The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (38 page)

In the perpetual reference, object

Of the perpetual meditation, point

Of the enduring, visionary love,

Obscure, in colors whether of the sun

Or mind, uncertain in the clearest bells,

The spirit’s speeches, the indefinite,

Confused illuminations and sonorities,

So much ourselves, we cannot tell apart

The idea and the bearer-being of the idea.

III

The point of vision and desire are the same.

It is to the hero of midnight that we pray

On a hill of stones to make beau mont thereof.

If it is misery that infuriates our love,

If the black of night stands glistening on beau mont,

Then, ancientest saint ablaze with ancientest truth,

Say next to holiness is the will thereto,

And next to love is the desire for love,

The desire for its celestial ease in the heart,

Which nothing can frustrate, that most secure,

Unlike love in possession of that which was

To be possessed and is. But this cannot

Possess. It is desire, set deep in the eye,

Behind all actual seeing, in the actual scene,

In the street, in a room, on a carpet or a wall,

Always in emptiness that would be filled,

In denial that cannot contain its blood,

A porcelain, as yet in the bats thereof.

IV

The plainness of plain things is savagery,

As: the last plainness of a man who has fought

Against illusion and was, in a great grinding

Of growling teeth, and falls at night, snuffed out

By the obese opiates of sleep. Plain men in plain towns

Are not precise about the appeasement they need.

They only know a savage assuagement cries

With a savage voice; and in that cry they hear

Themselves transposed, muted and comforted

In a savage and subtle and simple harmony,

A matching and mating of surprised accords,

A responding to a diviner opposite.

So lewd spring comes from winter’s chastity.

So, after summer, in the autumn air,

Comes the cold volume of forgotten ghosts,

But soothingly, with pleasant instruments,

So that this cold, a children’s tale of ice,

Seems like a sheen of heat romanticized.

V

Inescapable romance, inescapable choice

Of dreams, disillusion as the last illusion,

Reality as a thing seen by the mind,

Not that which is but that which is apprehended,

A mirror, a lake of reflections in a room,

A glassy ocean lying at the door,

A great town hanging pendent in a shade,

An enormous nation happy in a style,

Everything as unreal as real can be,

In the inexquisite eye. Why, then, inquire

Who has divided the world, what entrepreneur?

No man. The self, the chrysalis of all men

Became divided in the leisure of blue day

And more, in branchings after day. One part

Held fast tenaciously in common earth

And one from central earth to central sky

And in moonlit extensions of them in the mind

Searched out such majesty as it could find.

VI

Reality
is
the beginning not the end,

Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega,

Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals.

It is the infant A standing on infant legs,

Not twisted, stooping, polymathic Z,

He that kneels always on the edge of space

In the pallid perceptions of its distances.

Alpha fears men or else Omega’s men

Or else his prolongations of the human.

These characters are around us in the scene.

For one it is enough; for one it is not;

For neither is it profound absentia,

Since both alike appoint themselves the choice

Custodians of the glory of the scene,

The immaculate interpreters of life.

But that’s the difference: in the end and the way

To the end. Alpha continues to begin.

Omega is refreshed at every end.

VII

In the presence of such chapels and such schools,

The impoverished architects appear to be

Much richer, more fecund, sportive and alive.

The objects tingle and the spectator moves

With the objects. But the spectator also moves

With lesser things, with things exteriorized

Out of rigid realists. It is as if

Men turning into things, as comedy,

Stood, dressed in antic symbols, to display

The truth about themselves, having lost, as things,

That power to conceal they had as men,

Not merely as to depth but as to height

As well, not merely as to the commonplace

But, also, as to their miraculous,

Conceptions of new mornings of new worlds,

The tips of cock-cry pinked out pastily,

As that which was incredible becomes,

In misted contours, credible day again.

VIII

We fling ourselves, constantly longing, on this form.

We descend to the street and inhale a health of air

To our sepulchral hollows. Love of the real

Is soft in three-four cornered fragrances

From five-six cornered leaves, and green, the signal

To the lover, and blue, as of a secret place

In the anonymous color of the universe.

Our breath is like a desperate element

That we must calm, the origin of a mother tongue

With which to speak to her, the capable

In the midst of foreignness, the syllable

Of recognition, avowal, impassioned cry,

The cry that contains its converse in itself,

In which looks and feelings mingle and are part

As a quick answer modifies a question,

Not wholly spoken in a conversation between

Two bodies disembodied in their talk,

Too fragile, too immediate for any speech.

IX

We keep coming back and coming back

To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns

That fall upon it out of the wind. We seek

The poem of pure reality, untouched

By trope or deviation, straight to the word,

Straight to the transfixing object, to the object

At the exactest point at which it is itself,

Transfixing by being purely what it is,

A view of New Haven, say, through the certain eye,

The eye made clear of uncertainty, with the sight

Of simple seeing, without reflection. We seek

Nothing beyond reality. Within it,

Everything, the spirit’s alchemicana

Included, the spirit that goes roundabout

And through included, not merely the visible,

The solid, but the movable, the moment,

The coming on of feasts and the habits of saints,

The pattern of the heavens and high, night air.

