The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (28 page)

A seeming of the Spaniard, a style of life,

The invention of a nation in a phrase,

In a description hollowed out of hollow-bright,

The artificer of subjects still half night.

It matters, because everything we say

Of the past is description without place, a cast

Of the imagination, made in sound;

And because what we say of the future must portend,

Be alive with its own seemings, seeming to be

Like rubies reddened by rubies reddening.

I

Do you remember how the rocket went on

And on, at night, exploding finally

In an ovation of resplendent forms—

Ovation on ovation of large blue men

In pantaloons of fire and of women hatched,

Like molten citizens of the vacuum?

Do you remember the children there like wicks,

That constantly sparkled their small gold? The town

Had crowded into the rocket and touched the fuse.

That night, Liadoff, a long time after his death,

At a piano in a cloud sat practicing,

On a black piano practiced epi-tones.

Do you remember what the townsmen said,

As they fell down, as they heard Liadoff’s cloud

And its tragical, its haunted arpeggios?

And is it true that what they said, as they fell,

Was repeated by Liadoff in a narration

Of incredible colors ex, ex and ex and out?

II

The feeling of Liadoff was changed. It is

The instant of the change that was the poem,

When the cloud pressed suddenly the whole return

From thought, like a violent pulse in the cloud itself,

As if Liadoff no longer remained a ghost

And, being straw, turned green, lived backward, shared

The fantastic fortune of fantastic blood,

Until his body smothered him, until

His being felt the need of soaring, the need

Of air … But then that cloud, that piano placed

Just where it was, oh beau caboose … It was part

Of the instant to perceive, after the shock,

That the rocket was only an inferior cloud.

There was no difference between the town

And him. Both wanted the same thing. Both sought

His epi-tones, the colors of the ear,

The sounds that soon become a voluble speech—

Voluble but archaic and hard to hear.

THEME

ANALYSIS

In the conscious world, the great clouds

Potter in the summer sky.

It is a province—

Of ugly, subconscious time, in which

There is no beautiful eye

And no true tree,

There being no subconscious place,

Only Indyterranean

Resemblances

Of place: time’s haggard mongrels.

Yet in time’s middle deep,

In its abstract motion,

Its immaterial monsters move,

Without physical pedantry

Or any name.

Invisible, they move and are,

Not speaking worms, nor birds

Of mutable plume,

Pure coruscations, that lie beyond

The imagination, intact

And unattained,

Even in Paris, in the Gardens

Of Acclimatization,

On a holiday.

The knowledge of bright-ethered things

Bears us toward time, on its

Perfective wings.

We enjoy the ithy oonts and long-haired

Plomets, as the Herr Gott

Enjoys his comets.

Unsnack your snood, madanna, for the stars

Are shining on all brows of Neversink.

Already the green bird of summer has flown

Away. The night-flies acknowledge these planets,

Predestined to this night, this noise and the place

Of summer. Tomorrow will look like today,

Will appear like it. But it will be an appearance,

A shape left behind, with like wings spreading out,

Brightly empowered with like colors, swarmingly,

But not quite molten, not quite the fluid thing,

A little changed by tips of artifice, changed

By the glints of sound from the grass. These are not

The early constellations, from which came the first

Illustrious intimations—uncertain love,

The knowledge of being, sense without sense of time.

Take the diamonds from your hair and lay them down.

The deer-grass is thin. The timothy is brown.

The shadow of an external world comes near.

The poem must resist the intelligence

Almost successfully. Illustration:

A brune figure in winter evening resists

Identity. The thing he carries resists

The most necessitous sense. Accept them, then,

As secondary (parts not quite perceived

Of the obvious whole, uncertain particles

Of the certain solid, the primary free from doubt,

Things floating like the first hundred flakes of snow

Out of a storm we must endure all night,

Out of a storm of secondary things),

A horror of thoughts that suddenly are real.

We must endure our thoughts all night, until

The bright obvious stands motionless in cold.

Tinsel in February, tinsel in August.

There are things in a man besides his reason.

Come home, wind, he kept crying and crying.

Snow glistens in its instant in the air,

Instant of millefiori bluely magnified—

Come home, wind, he said as he climbed the stair—

Crystal on crystal until crystal clouds

Become an over-crystal out of ice,

Exhaling these creations of itself.

There is a sense in sounds beyond their meaning.

The tinsel of August falling was like a flame

That breathed on ground, more blue than red, more red

Than green, fidgets of all-related fire.

