The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (18 page)

Green is the night, green kindled and apparelled.

It is she that walks among astronomers.

She strides above the rabbit and the cat,

Like a noble figure, out of the sky,

Moving among the sleepers, the men,

Those that lie chanting
green is the night

Green is the night and out of madness woven,

The self-same madness of the astronomers

And of him that sees, beyond the astronomers,

The topaz rabbit and the emerald cat,

That sees above them, that sees rise up above them,

The noble figure, the essential shadow,

Moving and being, the image at its source,

The abstract, the archaic queen. Green is the night.

With my whole body I taste these peaches,

I touch them and smell them. Who speaks?

I absorb them as the Angevine

Absorbs Anjou. I see them as a lover sees,

As a young lover sees the first buds of spring

And as the black Spaniard plays his guitar.

Who speaks? But it must be that I,

That animal, that Russian, that exile, for whom

The bells of the chapel pullulate sounds at

Heart. The peaches are large and round,

Ah! and red; and they have peach fuzz, ah!

They are full of juice and the skin is soft.

They are full of the colors of my village

And of fair weather, summer, dew, peace.

The room is quiet where they are.

The windows are open. The sunlight fills

The curtains. Even the drifting of the curtains,

Slight as it is, disturbs me. I did not know

That such ferocities could tear

One self from another, as these peaches do.

Only the rich remember the past,

The strawberries once in the Apennines,

Philadelphia that the spiders ate.

There they sit, holding their eyes in their hands.

Queer, in this Vallombrosa of ears,

That they never hear the past. To see,

To hear, to touch, to taste, to smell, that’s now,

That’s this. Do they touch the thing they see,

Feel the wind of it, smell the dust of it?

They do not touch it. Sounds never rise

Out of what they see. They polish their eyes

In their hands. The lilacs came long after.

But the town and the fragrance were never one,

Though the blue bushes bloomed—and bloom,

Still bloom in the agate eyes, red blue,

Red purple, never quite red itself.

The tongue, the fingers, and the nose

Are comic trash, the ears are dirt,

But the eyes are men in the palm of the hand.

This? A man must be very poor

With a single sense, though he smells clouds,

Or to see the sea on Sunday, or

To touch a woman cadaverous,

Of poorness as an earth, to taste

Dry seconds and insipid thirds,

To hear himself and not to speak.

The strawberries once in the Apennines…

They seem a little painted, now.

The mountains are scratched and used, clear fakes.

A long time you have been making the trip

From Havre to Hartford, Master Soleil,

Bringing the lights of Norway and all that.

A long time the ocean has come with you,

Shaking the water off, like a poodle,

That splatters incessant thousands of drops,

Each drop a petty tricolor. For this,

The aunts in Pasadena, remembering,

Abhor the plaster of the western horses,

Souvenirs of museums. But, Master, there are

Lights masculine and lights feminine.

What is this purple, this parasol,

This stage-light of the Opera?

It is like a region full of intonings.

It is Hartford seen in a purple light.

A moment ago, light masculine,

Working, with big hands, on the town,

Arranged its heroic attitudes.

But now as in an amour of women

Purple sets purple round. Look, Master,

See the river, the railroad, the cathedral…

When male light fell on the naked back

Of the town, the river, the railroad were clear.

Now, every muscle slops away.

Hi! Whisk it, poodle, flick the spray

Of the ocean, ever-freshening,

On the irised hunks, the stone bouquet.

These days of disinheritance, we feast

On human heads. True, birds rebuild

Old nests and there is blue in the woods.

The church bells clap one night in the week.

But that’s all done. It is what used to be,

As they used to lie in the grass, in the heat,

Men on green beds and women half of sun.

The words are written, though not yet said.

It is like the season when, after summer,

It is summer and it is not, it is autumn

And it is not, it is day and it is not,

As if last night’s lamps continued to burn,

As if yesterday’s people continued to watch

The sky, half porcelain, preferring that

To shaking out heavy bodies in the glares

Of this present, this science, this unrecognized,

This outpost, this douce, this dumb, this dead, in which

We feast on human heads, brought in on leaves,

Crowned with the first, cold buds. On these we live,

No longer on the ancient cake of seed,

The almond and deep fruit. This bitter meat

Sustains us … Who, then, are they, seated here?

Is the table a mirror in which they sit and look?

Are they men eating reflections of themselves?

At the time of nougats, the peer yellow

Sighed in the evening that he lived

Without ideas in a land without ideas,

The pair yellow, the peer.

It was at the time, the place, of nougats.

There the dogwoods, the white ones and the pink ones,

Bloomed in sheets, as they bloom, and the girl,

A pink girl took a white dog walking.

The dog had to walk. He had to be taken.

