The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (29 page)

As if, in the presence of the sea,

We dried our nets and mended sail

And talked of never-ending things,

Of the never-ending storm of will,

One will and many wills, and the wind,

Of many meanings in the leaves,

Brought down to one below the eaves,

Link, of that tempest, to the farm,

The chain of the turquoise hen and sky

And the wheel that broke as the cart went by.

It is not a voice that is under the eaves.

It is not speech, the sound we hear

In this conversation, but the sound

Of things and their motion: the other man,

A turquoise monster moving round.

The wound kills that does not bleed.

It has no nurse nor kin to know

Nor kin to care.

And the man dies that does not fall.

He walks and dies. Nothing survives

Except what was,

Under the white clouds piled and piled

Like gathered-up forgetfulness,

In sleeping air.

The clouds are over the village, the town,

To which the walker speaks

And tells of his wound,

Without a word to the people, unless

One person should come by chance,

This man or that,

So much a part of the place, so little

A person he knows, with whom he might

Talk of the weather—

And let it go, with nothing lost,

Just out of the village, at its edge,

In the quiet there.

Young men go walking in the woods,

Hunting for the great ornament,

The pediment of appearance.

They hunt for a form which by its form alone,

Without diamond—blazons or flashing or

Chains of circumstance,

By its form alone, by being right,

By being high, is the stone

For which they are looking:

The savage transparence. They go crying

The world is myself, life is myself,

Breathing as if they breathed themselves,

Full of their ugly lord,

Speaking the phrases that follow the sight

Of this essential ornament

In the woods, in this full-blown May,

The months of understanding. The pediment

Lifts up its heavy scowl before them.

These two by the stone wall

Are a slight part of death.

The grass is still green.

But there is a total death,

A devastation, a death of great height

And depth, covering all surfaces,

Filling the mind.

These are the small townsmen of death,

A man and a woman, like two leaves

That keep clinging to a tree,

Before winter freezes and grows black—

Of great height and depth

Without any feeling, an imperium of quiet,

In which a wasted figure, with an instrument,

Propounds blank final music.

Place-bound and time-bound in evening rain

And bound by a sound which does not change,

Except that it begins and ends,

Begins again and ends again—

Rain without change within or from

Without. In this place and in this time

And in this sound, which do not change,

In which the rain is all one thing,

In the sky, an imagined, wooden chair

Is the clear-point of an edifice,

Forced up from nothing, evening’s chair,

Blue-strutted curule, true—unreal,

The centre of transformations that

Transform for transformation’s self,

In a glitter that is a life, a gold

That is a being, a will, a fate.

Through centuries he lived in poverty.

God only was his only elegance.

Then generation by generation he grew

Stronger and freer, a little better off.

He lived each life because, if it was bad,

He said a good life would be possible.

At last the good life came, good sleep, bright fruit,

And Lazarus betrayed him to the rest,

Who killed him, sticking feathers in his flesh

To mock him. They placed with him in his grave

Sour wine to warn him, an empty book to read;

And over it they set a jagged sign,

Epitaphium to his death, which read,

The Good Man Has No Shape, as if they knew.

The large-leaved day grows rapidly,

And opens in this familiar spot

Its unfamiliar, difficult fern,

Pushing and pushing red after red.

There are doubles of this fern in clouds,

Less firm than the paternal flame,

Yet drenched with its identity,

Reflections and off-shoots, mimic-motes

And mist-mites, dangling seconds, grown

Beyond relation to the parent trunk:

The dazzling, bulging, brightest core,

The furiously burning father-fire…

Infant, it is enough in life

To speak of what you see. But wait

Until sight wakens the sleepy eye

And pierces the physical fix of things.

In his packet Anacharsis found the lines:

“The farm was fat and the land in which it —,

Seemed in the morning like a holiday.”

He had written them near Athens. The farm was white.

The buildings were of marble and stood in marble light.

It was his clarity that made the vista bright.

A subject for Puvis. He would compose

The scene in his gray-rose with violet rocks.

And Bloom would see what Puvis did, protest

And speak of the floridest reality…

In the punctual centre of all circles white

Stands truly. The circles nearest to it share

Its color, but less as they recede, impinged

By difference and then by definition

As a tone defines itself and separates

And the circles quicken and crystal colors come

And flare and Bloom with his vast accumulation

Stands and regards and repeats the primitive lines.

The whole of appearance is a toy. For this,

The dove in the belly builds his nest and coos,

Selah, tempestuous bird. How is it that

The rivers shine and hold their mirrors up,

Like excellence collecting excellence?

How is it that the wooden trees stand up

And live and heap their panniers of green

And hold them round the sultry day? Why should

These mountains being high be, also, bright,

Fetched up with snow that never falls to earth?