The wind is like a dog that runs away.

But it is like a horse. It is like motion

That lives in space. It is a person at night,

A member of the family, a tie,

An ethereal cousin, another milleman.

From a Schuylkill in mid-earth there came emerging

Flotillas, willed and wanted, bearing in them

Shadows of friends, of those he knew, each bringing

From the water in which he believed and out of desire

Things made by mid-terrestrial, mid-human

Makers without knowing, or intending, uses.

These figures verdant with time’s buried verdure

Came paddling their canoes, a thousand thousand,

Carrying such shapes, of such alleviation,

That the beholder knew their subtle purpose,

Knew well the shapes were the exactest shaping

Of a vast people old in meditation…

Under Tinicum or small Cohansey,

The fathers of the makers may lie and weather.

The romance of the precise is not the elision

Of the tired romance of imprecision.

It is the ever-never-changing same,

An appearance of Again, the diva-dame.

That Which Cannot Be Fixed

I

Once more he turned to that which could not be fixed.

By the sea, insolid rock, stentor, and said:

Lascar, is there a body, turbulent

With time, in wavering water lies, swollen

With thought, through which it cannot see? Does it

Lie lengthwise like the cloud of sleep, not quite

Reposed? And does it have a puissant heart

To toll its pulses, vigors of its self?

Lascar, and water-carcass never-named,

These vigors make, thrice-triple-syllabled,

The difficult images of possible shapes,

That cannot now be fixed. Only there is

A beating and a beating in the centre of

The sea, a strength that tumbles everywhere,

Like more and more becoming less and less,

Like space dividing its blue and by division

Being changed from space to the sailor’s metier,

Or say from that which was conceived to that

Which was realized, like reason’s constant ruin.

Sleep deep, good eel, in your perverse marine.

II

The human ocean beats against this rock

Of earth, rises against it, tide by tide,

Continually. And old John Zeller stands

On his hill, watching the rising and falling, and says:

Of what are these the creatures, what element

Or—yes: what elements, unreconciled

Because there is no golden solvent here?

If they were creatures of the sea alone,

But singular, they would, like water, scale

The uptopping top and tip of things, borne up

By the cadaver of these caverns, half-asleep.

But if they are of sea, earth, sky—water

And fire and air and things not discomposed

From ignorance, not an undivided whole,

It is an ocean of watery images

And shapes of fire, and wind that bears them down.

Perhaps these forms are seeking to escape

Cadaverous undulations. Rest, old mould…

What should we be without the sexual myth,

The human revery or poem of death?

Castratos of moon-mash—Life consists

Of propositions about life. The human

Revery is a solitude in which

We compose these propositions, torn by dreams,

By the terrible incantations of defeats

And by the fear that defeats and dreams are one.

The whole race is a poet that writes down

The eccentric propositions of its fate.

The wood-doves are singing along the Perkiomen.

The bass lie deep, still afraid of the Indians.

In the one ear of the fisherman, who is all

One ear, the wood-doves are singing a single song.

The bass keep looking ahead, upstream, in one

Direction, shrinking from the spit and splash

Of waterish spears. The fisherman is all

One eye, in which the dove resembles the dove.

There is one dove, one bass, one fisherman.

Yet coo becomes rou-coo, rou-coo. How close

To the unstated theme each variation comes…

In that one ear it might strike perfectly:

State the disclosure. In that one eye the dove

Might spring to sight and yet remain a dove.

The fisherman might be the single man

In whose breast, the dove, alighting, would grow still.

Oh, that this lashing wind was something more

Than the spirit of Ludwig Richter…

The rain is pouring down. It is July.

There is lightning and the thickest thunder.

It is a spectacle. Scene 10 becomes 11,

In Series X, Act IV, et cetera.

People fall out of windows, trees tumble down,

Summer is changed to winter, the young grow old,

The air is full of children, statues, roofs

And snow. The theatre is spinning round,

Colliding with deaf-mute churches and optical trains.

The most massive sopranos are singing songs of scales.

And Ludwig Richter, turbulent Schlemihl,

Has lost the whole in which he was contained,

Knows desire without an object of desire,

All mind and violence and nothing felt.

He knows he has nothing more to think about,

Like the wind that lashes everything at once.

The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.

The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,

Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be

The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:

The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,

In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself

Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

The old brown hen and the old blue sky,

Between the two we live and die—

The broken cartwheel on the hill.