Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems

Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems, Vintage Feb 1990

Every time the bucks went clattering

Over Oklahoma

A firecat bristled in the way.

Wherever they went,

They went clattering,

Until they swerved

In a swift, circular lines

To the right,

Because of the firecat.

Or until they swerved

In a swift, circular line

To the left,

Because of the firecat.

(Earthy Anecdote, Harmonium)

And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

(Domination of Black, Harmonium)

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

(The Snow Man,, Harmonium, complete)

A red bird flies across the golden floor.

It is a red bird that seeks out his choir

Among the choirs of wind and wet and wing.

(Le Monocle de Mon Oncle, Harmonium)

Alas! Have all the barbers lived in vain

That not one curl in nature has survived?

(Le Monocle de Mon Oncle, Harmonium)

And that whatever noise the motion of the waves

Made on the sea-weeds and the covered stones

Disturbed not even the most idle ear.

(Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores, Harmonium)

What was the purpose of his pilgrimage,

Whatever shape it took in Crispin’s mind

If not, when all is said, to drive away

The shadow of his fellows from the skies,

(The Comedian as the Letter C, Harmonium)

What word have you, interpreters, of men

Who in the tomb of heaven walk by night

The darkened ghosts of our old comedy?

Do they believe they range the gusty cold,

With lanterns borne aloft to light the way,

Freemen of death, about and still about

To find whatever it is they seek?...

(Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb, Harmonium)

Not less because in purple I descended

The western day through what you called

The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?

What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?

What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,

And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.

I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw

Or heard or felt came not but from myself;

And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

(Tea at the Palaz of Hoon, Harmonium, complete)

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?

What is divinity if it can come

Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,

In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else

In any balm or beauty of the earth,

Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?

(Sunday Morning, Harmonium)

…she strews the leaves

Of sure obliteration on our paths,

(Sunday Morning, Harmonium)

Is there no change of death in paradise?

Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs

Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,

Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,

With rivers like our own that seek for seas

They never find…

(Sunday Morning, Harmonium)

I measure myself

Against a tall tree.

I find that I am much taller,

For I reach right up to the sun,

With my eye;

And I reach to the shore of the sea

With my ear.

Nevertheless, I dislike

The way the ants crawl

In and out of my shadow.

(Six Significant Landscapes, Harmonium)

The moon is the mother of pathos and pity

/

When, at the wearier end of November,

Her old light moves along the branches,

Feebly, slowly, depending upon them;

(Lunar Paraphrase, Harmonium)

But I am, in any case,

A most inappropriate man

In a most unpropitious place.

(Sailing After Lunch, Ideas of Order)

Oh! Blessed rage for order…

(The Idea of Order at c West, Ideas of Order)

…synagogue

…That church without bells.

(Winter Bells, Ideas of Order)

It was the custom

For his rage against chaos

To abate on the way to church,

(Winter Bells, Ideas of Order)

An infinite incantation of our selves

(Academic Discourse at Havana, Ideas of Order)

A little less returned for him each spring.

Music began to fail him. Brahms, although

His dark familiar, often walked apart.

(Anglais Mort a Florence, Ideas of Order)

To nail his thought across the door,

Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,

(The Man with the Blue Guitar, The Man with the Blue Guitar)

It is the chord that falsifies.

…

The discord merely magnifies.

(The Man with the Blue Guitar, The Man with the Blue Guitar)

…Am I a man that is dead

/

At a table on which the food is cold?

Is my thought a memory, not alive?

(The Man with the Blue Guitar, The Man with the Blue Guitar)

Place honey on the altars and die,

You lovers that are bitter at heart.

(The Man with the Blue Guitar, The Man with the Blue Guitar)

The imperfect is our paradise.

(The Poems of Our Climate, Parts of a World)

If he will be heaven and death,

If, while he lives, he hears himself

Sounded in music, f the sun,

Stormer, is the color of a self

As certainly as night is the color

Of a self, if, without sentiment,

He is what he hears and sees and if,

Without pathos, he feels what he hears

And sees, being nothing otherwise, he has not

To go to the Louvre to behold himself.

(Prelude to Objects, Parts of a World)

Birds that came like dirty water in waves

(Prelude to Objects, Parts of a World)

The web is woven and you have to wear it.

/

The winter is made and you have to bear it,

(The Dwarf, Parts of a World)

Where is it that you think, baffled

By the trash of life,

Through winter’s meditative light?

(The Bagatelles the Madrigals, Parts of a World)

The night should be warm and fluters’ fortune

Should play in the trees when morning comes.

(Girl in a Nightgown, Parts of a World)

If the stars that move together as one, disband,

Flying like insects…

(On an Old Horn, Parts of a World)

How often had he walked

Beneath summer and the sky

To receive her shadow into his mind…

Miserable that it was not she.

/

The sky is too blue, the earth too wide.

The thought of her takes her away.

The form of her in somethings else

Is not enough.

/

The reflection of her here, and then there,

Is another shadow, another evasion,

Another denial. If she is everywhere,

She is nowhere, to him.

