The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (22 page)

Even now, the centre of something else,

Merely by putting hand to brow,

Brooding on centuries like shells.

As the acorn broods on former oaks

In memorials of Northern sound,

Skims the real for its unreal,

So she in Hydaspia created

Out of the movement of few words,

Flora Lowzen invigorated

Archaic and future happenings,

In glittering seven-colored changes,

By Howzen, the chromatic Lowzen.

I

Force is my lot and not pink-clustered

Roma ni Avignon ni Leyden,

And cold, my element. Death is my

Master and, without light, I dwell. There

The snow hangs heavily on the rocks, brought

By a wind that seeks out shelter from snow. Thus

Each man spoke in winter. Yet each man spoke of

The brightness of arms, said Roma wasted

In its own dirt, said Avignon was

Peace in a time of peace, said Leyden

Was always the other mind. The brightness

Of arms, the will opposed to cold, fate

In its cavern, wings subtler than any mercy,

These were the psalter of their sybils.

II

The Got whome we serve is able to deliver

Us. Good chemistry, good common man, what

Of that angelic sword? Creature of

Ten times ten times dynamite, convulsive

Angel, convulsive shatterer, gun,

Click, click, the Got whom we serve is able,

Still, still to deliver us, still magic,

Still moving yet motionless in smoke, still

One with us, in the heaved-up noise, still

Captain, the man of skill, the expert

Leader, the creator of bursting color

And rainbow sortilege, the savage weapon

Against enemies, against the prester,

Presto, whose whispers prickle the spirit.

III

They are sick of each old romance, returning,

Of each old revolving dance, the music

Like a euphony in a museum

Of euphonies, a skin from Nubia,

A helio-horn. How strange the hero

To this accurate, exacting eye. Sight

Hangs heaven with flash drapery. Sight

Is a museum of things seen. Sight,

In war, observes each man profoundly.

Yes. But these sudden sublimations

Are to combat what his exaltations

Are to the unaccountable prophet or

What any fury to its noble centre.

IV

To grasp the hero, the eccentric

On a horse, in a plane, at the piano—

At the piano, scales, arpeggios

And chords, the morning exercises,

The afternoon’s reading, the night’s reflection,

That’s how to produce a virtuoso.

The drill of a submarine. The voyage

Beyond the oyster-beds, indigo

Shadow, up the great sea and downward

And darkly beside the vulcanic

Sea-tower, sea-pinnacles, sea-mountain.

The signal … The sea-tower, shaken,

Sways slightly and the pinnacles frisson.

The mountain collapses. Chopiniana.

V

The common man is the common hero.

The common hero is the hero.

Imprimatur. But then there’s common fortune,

Induced by what you will: the entrails

Of a cat, twelve dollars for the devil,

A kneeling woman, a moon’s farewell;

And common fortune, induced by nothing,

Unwished for, chance, the merest riding

Of the wind, rain in a dry September,

The improvisations of the cuckoos

In a clock-shop.… Soldier, think, in the darkness,

Repeating your appointed paces

Between two neatly measured stations,

Of less neatly measured common-places.

VI

Unless we believe in the hero, what is there

To believe? Incisive what, the fellow

Of what good. Devise. Make him of mud,

For every day. In a civiler manner,

Devise, devise, and make him of winter’s

Iciest core, a north star, central

In our oblivion, of summer’s

Imagination, the golden rescue:

The bread and wine of the mind, permitted

In an ascetic room, its table

Red as a red table-cloth, its windows

West Indian, the extremest power

Living and being about us and being

Ours, like a familiar companion.

VII

Gazette Guerrière
. A man might happen

To prefer
L’Observateur de la Paix
, since

The hero of the
Gazette
and the hero

Of
L’Observateur
, the classic hero

And the bourgeois, are different, much.

The classic changed. There have been many.

And there are many bourgeois heroes.

There are more heroes than marbles of them.

The marbles are pinchings of an idea,

Yet there is that idea behind the marbles,

The idea of things for public gardens,

Of men suited to public ferns … The hero

Glides to his meeting like a lover

Mumbling a secret, passionate message.

VIII

The hero is not a person. The marbles

Of Xenophon, his epitaphs, should

Exhibit Xenophon, what he was, since

Neither his head nor horse nor knife nor

Legend were part of what he was, forms

Of a still-life, symbols, brown things to think of

In brown books. The marbles of what he was stand

Like a white abstraction only, a feeling

In a feeling mass, a blank emotion,

An anti-pathos, until we call it

Xenophon, its implement and actor.

Obscure Satanas, make a model

Of this element, this force. Transfer it

Into a barbarism as its image.

IX

If the hero is not a person, the emblem

Of him, even if Xenophon, seems

To stand taller than a person stands, has

A wider brow, large and less human

Eyes and bruted ears: the man-like body

Of a primitive. He walks with a defter

And lither stride. His arms are heavy

And his breast is greatness. All his speeches

Are prodigies in longer phrases.

