

  The blown sheen—or is it air?

  How, then, is metaphor degeneration,

  When Swatara becomes this undulant river

  And the river becomes the landless, waterless ocean?

  Here the black violets grow down to its banks

  And the memorial mosses hang their green

  Upon it, as it flows ahead.

  THE WOMAN IN SUNSHINE

  It is only that this warmth and movement are like

  The warmth and movement of a woman.

  It is not that there is any image in the air

  Nor the beginning nor end of a form:

  It is empty. But a woman in threadless gold

  Burns us with brushings of her dress

  And a dissociated abundance of being,

  More definite for what she is—

  Because she is disembodied,

  Bearing the odors of the summer fields,

  Confessing the taciturn and yet indifferent,

  Invisibly clear, the only love.

  REPLY TO PAPINI

  In all the solemn moments of human history … poets rose to sing the hymn of victory or the psalm of supplication.… Cease, then, from being the astute calligraphers of congealed daydreams, the hunters of cerebral phosphorescences.

  LETTER OF CELESTIN VI, POPE, TO THE POETS P.C.C. GIOVANNI PAPINI

  I

  Poor procurator, why do you ask someone else

  To say what Celestin should say for himself?

  He has an ever-living subject. The poet

  Has only the formulations of midnight.

  Is Celestin dislodged? The way through the world

  Is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.

  You know that the nucleus of a time is not

  The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind

  Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed

  As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins

  Nor stand there making orotund consolations.

  He shares the confusions of intelligence.

  Giovanni Papini, by your faith, know how

  He wishes that all hard poetry were true.

  This pastoral of endurance and of death

  Is of a nature that must be perceived

  And not imagined. The removes must give,

  Including the removes toward poetry.

  II

  Celestin, the generous, the civilized,

  Will understand what it is to understand.

  The world is still profound and in its depths

  Man sits and studies silence and himself,

  Abiding the reverberations in the vaults.

  Now, once, he accumulates himself and time

  For humane triumphals. But a politics

  Of property is not an area

  For triumphals. These are hymns appropriate to

  The complexities of the world, when apprehended,

  The intricacies of appearance, when perceived.

  They become our gradual possession. The poet

  Increases the aspects of experience,

  As in an enchantment, analyzed and fixed

  And final. This is the centre. The poet is

  The angry day-son clanging at its make:

  The satisfaction underneath the sense,

  The conception sparkling in still obstinate thought.

  THE BOUQUET

  I

  Of medium nature, this farouche extreme

  Is a drop of lightning in an inner world,

  Suspended in temporary jauntiness.

  The bouquet stands in a jar, as metaphor,

  As lightning itself is, likewise, metaphor

  Crowded with apparitions suddenly gone

  And no less suddenly here again, a growth

  Of the reality of the eye, an artifice,

  Nothing much, a flitter that reflects itself.

  II

  One approaches, simply, the reality

  Of the other eye. One enters, entering home,

  The place of meta-men and para-things,

  And yet still men though meta-men, still things

  Though para-things; the meta-men for whom

  The world has turned to the several speeds of glass,

  For whom no blue in the sky prevents them, as

  They understand, and take on potency,

  By growing clear, transparent magistrates,

  Bearded with chains of blue-green glitterings

  And wearing hats of angular flick and fleck,

  Cold with an under impotency that t
hey know,

  Now that they know, because they know. One comes

  To the things of medium nature, as meta-men

  Behold them, not choses of Provence, growing

  In glue, but things transfixed, transpierced and well

  Perceived: the white seen smoothly argentine

  And plated up, dense silver shine, in a land

  Without a god, O silver sheen and shape,

  And movement of emotion through the air,

  True nothing, yet accosted self to self.

  Through the door one sees on the lake that the white duck swims

  Away—and tells and tells the water tells

  Of the image spreading behind it in idea.

  The meta-men behold the idea as part

  Of the image, behold it with exactness through beads

  And dewy bearings of their light-locked beards.

  The green bouquet comes from the place of the duck.

  It is centi-colored and mille-flored and ripe,

  Of dulce atmosphere, the fore of lofty scenes

  But not of romance, the bitterest vulgar do

  And die. It stands on a table at a window

  Of the land, on a checkered cover, red and white.

  The checkered squares, the skeleton of repose,

  Breathe slightly, slightly move or seem to move

  Toward a consciousness of red and white as one,

  A vibrancy of petals, fallen, that still cling

  By trivial filaments to the thing intact:

  The recognizable, medium, central whole—

  So near detachment, the cover’s cornered squares,

  And, when detached, so unimportantly gone,

  So severed and so much forlorn debris.

  Here the eye fastens intently to these lines

  And crawls on them, as if feathers of the duck

  Fell openly from the air to reappear

  In other shapes, as if duck and tablecloth

  And the eccentric twistings of the rapt bouquet

  Exacted attention with attentive force.

  A pack of cards is falling toward the floor.

  The sun is secretly shining on a wall.

  One remembers a woman standing in such a dress.

  III

  The rose, the delphinium, the red, the blue,

  Are questions of the looks they get. The bouquet,

  Regarded by the meta-men, is quirked

  And queered by lavishings of their will to see.

