The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (41 page)

Yet the absence of the imagination had

Itself to be imagined. The great pond,

The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,

Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,

The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this

Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,

Required, as a necessity requires.

Our divinations,

Mechanisms of angelic thought,

The means of prophecy,

Alert us most

At evening’s one star

And its pastoral text,

When the establishments

Of wind and light and cloud

Await an arrival,

A reader of the text,

A reader without a body,

Who reads quietly:

“Horrid figures of Medusa,

These accents explicate

The sparkling fall of night

On Europe, to the last Alp,

And the sheeted Atlantic.

These are not banlieus

Lacking men of stone,

In a well-rosed two-light

Of their own.

I am the archangel of evening and praise

This one star’s blaze.

Suppose it was a drop of blood…

So much guilt lies buried

Beneath the innocence

Of autumn days.”

Weaker and weaker, the sunlight falls

In the afternoon. The proud and the strong

Have departed.

Those that are left are the unaccomplished,

The finally human,

Natives of a dwindled sphere.

Their indigence is an indigence

That is an indigence of the light,

A stellar pallor that hangs on the threads.

Little by little, the poverty

Of autumnal space becomes

A look, a few words spoken.

Each person completely touches us

With what he is and as he is,

In the stale grandeur of annihilation.

The leaves on the macadam make a noise—

    How soft the grass on which the desired

    Reclines in the temperature of heaven—

Like tales that were told the day before yesterday—

    Sleek in a natural nakedness,

    She attends the tintinnabula—

And the wind sways like a great thing tottering—

    Of birds called up by more than the sun,

    Birds of more wit, that substitute—

Which suddenly is all dissolved and gone—

    Their intelligible twittering

    For unintelligible thought.

And yet this end and this beginning are one,

    And one last look at the ducks is a look

    At lucent children round her in a ring.

Silence is a shape that has passed.

Otu-bre’s lion-roses have turned to paper

And the shadows of the trees

Are like wrecked umbrellas.

The effete vocabulary of summer

No longer says anything.

The brown at the bottom of red

The orange far down in yellow,

Are falsifications from a sun

In a minor, without heat,

In a constant secondariness,

A turning down toward finality—

Except that a green plant glares, as you look

At the legend of the maroon and olive forest,

Glares, outside of the legend, with the barbarous green

Of the harsh reality of which it is part.

Weight him down, O side-stars, with the great weightings of the end.

Seal him there. He looked in a glass of the earth and thought he lived in it.

Now, he brings all that he saw into the earth, to the waiting parent.

His crisp knowledge is devoured by her, beneath a dew.

Weight him, weight, weight him with the sleepiness of the moon.

It was only a glass because he looked in it. It was nothing he could be told.

It was a language he spoke, because he must, yet did not know.

It was a page he had found in the handbook of heartbreak.

The black fugatos are strumming the blacknesses of black…

The thick strings stutter the finial gutturals.

He does not lie there remembering the blue-jay, say the jay.

His grief is that his mother should feed on him, himself and what he saw,

In that distant chamber, a bearded queen, wicked in her dead light.

On the threshold of heaven, the figures in the street

Become the figures of heaven, the majestic movement

Of men growing small in the distances of space,

Singing, with smaller and still smaller sound,

Unintelligible absolution and an end—

The threshold, Rome, and that more merciful Rome

Beyond, the two alike in the make of the mind.

It is as if in a human dignity

Two parallels become one, a perspective, of which

Men are part both in the inch and in the mile.

How easily the blown banners change to wings…

Things dark on the horizons of perception,

Become accompaniments of fortune, but

Of the fortune of the spirit, beyond the eye,

Not of its sphere, and yet not far beyond,

The human end in the spirit’s greatest reach,

The extreme of the known in the presence of the extreme

Of the unknown. The newsboys’ muttering

Becomes another murmuring; the smell

Of medicine, a fragrantness not to be spoiled…

The bed, the books, the chair, the moving nuns,

The candle as it evades the sight, these are

The sources of happiness in the shape of Rome,

A shape within the ancient circles of shapes,

And these beneath the shadow of a shape

In a confusion on bed and books, a portent

On the chair, a moving transparence on the nuns,

A light on the candle tearing against the wick

To join a hovering excellence, to escape

From fire and be part only of that of which

Fire is the symbol: the celestial possible.

Speak to your pillow as if it was yourself.