His thoughts begotten at clear sources,

Apparently in air, fall from him

Like chantering from an abundant

Poet, as if he thought gladly, being

Compelled thereto by an innate music.

X

And if the phenomenon, magnified, is

Further magnified, sua voluntate,

Beyond his circumstance, projected

High, low, far, wide, against the distance,

In parades like several equipages,

Painted by mad-men, seen as magic,

Leafed out in adjectives as private

And peculiar and appropriate glory,

Even enthroned on rainbows in the sight

Of the fishes of the sea, the colored

Birds and people of this too voluminous

Air-earth—Can we live on dry descriptions,

Feel everything starving except the belly

And nourish ourselves on crumbs of whimsy?

XI

But a profane parade, the basso

Preludes a-rub, a-rub-rub, for him that

Led the emperor astray, the tom trumpets

Curling round the steeple and the people,

The elephants of sound, the tigers

In trombones roaring for the children,

Young boys resembling pastry, hip-hip,

Young men as vegetables, hip-hip,

Home and the fields give praise, hurrah, hip,

Hip, hip, hurrah. Eternal morning…

Flesh on the bones. The skeleton throwing

His crust away eats of this meat, drinks

Of this tabernacle, this communion,

Sleeps in the sun no thing recalling.

XII

It is not an image. It is a feeling.

There is no image of the hero.

There is a feeling as definition.

How could there be an image, an outline,

A design, a marble soiled by pigeons?

The hero is a feeling, a man seen

As if the eye was an emotion,

As if in seeing we saw our feeling

In the object seen and saved that mystic

Against the sight, the penetrating,

Pure eye. Instead of allegory,

We have and are the man, capable

Of his brave quickenings, the human

Accelerations that seem inhuman.

XIII

These letters of him for the little,

The imaginative, ghosts that dally

With life’s salt upon their lips and savor

The taste of it, secrete within them

Too many references. The hero

Acts in reality, adds nothing

To what he does. He is the heroic

Actor and act but not divided.

It is a part of his conception,

That he be not conceived, being real.

Say that the hero is his nation,

In him made one, and in that saying

Destroy all references. This actor

Is anonymous and cannot help it.

XIV

A thousand crystals’ chiming voices,

Like the shiddow-shaddow of lights revolving

To momentary ones, are blended,

In hymns, through iridescent changes,

Of the apprehending of the hero.

These hymns are like a stubborn brightness

Approaching in the dark approaches

Of time and place, becoming certain,

The organic centre of responses,

Naked of hindrance, a thousand crystals.

To meditate the highest man, not

The highest supposed in him and over,

Creates, in the blissfuller perceptions,

What unisons create in music.

XV

The highest man with nothing higher

Than himself, his self, the self that embraces

The self of the hero, the solar single,

Man-sun, man-moon, man-earth, man-ocean,

Makes poems on the syllable
fa
or

Jumps from the clouds or, from his window,

Sees the petty gildings on February…

The man-sun being hero rejects that

False empire … These are the works and pastimes

Of the highest self: he studies the paper

On the wall, the lemons on the table.

This is his day. With nothing lost, he

Arrives at the man-man as he wanted.

This is his night and meditation.

XVI

Each false thing ends. The bouquet of summer

Turns blue and on its empty table

It is stale and the water is discolored.

True autumn stands then in the doorway.

After the hero, the familiar

Man makes the hero artificial.

But was the summer false? The hero?

How did we come to think that autumn

Was the veritable season, that familiar

Man was the veritable man? So

Summer, jangling the savagest diamonds and

Dressed in its azure-doubled crimsons,

May truly bear its heroic fortunes

For the large, the solitary figure.

Look round, brown moon, brown bird, as you rise to fly,

Look round at the head and zither

On the ground.

Look round you as you start to rise, brown moon,

At the book and shoe, the rotted rose

At the door.

This was the place to which you came last night,

Flew close to, flew to without rising away.

Now, again,

In your light, the head is speaking. It reads the book.

It becomes the scholar again, seeking celestial

Rendezvous,

Picking thin music on the rustiest string,

Squeezing the reddest fragrance from the stump

Of summer.

The venerable song falls from your fiery wings.

The song of the great space of your age pierces

The fresh night.

I

The cricket in the telephone is still.

A geranium withers on the window-sill.

Cat’s milk is dry in the saucer. Sunday song

Comes from the beating of the locust’s wings,

That do not beat by pain, but calendar,

Nor meditate the world as it goes round.

Someone has left for a ride in a balloon

Or in a bubble examines the bubble of air.

The room is emptier than nothingness.

Yet a spider spins in the left shoe under the bed—

And old John Rocket dozes on his pillow.

It is safe to sleep to a sound that time brings back.

II

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 … The sound of that slick sonata,

Finding its way from the house, makes music seem

To be a nature, a place in which itself

Is that which produces everything else, in which

The Roamer is a voice taller than the redwoods,

Engaged in the most prolific narrative,

A sound producing the things that are spoken.