The girl had to hold back and lean back to hold him,

At the time of the dogwoods, handfuls thrown up

To spread colors. There was not an idea

This side of Moscow. There were anti-ideas

And counter-ideas. There was nothing one had. There were

No horses to ride and no one to ride them

In the woods of the dogwoods,

No large white horses. But there was the fluffy dog.

There were the sheets high up on older trees,

Seeming to be liquid as leaves made of cloud,

Shells under water. These were nougats.

It had to be right: nougats. It was a shift

Of realities, that, in which it could be wrong.

The weather was like a waiter with a tray.

One had come early to a crisp café.

I

The bird kept saying that birds had once been men,

Or were to be, animals with men’s eyes,

Men fat as feathers, misers counting breaths,

Women of a melancholy one could sing.

Then the bird from his ruddy belly blew

A trumpet round the trees. Could one say that it was

A baby with the tail of a rat?

                                        The stones

Were violet, yellow, purple, pink. The grass

Of the iris bore white blooms. The bird then boomed.

Could one say that he sang the colors in the stones,

False as the mind, instead of the fragrance, warm

With sun?

               In the little of his voice, or the like,

Or less, he found a man, or more, against

Calamity, proclaimed himself, was proclaimed.

II

If the stars that move together as one, disband,

Flying like insects of fire in a cavern of night,

Pipperoo, pippera, pipperum … The rest is rot.

I

It is she alone that matters.

She made it. It is easy to say

The figures of speech, as why she chose

This dark, particular rose.

II

Everything in it is herself.

Yet the freshness of the leaves, the burn

Of the colors, are tinsel changes,

Out of the changes of both light and dew

III

How often had he walked

Beneath summer and the sky

To receive her shadow into his mind…

Miserable that it was not she.

IV

The sky is too blue, the earth too wide.

The thought of her takes her away.

The form of her in something else

Is not enough.

V

The reflection of her here, and then there,

Is another shadow, another evasion,

Another denial. If she is everywhere,

She is nowhere, to him.

VI

But this she has made. If it is

Another image, it is one she has made.

It is she that he wants, to look at directly,

Someone before him to see and to know.

I

Say of the gulls that they are flying

In light blue air over dark blue sea.

II

A music more than a breath, but less

Than the wind, sub-music like sub-speech,

A repetition of unconscious things,

Letters of rock and water, words

Of the visible elements and of ours.

III

The rocks of the cliffs are the heads of dogs

That turn into fishes and leap

Into the sea.

IV

Star over Monhegan, Atlantic star,

Lantern without a bearer, you drift,

You, too, are drifting, in spite of your course;

Unless in the darkness, brightly-crowned,

You are the will, if there is a will,

Or the portent of a will that was,

One of the portents of the will that was.

V

The leaves of the sea are shaken and shaken.

There was a tree that was a father,

We sat beneath it and sang our songs.

VI

It is cold to be forever young,

To come to tragic shores and flow,

In sapphire, round the sun-bleached stones,

Being, for old men, time of their time.

VII

One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls,

When it sings. The gull sits on chimney-tops.

He mocks the guinea, challenges

The crow, inciting various modes.

The sparrow requites one, without intent.

VIII

An exercise in viewing the world.

On the motive! But one looks at the sea

As one improvises, on the piano.

IX

This cloudy world, by aid of land and sea,

Night and day, wind and quiet, produces

More nights, more days, more clouds, more worlds.

X

To change nature, not merely to change ideas,

To escape from the body, so to feel

Those feelings that the body balks,

The feelings of the natures round us here:

As a boat feels when it cuts blue water.

XI

Now, the timothy at Pemaquid

That rolled in heat is silver-tipped

And cold. The moon follows the sun like a French

Translation of a Russian poet.

XII

Everywhere the spruce trees bury soldiers:

Hugh March, a sergeant, a redcoat, killed,

With his men, beyond the barbican.

Everywhere spruce trees bury spruce trees.

XIII

Cover the sea with the sand rose. Fill

The sky with the radiantiana

Of spray. Let all the salt be gone.

XIV

Words add to the senses. The words for the dazzle

Of mica, the dithering of grass,

The Arachne integument of dead trees,

Are the eye grown larger, more intense.

XV

The last island and its inhabitant,

The two alike, distinguish blues,

Until the difference between air

And sea exists by grace alone,

In objects, as white this, white that.

XVI

Round and round goes the bell of the water

And round and round goes the water itself

And that which is the pitch of its motion,

The bell of its dome, the patron of sound.

XVII

Pass through the door and through the walls,

Those bearing balsam, its field fragrance,

Pine-figures bringing sleep to sleep.

XVIII

Low tide, flat water, sultry sun.

One observes profoundest shadows rolling.

Damariscotta da da doo.

XIX