The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (4 page)

Could Crispin stem verboseness in the sea,

The old age of a watery realist,

Triton, dissolved in shifting diaphanes

Of blue and green? A wordy, watery age

That whispered to the sun’s compassion, made

A convocation, nightly, of the sea-stars,

And on the clopping foot-ways of the moon

Lay grovelling. Triton incomplicate with that

Which made him Triton, nothing left of him,

Except in faint, memorial gesturings,

That were like arms and shoulders in the waves,

Here, something in the rise and fall of wind

That seemed hallucinating horn, and here,

A sunken voice, both of remembering

And of forgetfulness, in alternate strain.

Just so an ancient Crispin was dissolved.

The valet in the tempest was annulled.

Bordeaux to Yucatan, Havana next,

And then to Carolina. Simple jaunt.

Crispin, merest minuscule in the gales,

Dejected his manner to the turbulence.

The salt hung on his spirit like a frost,

The dead brine melted in him like a dew

Of winter, until nothing of himself

Remained, except some starker, barer self

In a starker, barer world, in which the sun

Was not the sun because it never shone

With bland complaisance on pale parasols,

Beetled, in chapels, on the chaste bouquets.

Against his pipping sounds a trumpet cried

Celestial sneering boisterously. Crispin

Became an introspective voyager.

Here was the veritable ding an sich, at last,

Crispin confronting it, a vocable thing,

But with a speech belched out of hoary darks

Noway resembling his, a visible thing,

And excepting negligible Triton, free

From the unavoidable shadow of himself

That lay elsewhere around him. Severance

Was clear. The last distortion of romance

Forsook the insatiable egotist. The sea

Severs not only lands but also selves.

Here was no help before reality.

Crispin beheld and Crispin was made new.

The imagination, here, could not evade,

In poems of plums, the strict austerity

Of one vast, subjugating, final tone.

The drenching of stale lives no more fell down.

What was this gaudy, gusty panoply?

Out of what swift destruction did it spring?

It was caparison of wind and cloud

And something given to make whole among

The ruses that were shattered by the large.

II

Concerning the Thunderstorms of Yucatan

In Yucatan, the Maya sonneteers

Of the Caribbean amphitheatre,

In spite of hawk and falcon, green toucan

And jay, still to the night-bird made their plea,

As if raspberry tanagers in palms,

High up in orange air, were barbarous.

But Crispin was too destitute to find

In any commonplace the sought-for aid.

He was a man made vivid by the sea,

A man come out of luminous traversing,

Much trumpeted, made desperately clear,

Fresh from discoveries of tidal skies,

To whom oracular rockings gave no rest.

Into a savage color he went on.

How greatly had he grown in his demesne,

This auditor of insects! He that saw

The stride of vanishing autumn in a park

By way of decorous melancholy; he

That wrote his couplet yearly to the spring,

As dissertation of profound delight,

Stopping, on voyage, in a land of snakes,

Found his vicissitudes had much enlarged

His apprehension, made him intricate

In moody rucks, and difficult and strange

In all desires, his destitution’s mark.

He was in this as other freemen are,

Sonorous nutshells rattling inwardly.

His violence was for aggrandizement

And not for stupor, such as music makes

For sleepers halfway waking. He perceived

That coolness for his heat came suddenly,

And only, in the fables that he scrawled

With his own quill, in its indigenous dew,

Of an æsthetic tough, diverse, untamed,

Incredible to prudes, the mint of dirt,

Green barbarism turning paradigm.

Crispin foresaw a curious promenade

Or, nobler, sensed an elemental fate,

And elemental potencies and pangs,

And beautiful barenesses as yet unseen,

Making the most of savagery of palms,

Of moonlight on the thick, cadaverous bloom

That yuccas breed, and of the panther’s tread.

The fabulous and its intrinsic verse

Came like two spirits parleying, adorned

In radiance from the Atlantic coign,

For Crispin and his quill to catechize.

But they came parleying of such an earth,

So thick with sides and jagged lops of green,

So intertwined with serpent-kin encoiled

Among the purple tufts, the scarlet crowns,

Scenting the jungle in their refuges,

So streaked with yellow, blue and green and red

In beak and bud and fruity gobbet-skins,

That earth was like a jostling festival

Of seeds grown fat, too juicily opulent,

Expanding in the gold’s maternal warmth.

So much for that. The affectionate emigrant found

A new reality in parrot-squawks.

Yet let that trifle pass. Now, as this odd

Discoverer walked through the harbor streets

Inspecting the cabildo, the façade

Of the cathedral, making notes, he heard

A rumbling, west of Mexico, it seemed,

Approaching like a gasconade of drums.

The white cabildo darkened, the façade,

As sullen as the sky, was swallowed up

In swift, successive shadows, dolefully.

The rumbling broadened as it fell. The wind,

Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry,

Came bluntly thundering, more terrible

Than the revenge of music on bassoons.

Gesticulating lightning, mystical,

Made pallid flitter. Crispin, here, took flight.

An annotator has his scruples, too.

He knelt in the cathedral with the rest,

This connoisseur of elemental fate,

Aware of exquisite thought. The storm was one

Of many proclamations of the kind,

Proclaiming something harsher than he learned

From hearing signboards whimper in cold nights

Or seeing the midsummer artifice

Of heat upon his pane. This was the span

Of force, the quintessential fact, the note

Of Vulcan, that a valet seeks to own,

The thing that makes him envious in phrase.

