The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (27 page)

The need of its element, the final need

Of final access to its element—

Of access like the page of a wiggy book,

Touched suddenly by the universal flare

For a moment, a moment in which we read and repeat

The eloquences of light’s faculties.

As one of the secretaries of the moon,

The queen of ignorance, you have deplored

How she presides over imbeciles. The night

Makes everything grotesque. Is it because

Night is the nature of man’s interior world?

Is lunar Habana the Cuba of the self?

We must enter boldly that interior world

To pick up relaxations of the known.

For example, this old man selling oranges

Sleeps by his basket. He snores. His bloated breath

Bursts back. What not quite realized transit

Of ideas moves wrinkled in a motion like

The cry of an embryo? The spirit tires,

It has, long since, grown tired, of such ideas.

It says there is an absolute grotesque.

There is a nature that is grotesque within

The boulevards of the generals. Why should

We say that it is man’s interior world

Or seeing the spent, unconscious shapes of night,

Pretend they are shapes of another consciousness?

The grotesque is not a visitation. It is

Not apparition but appearance, part

Of that simplified geography, in which

The sun comes up like news from Africa.

What are the major men? All men are brave.

All men endure. The great captain is the choice

Of chance. Finally, the most solemn burial

Is a paisant chronicle.

Admired by men and all men, therefore, live

To be admired by all men. Nations live

To be admired by nations. The race is brave.

The race endures. The funeral pomps of the race

Are a multitude of individual pomps

And the chronicle of humanity is the sum

Of paisant chronicles.

That is different. They are characters beyond

Reality, composed thereof. They are

The fictive man created out of men.

They are men but artificial men. They are

Nothing in which it is not possible

To believe, more than the casual hero, more

Than Tartuffe as myth, the most Molière,

The easy projection long prohibited.

The baroque poet may see him as still a man

As Virgil, abstract. But see him for yourself,

The fictive man. He may be seated in

A café. There may be a dish of country cheese

And a pineapple on the table. It must be so.

He is the final builder of the total building,

The final dreamer of the total dream,

Or will be. Building and dream are one.

There is a total building and there is

A total dream. There are words of this,

Words, in a storm, that beat around the shapes.

There is a storm much like the crying of the wind,

Words that come out of us like words within,

That have rankled for many lives and made no sound.

He can hear them, like people on the walls,

Running in the rises of common speech,

Crying as that speech falls as if to fail.

There is a building stands in a ruinous storm,

A dream interrupted out of the past,

From beside us, from where we have yet to live.

This man escaped the dirty fates,

Knowing that he died nobly, as he died.

Darkness, nothingness of human after-death,

Receive and keep him in the deepnesses of space—

Profundum, physical thunder, dimension in which

We believe without belief, beyond belief.

The physical world is meaningless tonight

And there is no other. There is Ha-eé-me, who sits

And plays his guitar. Ha-eé-me is a beast.

Or perhaps his guitar is a beast or perhaps they are

Two beasts. But of the same kind—two conjugal beasts.

Ha-eé-me is the male beast … an imbecile,

Who knocks out a noise. The guitar is another beast

Beneath his tip-tap-tap. It is she that responds.

Two beasts but two of a kind and then not beasts.

Yet two not quite of a kind. It is like that here.

There are many of these beasts that one never sees,

Moving so that the foot-falls are slight and almost nothing.

This afternoon the wind and the sea were like that—

And after a while, when Ha-eé-me has gone to sleep,

A great jaguar running will make a little sound.

There is so little that is close and warm.

It is as if we were never children.

Sit in the room. It is true in the moonlight

That it is as if we had never been young.

We ought not to be awake. It is from this

That a bright red woman will be rising

And, standing in violent golds, will brush her hair.

She will speak thoughtfully the words of a line.

She will think about them not quite able to sing.

Besides, when the sky is so blue, things sing themselves,

Even for her, already for her. She will listen

And feel that her color is a meditation,

The most gay and yet not so gay as it was.

Stay here. Speak of familiar things a while.

I

It is possible that to seem—it is to be,

As the sun is something seeming and it is.

The sun is an example. What it seems

It is and in such seeming all things are.

Thus things are like a seeming of the sun

Or like a seeming of the moon or night

Or sleep. It was a queen that made it seem

By the illustrious nothing of her name.

Her green mind made the world around her green.

The queen is an example … This green queen

In the seeming of the summer of her sun

By her own seeming made the summer change.

In the golden vacancy she came, and comes,

And seems to be on the saying of her name.

Her time becomes again, as it became,

The crown and week-day coronal of her fame.