  It stands a sovereign of souvenirs

  Neither remembered nor forgotten, nor old,

  Nor new, nor in the sense of memory.

  It is a symbol, a sovereign of symbols

  In its interpretations voluble,

  Embellished by the quicknesses of sight,

  When in a way of seeing seen, an extreme,

  A sovereign, a souvenir, a sign,

  Of today, of this morning, of this afternoon,

  Not yesterday, nor tomorrow, an appanage

  Of indolent summer not quite physical

  And yet of summer, the petty tones

  Its colors make, the migratory daze,

  The doubling second things, not mystical,

  The infinite of the actual perceived,

  A freedom revealed, a realization touched,

  The real made more acute by an unreal.

  IV

  Perhaps, these colors, seen in insight, assume

  In the eye a special hue of origin.

  But if they do, they cast it widely round.

  They cast deeply round a crystal crystal-white

  And pallid bits, that tend to comply with blue,

  A right red with its composites glutted full,

  Like a monster that has everything and rests,

  And yet is there, a presence in the way.

  They cast closely round the facture of the thing

  Turned para-thing, the rudiments in the jar,

  The stalk, the weed, the grassy flourishes,

  The violent disclosure trimly leafed,

  Lean larkspur and jagged fern and rusting rue

  In a stubborn literacy, an intelligence,

  The prismatic sombreness of a torrent’s wave.

  The rudiments in the jar, farced, finikin,

  Are flatly there, unversed except to be,

  Made difficult by salt fragrance, intricate.

  They are not splashings in a penumbra. They stand.

  They are. The bouquet is a part of a dithering:

  Cloud’s gold, of a whole appearance that stands and is.

  V

  A car drives up. A soldier, an officer,

  Steps out. He rings and knocks. The door is not locked.

  He enters the room and calls. No one is there.

  He bumps the table. The bouquet falls on its side.

  He walks through the house, looks round him and then leaves.

  The bouquet has slopped over the edge and lies on the floor.

  WORLD WITHOUT PECULIARITY

  The day is great and strong—

  But his father was strong, that lies now

  In the poverty of dirt.

  Nothing could be more hushed than the way

  The moon moves toward the night.

  But what his mother was returns and cries on his breast.

  The red ripeness of round leaves is thick

  With the spices of red summer.

  But she that he loved turns cold at his light touch.

  What good is it that the earth is justified,

  That it is complete, that it is an end,

  That in itself it is enough?

  It is the earth itself that is humanity…

  He is the inhuman son and she,

  She is the fateful mother, whom he does not know.

  She is the day, the walk of the moon

  Among the breathless spices and, sometimes,

  He, too, is human and difference disappears

  And the poverty of dirt, the thing upon his breast,

  The hating woman, the meaningless place,

  Become a single being, sure and true.

  OUR STARS COME FROM IRELAND

  I

  Tom McGreevy, in America,

  Thinks of Himself as a Boy

  Out of him that I loved,

  Mal Bay I made,

  I made Mal Bay

  And him in that water.

  Over the top of the Bank of Ireland,

  The wind blows quaintly

  Its thin-stringed music,

  As he heard it in Tarbert.

  These things were made of him

  And out of myself.

  He stayed in Kerry, died there.

  I live in Pennsylvania.

  Out of him I made Mal Bay

  And not a bald and tasselled saint.

  What would the water have been,

  Without that that he makes of it?

  The stars are washing up from Ireland

  And through and over the puddles of Swatara

  And Schuylkill. The sound of him

  Comes from a great distance and is heard.

  II

  The Westwardness of Everything

  These are the ashes of fiery weather,

  Of nights full of the green stars from Ireland,

  Wet out of the sea, and luminously wet,

  Like beautiful and abandoned refugees.

  The whole habit of the mind is changed by them,

  These Gaeled and fitful-fangled darknesses

  Made suddenly luminous, themselves a change,

  An east in their compelling westwardness,

  Themselves an issue as at an end, as if

  There was an end at which in a final change,

  When the whole habit of the mind was changed,

  The ocean breathed out morning in one breath.

  PUELLA PARVULA

  Every thread of summer is at last unwoven.

  By one caterpillar is great Africa devour
ed

  And Gibraltar is dissolved like spit in the wind.

  But over the wind, over the legends of its roaring,

  The elephant on the roof and its elephantine blaring,

  The bloody lion in the yard at night or ready to spring

  From the clouds in the midst of trembling trees

  Making a great gnashing, over the water wallows

  Of a vacant sea declaiming with wide throat,

  Over all these the mighty imagination triumphs

  Like a trumpet and says, in this season of memory,

  When the leaves fall like things mournful of the past,

  Keep quiet in the heart, O wild bitch. O mind

  Gone wild, be what he tells you to be: Puella.

  Write pax across the window pane. And then

  Be still. The summarium in excelsis begins…

  Flame, sound, fury composed … Hear what he says,

  The dauntless master, as he starts the human tale.

  THE NOVEL

  The crows are flying above the foyer of summer.