And while the torrent on the roof still droned

He felt the Andean breath. His mind was free

And more than free, elate, intent, profound

And studious of a self possessing him,

That was not in him in the crusty town

From which he sailed. Beyond him, westward, lay

The mountainous ridges, purple balustrades,

In which the thunder, lapsing in its clap,

Let down gigantic quavers of its voice,

For Crispin to vociferate again.

III

Approaching Carolina

The book of moonlight is not written yet

Nor half begun, but, when it is, leave room

For Crispin, fagot in the lunar fire,

Who, in the hubbub of his pilgrimage

Through sweating changes, never could forget

That wakefulness or meditating sleep,

In which the sulky strophes willingly

Bore up, in time, the somnolent, deep songs.

Leave room, therefore, in that unwritten book

For the legendary moonlight that once burned

In Crispin’s mind above a continent.

America was always north to him,

A northern west or western north, but north,

And thereby polar, polar-purple, chilled

And lank, rising and slumping from a sea

Of hardy foam, receding flatly, spread

In endless ledges, glittering, submerged

And cold in a boreal mistiness of the moon.

The spring came there in clinking pannicles

Of half-dissolving frost, the summer came,

If ever, whisked and wet, not ripening,

Before the winter’s vacancy returned.

The myrtle, if the myrtle ever bloomed,

Was like a glacial pink upon the air.

The green palmettoes in crepuscular ice

Clipped frigidly blue-black meridians,

Morose chiaroscuro, gauntly drawn.

How many poems he denied himself

In his observant progress, lesser things

Than the relentless contact he desired;

How many sea-masks he ignored; what sounds

He shut out from his tempering ear; what thoughts,

Like jades affecting the sequestered bride;

And what descants, he sent to banishment!

Perhaps the Arctic moonlight really gave

The liaison, the blissful liaison,

Between himself and his environment,

Which was, and if, chief motive, first delight,

For him, and not for him alone. It seemed

Illusive, faint, more mist than moon, perverse,

Wrong as a divagation to Peking,

To him that postulated as his theme

The vulgar, as his theme and hymn and flight,

A passionately niggling nightingale.

Moonlight was an evasion, or, if not,

A minor meeting, facile, delicate.

Thus he conceived his voyaging to be

An up and down between two elements,

A fluctuating between sun and moon,

A sally into gold and crimson forms,

As on this voyage, out of goblinry,

And then retirement like a turning back

And sinking down to the indulgences

That in the moonlight have their habitude.

But let these backward lapses, if they would,

Grind their seductions on him, Crispin knew

It was a flourishing tropic he required

For his refreshment, an abundant zone,

Prickly and obdurate, dense, harmonious,

Yet with a harmony not rarefied

Nor fined for the inhibited instruments

Of over-civil stops. And thus he tossed

Between a Carolina of old time,

A little juvenile, an ancient whim,

And the visible, circumspect presentment drawn

From what he saw across his vessel’s prow.

He came. The poetic hero without palms

Or jugglery, without regalia.

And as he came he saw that it was spring,

A time abhorrent to the nihilist

Or searcher for the fecund minimum.

The moonlight fiction disappeared. The spring,

Although contending featly in its veils,

Irised in dew and early fragrancies,

Was gemmy marionette to him that sought

A sinewy nakedness. A river bore

The vessel inward. Tilting up his nose,

He inhaled the rancid rosin, burly smells

Of dampened lumber, emanations blown

From warehouse doors, the gustiness of ropes,

Decays of sacks, and all the arrant stinks

That helped him round his rude aesthetic out.

He savored rankness like a sensualist.

He marked the marshy ground around the dock,

The crawling railroad spur, the rotten fence,

Curriculum for the marvelous sophomore.

It purified. It made him see how much

Of what he saw he never saw at all.

He gripped more closely the essential prose

As being, in a world so falsified,

The one integrity for him, the one

Discovery still possible to make,

To which all poems were incident, unless

That prose should wear a poem’s guise at last.

IV

The Idea of a Colony

Nota: his soil is man’s intelligence.

That’s better. That’s worth crossing seas to find.

Crispin in one laconic phrase laid bare

His cloudy drift and planned a colony.

Exit the mental moonlight, exit lex,

Rex and principium, exit the whole

Shebang. Exeunt omnes. Here was prose

More exquisite than any tumbling verse:

A still new continent in which to dwell.

What was the purpose of his pilgrimage,

Whatever shape it took in Crispin’s mind,

If not, when all is said, to drive away

The shadow of his fellows from the skies,

And, from their stale intelligence released,

To make a new intelligence prevail?

Hence the reverberations in the words

Of his first central hymns, the celebrants

Of rankest trivia, tests of the strength

Of his æsthetic, his philosophy,

The more invidious, the more desired:

The florist asking aid from cabbages,

The rich man going bare, the paladin

Afraid, the blind man as astronomer,

The appointed power unwielded from disdain.

His western voyage ended and began.

The torment of fastidious thought grew slack,

Another, still more bellicose, came on.

He, therefore, wrote his prolegomena,

And, being full of the caprice, inscribed

Commingled souvenirs and prophecies.

He made a singular collation. Thus:

The natives of the rain are rainy men.

Although they paint effulgent, azure lakes,

And April hillsides wooded white and pink,

Their azure has a cloudy edge, their white

And pink, the water bright that dogwood bears.

And in their music showering sounds intone.

On what strange froth does the gross Indian dote,

What Eden sapling gum, what honeyed gore,

What pulpy dram distilled of innocence,

That streaking gold should speak in him

Or bask within his images and words?

If these rude instances impeach themselves

By force of rudeness, let the principle

Be plain. For application Crispin strove,

Abhorring Turk as Esquimau, the lute

As the marimba, the magnolia as rose.