(Bouquet of Belle Scavoir, Parts of a World)

…But one looks at the sea

As one improvises, on the piano.

(Variations on a Summer Day, Parts of a World)

The wind dissolving into birds

(Woman Looking at  a Vase of Flowers, Parts of a World)

Hoot, little owl within her, how

High blue became particular

In the leaf and bud and how the red,

Flicked into pieces, points of air,

Became—how the central, essential red

Escaped its large abstraction, became,

First, summer, then a lesser time,

Then the sides of peaches, of dusky pears.

(Woman Looking at a Vase of Flowers, Parts of a World)

The good is evil’s last invention. Thus

The maker of catastrophe invents the eye

And through the eye equates ten thousand deaths

With a single, well-tempered apricot…

(Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas, Parts of a World)

…Or is it the multitude of thoughts,

Like insects in the depth of the mind, that kill

The single thought? The multitudes of men

That kill the single man, starvation’s head,

One man, their bread and their remembered wine?

(Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas, Parts of a World)

…Ercole,

Of what do you lie thinking in your cavern?

To think it is to think the way to death…

(Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas, Parts of a World)

What more is there to love that I have loved?

…

But if there be something more to love, amen,

Amen to the feelings about familiar things,

…

Delivering the prisoner by his words,

So that the skeleton in the moonlight sings,

Sings of an heroic world beyond the cell

/

No, not believing, but to make the cell

A hero’s world in which he is the hero.

Man must become the hero of his world.

(Montrachet-le-Jardin, Parts of a World)

One of the sacraments between two breaths

(Montrachet-le-Jardin, Parts of a World)

So you’re home again, Redwood Roamer, and ready

To feast…Slice the mango, Naaman and dress it

/

With white wine, sugar and lime juice. Then bring it,

After we’ve drunk the Moselle, to the thickest shade

/

Of the garden. We must prepare to hear the Roamer’s

Story…

(Certain Phenomena of Sound, Transport to Summer)

The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves

And repeats words without meaning.

(The Motive for Metaphor, Transport to Summer)

The lies the misery, the coldest coil

That grips the centre, the actual bite, that life

Itself is like a poverty in the space of life,

So that the flapping of wind around me here

Is something in tatters that I cannot hold.

(So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch, Transport to Summer)

Tell X that speech is not dirty silence

Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.

(The Creation of Sound, Transport to Summer)

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 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.

(Esthetique du Mal, Transport to Summer)

It may be that one life is a punishment

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

(Esthetique du Mal, Transport to Summer)

If there must be a god in the house, must be,

Saying things in the rooms and on the stair,

/

Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,

Or moonlight, silently, …

(Esthetique du Mal, Transport to Summer)

The grotesque is not a visitation. It is

Not apparition but appearance…

(A Word with Jose Rodriguez-Feo, Transport to Summer)

The poem must resist the intelligence

Almost successfully…

(Man Carry Thing, Transport to Summer)

Through centuries he lived in poverty.

God only was his only elegance.

(The Good Man Has No Shape, Transport to Summer)

Of the limits of reality

Presents itself in Oley when the hay,

Baked through long days, is piled in mows. It is

A land too ripe for enigmas, too serene.

(Credences of Summer, Transport to Summer)

How clean the sun when seen in its idea,

Washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven

That has expelled us and our images…

(Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, Transport to Summer)

…and yet so poisonous

/

Are the ravishments of truth, so fatal to

The truth itself,…

(Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, Transport to Summer)

Being virile, it hears the calendar hymn.

(Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction, Transport to Summer)

…Perhaps

The truth depends on a walk around a lake,

/

A composing as the body tires, a stop

To see hepatica, a stop to watch

A definition growing certain and

/

A wait within that certainty, a rest

In the swags of pine-trees bordering the lake.

(Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, Transport to Summer)

It is of him, ephebe, to make, to confect

The final elegance, not to console

Nor sanctify, but plainly to propound.

(Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, Transport to Summer)

…like a photograph of fate

(Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, Transport to Summer)

On her trip around the world, Nanzia Nunzio

Confronted Ozymandias. She went

Alone and like a vestal long-prepared.

/

I am the spouse. She took her necklace off

And laid it in the sand. As I am, I am

The spouse. She opened her stone-studded belt.

/

I am the spouse, divested of bright gold,

The spouse beyond emerald or amethyst,

Beyond the burning body that I bear.

/

I am the woman stripped more nakedly

Than nakedness, standing before an inflexible

Order, saying I am the contemplated spouse.

/

Speak to me that, which spoken, will array me

In its own only precious ornament.

Set on me the spirit’s diamond coronal.

/

Clothe me entire in the final filament,

So that I tremble with such love so known

And myself am precious for your perfecting.

/

Then Ozymandias said the spouse, the bride

Is never naked. A fictive covering

Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind.

(Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, Transport to Summer)

What am I to believe? If the angel in his cloud,

Serenely gazing at the violent abyss,

Plucks on his strings to pluck abysmal glory,

/

Leaps downward through evening’s revelations, and

On his spredden wings, needs nothing but deep space,

Forgets the gold centre, the golden destiny.