II

Such seemings are the actual ones: the way

Things look each day, each morning, or the style

Peculiar to the queen, this queen or that,

The lesser seeming original in the blind

Forward of the eye that, in its backward, sees

The greater seeming of the major mind.

An age is a manner collected from a queen.

An age is green or red. An age believes

Or it denies. An age is solitude

Or a barricade against the singular man

By the incalculably plural. Hence

Its identity is merely a thing that seems,

In the seeming of an original in the eye,

In the major manner of a queen, the green

The red, the blue, the argent queen. If not,

What subtlety would apparition have?

In flat appearance we should be and be,

Except for delicate clinkings not explained.

These are the actual seemings that we see,

Hear, feel and know. We feel and know them so.

III

There are potential seemings, arrogant

To be, as on the youngest poet’s page,

Or in the dark musician, listening

To hear more brightly the contriving chords.

There are potential seemings turbulent

In the death of a soldier, like the utmost will,

The more than human commonplace of blood,

The breath that gushes upward and is gone,

And another breath emerging out of death,

That speaks for him such seemings as death gives.

There might be, too, a change immenser than

A poet’s metaphors in which being would

Come true, a point in the fire of music where

Dazzle yields to a clarity and we observe,

And observing is completing and we are content,

In a world that shrinks to an immediate whole,

That we do not need to understand, complete

Without secret arrangements of it in the mind.

There might be in the curling-out of spring

A purple-leaping element that forth

Would froth the whole heaven with its seeming-so,

The intentions of a mind as yet unknown,

The spirit of one dwelling in a seed,

Itself that seed’s ripe, unpredictable fruit.

Things are as they seemed to Calvin or to Anne

Of England, to Pablo Neruda in Ceylon,

To Nietzsche in Basel, to Lenin by a lake.

But the integrations of the past are like

A
Museo Olimpico
, so much

So little, our affair, which is the affair

Of the possible: seemings that are to be,

Seemings that it is possible may be.

IV

Nietzsche in Basel studied the deep pool

Of these discolorations, mastering

The moving and the moving of their forms

In the much-mottled motion of blank time.

His revery was the deepness of the pool,

The very pool, his thoughts the colored forms,

The eccentric souvenirs of human shapes,

Wrapped in their seemings, crowd on curious crowd,

In a kind of total affluence, all first,

All final, colors subjected in revery

To an innate grandiose, an innate light,

The sun of Nietzsche gildering the pool,

Yes: gildering the swarm-like manias

In perpetual revolution, round and round…

Lenin on a bench beside a lake disturbed

The swans. He was not the man for swans.

The slouch of his body and his look were not

In suavest keeping. The shoes, the clothes, the hat

Suited the decadence of those silences,

In which he sat. All chariots were drowned. The swans

Moved on the buried water where they lay.

Lenin took bread from his pocket, scattered it—

The swans fled outward to remoter reaches,

As if they knew of distant beaches; and were

Dissolved. The distances of space and time

Were one and swans far off were swans to come.

The eye of Lenin kept the far-off shapes.

His mind raised up, down-drowned, the chariots.

And reaches, beaches, tomorrow’s regions became

One thinking of apocalyptic legions.

V

If seeming is description without place,

The spirit’s universe, then a summer’s day,

Even the seeming of a summer’s day,

Is description without place. It is a sense

To which we refer experience, a knowledge

Incognito, the column in the desert,

On which the dove alights. Description is

Composed of a sight indifferent to the eye.

It is an expectation, a desire,

A palm that rises up beyond the sea,

A little different from reality:

The difference that we make in what we see

And our memorials of that difference,

Sprinklings of bright particulars from the sky.

The future is description without place,

The categorical predicate, the arc.

It is a wizened starlight growing young,

In which old stars are planets of morning, fresh

In the brilliantest descriptions of new day,

Before it comes, the just anticipation

Of the appropriate creatures, jubilant,

The forms that are attentive in thin air.

VI

Description is revelation. It is not

The thing described, nor false facsimile.

It is an artificial thing that exists,

In its own seeming, plainly visible,

Yet not too closely the double of our lives,

Intenser than any actual life could be,

A text we should be born that we might read,

More explicit than the experience of sun

And moon, the book of reconciliation,

Book of a concept only possible

In description, canon central in itself,

The thesis of the plentifullest John.

VII

Thus the theory of description matters most.

It is the theory of the word for those

For whom the word is the making of the world,

The buzzing world and lisping firmament.

It is a world of words to the end of it,

In which nothing solid is its solid self.

As, men make themselves their speech: the hard hidalgo

Lives in the mountainous character of his speech;

And in that mountainous mirror Spain acquires

The knowledge of Spain and of the hidalgo’s hat—