And this great esplanade of corn, miles wide,

Is something wished for made effectual

And something more. And the people in costumes,

Though poor, though raggeder than ruin, have that

Within them right for terraces—oh, brave salut!

Deep dove, placate you in your hiddenness.

The sea full of fishes in shoals, the woods that let

One seed alone grow wild, the railway-stops

In Russia at which the same statue of Stalin greets

The same railway passenger, the ancient tree

In the centre of its cones, the resplendent flights

Of red facsimiles through related trees,

White houses in villages, black communicants—

The catalogue is too commodious.

Regard the invalid personality

Instead, outcast, without the will to power

And impotent, like the imagination seeking

To propagate the imagination or like

War’s miracle begetting that of peace.

Freud’s eye was the microscope of potency.

By fortune, his gray ghost may meditate

The spirits of all the impotent dead, seen clear,

And quickly understand, without their flesh,

How truly they had not been what they were.

Day is the children’s friend.

It is Marianna’s Swedish cart.

It is that and a very big hat.

Confined by what they see,

Aquiline pedants treat the cart,

As one of the relics of the heart.

They treat the philosopher’s hat,

Left thoughtlessly behind,

As one of the relics of the mind…

Of day, then, children make

What aquiline pedants take

For souvenirs of time, lost time,

Adieux, shapes, images—

No, not of day, but of themselves,

Not of perpetual time.

And, therefore, aquiline pedants find

The philosopher’s hat to be part of the mind,

The Swedish cart to be part of the heart.

The mother ties the hair-ribbons of the child

And she has peace.
My Jacomyntje!

Your great-grandfather was an Indian fighter
.

The cool sun of the Tulpehocken refers

To its barbed, barbarous rising and has peace.

These earlier dissipations of the blood

And brain, as the extraordinary references

Of ordinary people, places, things,

Compose us in a kind of eulogy.

My Jacomyntje! This first spring after the war
,

In which your father died, still breathes for him

And breathes again for us a fragile breath
.

In the inherited garden, a second-hand

Vertumnus creates an equilibrium.

The child’s three ribbons are in her plaited hair.

At San Miguel de los Baños,

The waitress heaped up black Hermosas

In the magnificence of a volcano.

Round them she spilled the roses

Of the place, blue and green, both streaked.

And white roses shaded emerald on petals

Out of the deadliest heat.

There entered a cadaverous person,

Who bowed and, bowing, brought, in her mantilla,

A woman brilliant and pallid-skinned,

Of fiery eyes and long thin arms.

She stood with him at the table,

Smiling and wetting her lips

In the heavy air.

The green roses drifted up from the table

In smoke. The blue petals became

The yellowing fomentations of effulgence,

Among fomentations of black bloom and of white bloom.

The cadaverous persons were dispelled.

On the table near which they stood

Two coins were lying—dos centavos.

It was like passing a boundary to dive

Into the sun-filled water, brightly leafed

And limbed and lighted out from bank to bank.

That’s how the stars shine during the day. There, then,

The yellow that was yesterday, refreshed,

Became to-day, among our children and

Ourselves, in the clearest green—well, call it green.

We bathed in yellow green and yellow blue

And in these comic colors dangled down,

Like their particular characters, addicts

To blotches, angular anonymids

Gulping for shape among the reeds. No doubt,

We were the appropriate conceptions, less

Than creatures, of the sky between the banks,

The water flowing in the flow of space.

It was passing a boundary, floating without a head

And naked, or almost so, into the grotesque

Of being naked, or almost so, in a world

Of nakedness, in the company of the sun,

Good-fortuner of the grotesque, patroon,

A funny foreigner of meek address.

How good it was at home again at night

To prepare for bed, in the frame of the house, and move

Round the rooms, which do not ever seem to change…

I

Now in midsummer come and all fools slaughtered

And spring’s infuriations over and a long way

To the first autumnal inhalations, young broods

Are in the grass, the roses are heavy with a weight

Of fragrance and the mind lays by its trouble.

Now the mind lays by its trouble and considers.

The fidgets of remembrance come to this.

This is the last day of a certain year

Beyond which there is nothing left of time.

It comes to this and the imagination’s life.

There is nothing more inscribed nor thought nor felt

And this must comfort the heart’s core against

Its false disasters—these fathers standing round,

These mothers touching, speaking, being near,

These lovers waiting in the soft dry grass.

II

Postpone the anatomy of summer, as

The physical pine, the metaphysical pine.

Let’s see the very thing and nothing else.

Let’s see it with the hottest fire of sight.

Burn everything not part of it to ash.

Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky

Without evasion by a single metaphor.

Look at it in its essential barrenness

And say this, this is the centre that I seek.

Fix it in an eternal foliage