/

Grows warm in the motionless motion of his flight,

Am I that imagine this angel less satisfied?

Are the wings his, the lapis-haunted air?

/

Is it he or is it I that experience this?

(Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, Transport to Summer)

This is where the serpent lives. This is his nest,

These fields, these hills, these tinted distances,

And the pines above and along and beside the sea.

(The Auroras of Autumn, The Auroras of Autumn)

Farewell to an idea… A cabin stands,

Deserted, on a beach. It is white,

As by a custom or according to

/

An ancestral theme or as a consequence

Of an infinite course. The flowers against the wall

Are white, a little dried, a kind of mark

/

Reminding, trying to remind, of a white

That was different, something else, last year

Or before, not the white of an aging afternoon,

/

Whether fresher or duller, whether of winter cloud

Or of winter sky, from horizon to horizon.

The wind is blowing the sand across the floor.

/

Here, being visible is being white,

Is being of the solid of white, the accomplishment

Of an extremist in an exercise…

/

The seasons change. A cold wind chills the beach.

The long lines of it grow longer, emptier,

A darkness gathers though it does not fall

/

And the whiteness grows less vivid on the wall.

The man who is walking turns blankly on the sand.

He observes how north is always enlarging the change,

/

With its frigid brilliances, its blue-red sweeps

And gusts of great enkindlings, its polar green,

The color of ice and fire and solitude.

(The Auroras of Autumn, The Auroras of Autumn)

We were as Danes in Denmark all day long

And knew each other well, hale-hearted landsmen,

For whom the outlandish was another day

/

Of the week, queerer than Sunday. …

(The Auroras of Autumn, The Auroras of Autumn)

How mad would he have to be to say, “He beheld

An order and thereafter he belonged

To it”? He beheld the order of the northern sky.

/

But the beggar gazes on calamity

And thereafter he belongs to it, to bread

Hard found, and water tasting of misery.

/

For him cold’s glacial beauty is his fate.

Without understanding, he belongs to it

And the night, and midnight, and after, where it is.

(In a Bad Time, The Auroras of Autumn)

A source of pleasant outbursts…

(A Primitive Like an Orb, The Auroras of Autumn)

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. (Reply to Papini, The Auroras of Autumn)

The day is great and strong—

But his father was strong, that lies now

In the poverty of dirt.

(World Without Peculiarity, The Auroras of Autumn)

The eye’s plain version is a thing apart,

The vulgate of experience…

(An Ordinary Evening in New Haven, The Auroras of Autumn)

The point of vision and desire are the same.

(An Ordinary Evening in New Haven, The Auroras of Autumn)

…It is as if

Men turning into things, as comedy,

Stood, dressed in antic symbols, to display

/

The truth about themselves, having lost, as things,

That power to conceal they had as men,

(An Ordinary Evening in New Haven, The Auroras of Autumn)

Of bird-nest arches and of rain-stained-vaults.

/

The sound drifts in. The buildings are remembered.

The life of the city never lets go, nor do you

Ever want it to. It is part of the life in your room.

Its domes are the architecture of your bed.

The bells keep on repeated solemn names

/

In choruses and choirs of choruses,

Unwilling that mercy should be a mystery

Of silence, that any solitude of sense

Should give you more than their peculiar chords

And reverberations clinging to whisper still.

/

It is a kind of total grandeur at the end,

With every visible thing enlarged and yet

No more than a bed, a chair and moving nuns,

The immensest theatre, the pillared porch,

The book and candle in your ambered room,

/

Total grandeur of a total edifice,

Chosen by an inquisitor of structures,

For himself. He stops upon this threshold,

As if the design of all his words takes form

And frame from thinking and is realized.

(To an Old Philosopher in Rome, The Rock)

Among the more irritating minor ideas

Of Mr. Homburg during his visits home

To Concord, at the edge of things, was this:

(Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly, The Rock)

…Wanderer, this is the pre-history of February.

The life of the poem in the mind has not yet begun.

/

You were not born yet when the trees were crystal

Nor are you now, in this wakefulness inside a sleep.

(Long and Sluggish Lines, The Rock)

His place, as he sat and as he thought, was not

In anything that he constructed, so frail,

So barely lit, so shadowed over and naught,

/

As, for example, a world in which, like snow,

He became an inhabitant, obedient

To gallant notions of the part of cold.

/

It was here. This was the setting and the time

Of year. Here in his house and in his room,

In his chair, the most tranquil thought grew peaked

/

And the oldest and the warmest heart was cut

By gallant notions on the part of night—

Both late and alone, above the cricket’s chords,

/

Babbling, each one, the uniqueness of its sound.

There was no fury in transcendent forms.

But his actual candle blazed with artifice.

(A Quiet Normal Life, complete, The Rock)

It is an illusion that we were ever alive

Lived in the houses of mothers, arranged ourselves

By our own motions in a freedom of air.

(The Rock, The Rock)