The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (23 page)

III

Eulalia, I lounged on the hospital porch,

On the east, sister and nun, and opened wide

A parasol, which I had found, against

The sun. The interior of a parasol,

It is a kind of blank in which one sees.

So seeing, I beheld you walking, white,

Gold-shined by sun, perceiving as I saw

That of that light Eulalia was the name.

Then I, Semiramide, dark-syllabled,

Contrasting our two names, considered speech.

You were created of your name, the word

Is that of which you were the personage.

There is no life except in the word of it.

I write
Semiramide
and in the script

I am and have a being and play a part.

You are that white Eulalia of the name.

You like it under the trees in autumn,

Because everything is half dead.

The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves

And repeats words without meaning.

In the same way, you were happy in spring,

With the half colors of quarter-things,

The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,

The single bird, the obscure moon—

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world

Of things that would never be quite expressed,

Where you yourself were never quite yourself

And did not want nor have to be,

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:

The motive for metaphor, shrinking from

The weight of primary noon,

The A B C of being,

The ruddy temper, the hammer

Of red and blue, the hard sound—

Steel against intimation—the sharp flash,

The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.

They could not carry much, as soldiers.

There was no past in their forgetting,

No self in the mass: the braver being,

The body that could never be wounded,

The life that never would end, no matter

Who died, the being that was an abstraction,

A giant’s heart in the veins, all courage.

But to strip off the complacent trifles,

To expel the ever-present seductions,

To reject the script for its lack-tragic,

To confront with plainest eye the changes,

That was to look on what war magnified.

It was increased, enlarged, made simple,

Made single, made one. This was not denial.

Each man himself became a giant,

Tipped out with largeness, bearing the heavy

And the high, receiving out of others,

As from an inhuman elevation

And origin, an inhuman person,

A mask, a spirit, an accoutrement.

For soldiers, the new moon stretches twenty feet.

Angry men and furious machines

Swarm from the little blue of the horizon

To the great blue of the middle height.

Men scatter throughout clouds.

The wheels are too large for any noise.

And you, my semblables, in sooty residence

Tap skeleton drums inaudibly.

There are shouts and voices.

There are men shuffling on foot in air.

Men are moving and marching

And shuffling lightly, with the heavy lightness

Of those that are marching, many together.

And you, my semblables—the old flag of Holland

Flutters in tiny darkness.

There are circles of weapons in the sun.

The air attends the brightened guns,

As if sounds were forming

Out of themselves, a saying,

An expressive on-dit, a profession.

And you, my semblables, are doubly killed

To be buried in desert and deserted earth.

The flags are natures newly found.

Rifles grow sharper on the sight.

There is a rumble of autumnal marching,

From which no soft sleeve relieves us.

Fate is the present desperado.

And you, my semblables, are crusts that lie

In the shrivellings of your time and place.

There is a battering of the drums. The bugles

Cry loudly, cry out in the powerful heart.

A force gathers that will cry loudlier

Than the most metal music, loudlier,

Like an instinctive incantation.

And you, my semblables, in the total

Of remembrance share nothing of ourselves.

An end must come in a merciless triumph,

An end of evil in a profounder logic,

In a peace that is more than a refuge,

In the will of what is common to all men,

Spelled from spent living and spent dying.

And you, my semblables, in gaffer-green,

Know that the past is not part of the present.

There were other soldiers, other people,

Men came as the sun comes, early children

And late wanderers creeping under the barb of night,

Year, year and year, defeated at last and lost

In an ignorance of sleep with nothing won.

And you, my semblables, know that this time

Is not an early time that has grown late.

But these are not those rusted armies.

There are the lewdest and the lustiest,

The hullaballoo of health and have,

The much too many disinherited

In a storm of torn-up testaments.

And you, my semblables, know that your children

Are not your children, not your selves.

Who are the mossy cronies muttering,

Monsters antique and haggard with past thought?

What is this crackling of voices in the mind,

This pitter-patter of archaic freedom,

Of the thousands of freedoms except our own?

And you, my semblables, whose ecstasy

Was the glory of heaven in the wilderness—

Freedom is like a man who kills himself

Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife

Grows sharp in blood. The armies kill themselves,

And in their blood an ancient evil dies—

The action of incorrigible tragedy.

And you, my semblables, behold in blindness

That a new glory of new men assembles.

This is the pit of torment that placid end

Should be illusion, that the mobs of birth

Avoid our stale perfections, seeking out

Their own, waiting until we go

To picnic in the ruins that we leave.

So that the stars, my semblables, chimeres,

Shine on the very living of those alive.

These violent marchers of the present,

Rumbling along the autumnal horizon,

Under the arches, over the arches, in arcs

Of a chaos composed in more than order,

March toward a generation’s centre.