Be orator but with an accurate tongue

And without eloquence, O, half-asleep,

Of the pity that is the memorial of this room,

So that we feel, in this illumined large,

The veritable small, so that each of us

Beholds himself in you, and hears his voice

In yours, master and commiserable man,

Intent on your particles of nether-do,

Your dozing in the depths of wakefulness,

In the warmth of your bed, at the edge of your chair, alive

Yet living in two worlds, impenitent

As to one, and, as to one, most penitent,

Impatient for the grandeur that you need

In so much misery; and yet finding it

Only in misery, the afflatus of ruin,

Profound poetry of the poor and of the dead,

As in the last drop of the deepest blood,

As it falls from the heart and lies there to be seen,

Even as the blood of an empire, it might be,

For a citizen of heaven though still of Rome.

It is poverty’s speech that seeks us out the most

It is older than the oldest speech of Rome.

This is the tragic accent of the scene.

And you—it is you that speak it, without speech,

The loftiest syllables among loftiest things,

The one invulnerable man among

Crude captains, the naked majesty, if you like,

Of bird-nest arches and of rain-stained-vaults.

The sounds drift in. The buildings are remembered.

The life of the city never lets go, nor do you

Ever want it to. It is part of the life in your room.

Its domes are the architecture of your bed.

The bells keep on repeating solemn names

In choruses and choirs of choruses,

Unwilling that mercy should be a mystery

Of silence, that any solitude of sense

Should give you more than their peculiar chords

And reverberations clinging to whisper still.

It is a kind of total grandeur at the end,

With every visible thing enlarged and yet

No more than a bed, a chair and moving nuns,

The immensest theatre, the pillared porch,

The book and candle in your ambered room,

Total grandeur of a total edifice,

Chosen by an inquisitor of structures

For himself. He stops upon this threshold,

As if the design of all his words takes form

And frame from thinking and is realized.

March … Someone has walked across the snow,

Someone looking for he knows not what.

It is like a boat that has pulled away

From a shore at night and disappeared.

It is like a guitar left on a table

By a woman, who has forgotten it.

It is like the feeling of a man

Come back to see a certain house.

The four winds blow through the rustic arbor,

Under its mattresses of vines.

There it was, word for word,

The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed its oxygen,

Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.

It reminded him how he had needed

A place to go to in his own direction,

How he had recomposed the pines,

Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,

For the outlook that would be right,

Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:

The exact rock where his inexactnesses

Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,

Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,

Recognize his unique and solitary home.

I

The Constant Disquisition of the Wind

The sky seemed so small that winter day,

A dirty light on a lifeless world,

Contracted like a withered stick.

It was not the shadow of cloud and cold,

But a sense of the distance of the sun—

The shadow of a sense of his own,

A knowledge that the actual day

Was so much less. Only the wind

Seemed large and loud and high and strong.

And as he thought within the thought

Of the wind, not knowing that that thought

Was not his thought, nor anyone’s,

The appropriate image of himself,

So formed, became himself and he breathed

The breath of another nature as his own,

But only its momentary breath,

Outside of and beyond the dirty light,

That never could be animal,

A nature still without a shape,

Except his own—perhaps, his own

In a Sunday’s violent idleness.

II

The World Is Larger in Summer

He left half a shoulder and half a head

To recognize him in after time.

These marbles lay weathering in the grass

When the summer was over, when the change

Of summer and of the sun, the life

Of summer and of the sun, were gone.

He had said that everything possessed

The power to transform itself, or else,

And what meant more, to be transformed.

He discovered the colors of the moon

In a single spruce, when, suddenly,

The tree stood dazzling in the air

And blue broke on him from the sun,

A bullioned blue, a blue abulge,

Like daylight, with time’s bellishings,

And sensuous summer stood full-height.

The master of the spruce, himself,

Became transformed. But his mastery

Left only the fragments found in the grass,

From his project, as finally magnified.

I

There was an ease of mind that was like being alone in a boat at sea,

A boat carried forward by waves resembling the bright backs of rowers,

Gripping their oars, as if they were sure of the way to their destination,

Bending over and pulling themselves erect on the wooden handles,

Wet with water and sparkling in the one-ness of their motion.

The boat was built of stones that had lost their weight and being no longer heavy

Had left in them only a brilliance, of unaccustomed origin,

So that he that stood up in the boat leaning and looking before him

Did not pass like someone voyaging out of and beyond the familiar.

He belonged to the far-foreign departure of his vessel and was part of it,

Part of the speculum of fire on its prow, its symbol, whatever it was,

Part of the glass-like sides on which it glided over the salt-stained water,

As he traveled alone, like a man lured on by a syllable without any meaning,

A syllable of which he felt, with an appointed sureness,

That it contained the meaning into which he wanted to enter,

A meaning which, as he entered it, would shatter the boat and leave the oarsmen quiet

As at a point of central arrival, an instant moment, much or little,

Removed from any shore, from any man or woman, and needing none.