X

It is fatal in the moon and empty there.

But, here, allons. The enigmatical

Beauty of each beautiful enigma

Becomes amassed in a total double-thing.

We do not know what is real and what is not.

We say of the moon, it is haunted by the man

Of bronze whose mind was made up and who, therefore, died.

We are not men of bronze and we are not dead.

His spirit is imprisoned in constant change.

But ours is not imprisoned. It resides

In a permanence composed of impermanence,

In a faithfulness as against the lunar light,

So that morning and evening are like promises kept,

So that the approaching sun and its arrival,

Its evening feast and the following festival,

This faithfulness of reality, this mode,

This tendance and venerable holding-in

Make gay the hallucinations in surfaces.

XI

In the metaphysical streets of the physical town

We remember the lion of Juda and we save

The phrase … Say of each lion of the spirit

It is a cat of a sleek transparency

That shines with a nocturnal shine alone.

The great cat must stand potent in the sun.

The phrase grows weak. The fact takes up the strength

Of the phrase. It contrives the self-same evocations

And Juda becomes New Haven or else must.

In the metaphysical streets, the profoundest forms

Go with the walker subtly walking there.

These he destroys with wafts of wakening,

Free from their majesty and yet in need

Of majesty, of an invincible clou,

A minimum of making in the mind,

A verity of the most veracious men,

The propounding of four seasons and twelve months.

The brilliancy at the central of the earth.

XII

The poem is the cry of its occasion,

Part of the res itself and not about it.

The poet speaks the poem as it is,

Not as it was: part of the reverberation

Of a windy night as it is, when the marble statues

Are like newspapers blown by the wind. He speaks

By sight and insight as they are. There is no

Tomorrow for him. The wind will have passed by,

The statues will have gone back to be things about.

The mobile and the immobile flickering

In the area between is and was are leaves,

Leaves burnished in autumnal burnished trees

And leaves in whirlings in the gutters, whirlings

Around and away, resembling the presence of thought,

Resembling the presences of thoughts, as if,

In the end, in the whole psychology, the self,

The town, the weather, in a casual litter,

Together, said words of the world are the life of the world.

XIII

The ephebe is solitary in his walk.

He skips the journalism of subjects, seeks out

The perquisites of sanctity, enjoys

A strong mind in a weak neighborhood and is

A serious man without the serious,

Inactive in his singular respect.

He is neither priest nor proctor at low eve,

Under the birds, among the perilous owls,

In the big X of the returning primitive.

It is a fresh spiritual that he defines,

A coldness in a long, too-constant warmth,

A thing on the side of a house, not deep in a cloud,

A difficulty that we predicate:

The difficulty of the visible

To the nations of the clear invisible,

The actual landscape with its actual horns

Of baker and butcher blowing, as if to hear,

Hear hard, gets at an essential integrity.

XIV

The dry eucalyptus seeks god in the rainy cloud.

Professor Eucalyptus of New Haven seeks him

In New Haven with an eye that does not look

Beyond the object. He sits in his room, beside

The window, close to the ramshackle spout in which

The rain falls with a ramshackle sound. He seeks

God in the object itself, without much choice.

It is a choice of the commodious adjective

For what he sees, it comes in the end to that:

The description that makes it divinity, still speech

As it touches the point of reverberation—not grim

Reality but reality grimly seen

And spoken in paradisal parlance new

And in any case never grim, the human grim

That is part of the indifference of the eye

Indifferent to what it sees. The tink-tonk

Of the rain in the spout is not a substitute.

It is of the essence not yet well perceived.

XV

He preserves himself against the repugnant rain

By an instinct for a rainless land, the self

Of his self, come at upon wide delvings of wings.

The instinct for heaven had its counterpart:

The instinct for earth, for New Haven, for his room,

The gay tournamonde as of a single world

In which he is and as and is are one.

For its counterpart a kind of counterpoint

Irked the wet wallows of the water-spout.

The rain kept falling loudly in the trees

And on the ground. The hibernal dark that hung

In primavera, the shadow of bare rock,

Becomes the rock of autumn, glittering,

Ponderable source of each imponderable,

The weight we lift with the finger of a dream,

The heaviness we lighten by light will,

By the hand of desire, faint, sensitive, the soft

Touch and trouble of the touch of the actual hand.

XVI

Among time’s images, there is not one

Of this present, the venerable mask above

The dilapidation of dilapidations.

The oldest-newest day is the newest alone.

The oldest-newest night does not creak by,

With lanterns, like a celestial ancientness.