Time was not wasted in your subtle temples.

No: nor divergence made too steep to follow down.

He is not here, the old sun,

As absent as if we were asleep.

The field is frozen. The leaves are dry.

Bad is final in this light.

In this bleak air the broken stalks

Have arms without hands. They have trunks

Without legs or, for that, without heads.

They have heads in which a captive cry

Is merely the moving of a tongue.

Snow sparkles like eyesight falling to earth,

Like seeing fallen brightly away.

The leaves hop, scraping on the ground.

It is deep January. The sky is hard.

The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.

It is in this solitude, a syllable,

Out of these gawky flitterings,

Intones its single emptiness,

The savagest hollow of winter-sound.

It is here, in this bad, that we reach

The last purity of the knowledge of good.

The crow looks rusty as he rises up.

Bright is the malice in his eye…

One joins him there for company,

But at a distance, in another tree.

On her side, reclining on her elbow.

This mechanism, this apparition,

Suppose we call it Projection A.

She floats in air at the level of

The eye, completely anonymous,

Born, as she was, at twenty-one,

Without lineage or language, only

The curving of her hip, as motionless gesture,

Eyes dripping blue, so much to learn.

If just above her head there hung,

Suspended in air, the slightest crown

Of Gothic prong and practick bright,

The suspension, as in solid space,

The suspending hand withdrawn, would be

An invisible gesture. Let this be called

Projection B. To get at the thing

Without gestures is to get at it as

Idea. She floats in the contention, the flux

Between the thing as idea and

The idea as thing. She is half who made her.

This is the final Projection, C.

The arrangement contains the desire of

The artist. But one confides in what has no

Concealed creator. One walks easily

The unpainted shore, accepts the world

As anything but sculpture. Good-bye,

Mrs. Pappadopoulos, and thanks.

I

To speak quietly at such a distance, to speak

And to be heard is to be large in space,

That, like your own, is large, hence, to be part

Of sky, of sea, large earth, large air. It is

To perceive men without reference to their form.

II

The armies are forms in number, as cities are.

The armies are cities in movement. But a war

Between cities is a gesticulation of forms,

A swarming of number over number, not

One foot approaching, one uplifted arm.

III

At the end of night last night a crystal star,

The crystal-pointed star of morning, rose

And lit the snow to a light congenial

To this prodigious shadow, who then came

In an elemental freedom, sharp and cold.

IV

The feeling of him was the feel of day,

And of a day as yet unseen, in which

To see was to be. He was the figure in

A poem for Liadoff, the self of selves:

To think of him destroyed the body’s form.

V

He was a shell of dark blue glass, or ice,

Or air collected in a deep essay,

Or light embodied, or almost, a flash

On more than muscular shoulders, arms and chest,

Blue’s last transparence as it turned to black,

VI

The glitter of a being, which the eye

Accepted yet which nothing understood,

A fusion of night, its blue of the pole of blue

And of the brooding mind, fixed but for a slight

Illumination of movement as he breathed.

VII

He was as tall as a tree in the middle of

The night. The substance of his body seemed

Both substance and non-substance, luminous flesh

Or shapely fire: fire from an underworld,

Of less degree than flame and lesser shine.

VIII

Upon my top he breathed the pointed dark.

He was not man yet he was nothing else.

If in the mind, he vanished, taking there

The mind’s own limits, like a tragic thing

Without existence, existing everywhere.

IX

He breathed in crystal-pointed change the whole

Experience of night, as if he breathed

A consciousness from solitude, inhaled

A freedom out of silver-shaping size,

Against the whole experience of day.

X

The silver-shapeless, gold-encrusted size

Of daylight came while he sat thinking. He said,

“The moments of enlargement overlook

The enlarging of the simplest soldier’s cry

In what I am, as he falls. Of what I am,

XI

The cry is part. My solitaria

Are the meditations of a central mind.

I hear the motions of the spirit and the sound

Of what is secret becomes, for me, a voice

That is my own voice speaking in my ear.

XII

There 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.”

XIII

In spite of this, the gigantic bulk of him

Grew strong, as if doubt never touched his heart.

Of what was this the force? From what desire

And from what thinking did his radiance come?

In what new spirit had his body birth?

XIV

He was more than an external majesty,

Beyond the sleep of those that did not know,

More than a spokesman of the night to say

Now, time stands still. He came from out of sleep.

He rose because men wanted him to be.

XV

They wanted him by day to be, image,

But not the person, of their power, thought,

But not the thinker, large in their largeness, beyond

Their form, beyond their life, yet of themselves,

Excluding by his largeness their defaults.