The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (42 page)

II

The metaphor stirred his fear. The object with which he was compared

Was beyond his recognizing. By this he knew that likeness of him extended

Only a little way, and not beyond, unless between himself

And things beyond resemblance there was this and that intended to be recognized,

The this and that in the enclosures of hypotheses

On which men speculated in summer when they were half asleep.

What self, for example, did he contain that had not yet been loosed,

Snarling in him for discovery as his attentions spread,

As if all his hereditary lights were suddenly increased

By an access of color, a new and unobserved, slight dithering,

The smallest lamp, which added its puissant flick to which he gave

A name and privilege over the ordinary of his commonplace—

A flick which added to what was real and its vocabulary,

The way some first thing coming into Northern trees

Adds to them the whole vocabulary of the South,

The way the earliest single light in the evening sky, in spring,

Creates a fresh universe out of nothingness by adding itself,

The way a look or a touch reveals its unexpected magnitudes.

Among the more irritating minor ideas

Of Mr. Homburg during his visits home

To Concord, at the edge of things, was this:

To think away the grass, the trees, the clouds,

Not to transform them into other things,

Is only what the sun does every day,

Until we say to ourselves that there may be

A pensive nature, a mechanical

And slightly detestable
operandum
, free

From man’s ghost, larger and yet a little like,

Without his literature and without his gods…

No doubt we live beyond ourselves in air,

In an element that does not do for us,

So well, that which we do for ourselves, too big,

A thing not planned for imagery or belief,

Not one of the masculine myths we used to make,

A transparency through which the swallow weaves,

Without any form or any sense of form,

What we know in what we see, what we feel in what

We hear, what we are, beyond mystic disputation,

In the tumult of integrations out of the sky,

And what we think, a breathing like the wind,

A moving part of a motion, a discovery

Part of a discovery, a change part of a change,

A sharing of color and being part of it.

The afternoon is visibly a source,

Too wide, too irised, to be more than calm,

Too much like thinking to be less than thought,

Obscurest parent, obscurest patriarch,

A daily majesty of meditation,

That comes and goes in silences of its own.

We think, then, as the sun shines or does not.

We think as wind skitters on a pond in a field

Or we put mantles on our words because

The same wind, rising and rising, makes a sound

Like the last muting of winter as it ends.

A new scholar replacing an older one reflects

A moment on this fantasia. He seeks

For a human that can be accounted for.

The spirit comes from the body of the world,

Or so Mr. Homburg thought: the body of a world

Whose blunt laws make an affectation of mind,

The mannerism of nature caught in a glass

And there become a spirit’s mannerism,

A glass aswarm with things going as far as they can.

Rou-cou spoke the dove,

Like the sooth lord of sorrow,

Of sooth love and sorrow,

And a hail-bow, hail-bow,

To this morrow.

She lay upon the roof,

A little wet of wing and woe,

And she rou-ed there,

Softly she piped among the suns

And their ordinary glare,

The sun of five, the sun of six,

Their ordinariness,

And the ordinariness of seven,

Which she accepted,

Like a fixed heaven,

Not subject to change…

Day’s invisible beginner,

The lord of love and of sooth sorrow,

Lay on the roof

And made much within her.

J’ai passé trop de temps à travailler mon violon, à voyager. Mais l’exercice essentiel du compositeur—la méditation—rien ne l’a jamais suspendu en moi … Je vis un rêve permanent, qui ne s’arrête ni nuit ni jour
.

GEORGES ENESCO

Is it Ulysses that approaches from the east,

The interminable adventurer? The trees are mended.

That winter is washed away. Someone is moving

On the horizon and lifting himself up above it.

A form of fire approaches the cretonnes of Penelope,

Whose mere savage presence awakens the world in which she dwells.

She has composed, so long, a self with which to welcome him,

Companion to his self for her, which she imagined,

Two in a deep-founded sheltering, friend and dear friend.

The trees had been mended, as an essential exercise

In an inhuman meditation, larger than her own.

No winds like dogs watched over her at night.

She wanted nothing he could not bring her by coming alone.

She wanted no fetchings. His arms would be her necklace

And her belt, the final fortune of their desire.

But was it Ulysses? Or was it only the warmth of the sun

On her pillow? The thought kept beating in her like her heart.

The two kept beating together. It was only day.

It was Ulysses and it was not. Yet they had met,

Friend and dear friend and a planet’s encouragement.

The barbarous strength within her would never fail.

She would talk a little to herself as she combed her hair,

Repeating his name with its patient syllables,

Never forgetting him that kept coming constantly so near.

It makes so little difference, at so much more

Than seventy, where one looks, one has been there before.

Wood-smoke rises through trees, is caught in an upper flow

Of air and whirled away. But it has been often so.

The trees have a look as if they bore sad names

And kept saying over and over one same, same thing,

In a kind of uproar, because an opposite, a contradiction,

Has enraged them and made them want to talk it down.

What opposite? Could it be that yellow patch, the side

Of a house, that makes one think the house is laughing;

Or these—escent—issant pre-personae: first fly,

A comic infanta among the tragic drapings,

Babyishness of forsythia, a snatch of belief,

The spook and makings of the nude magnolia?

…Wanderer, this is the pre-history of February.

The life of the poem in the mind has not yet begun.

You were not born yet when the trees were crystal

Nor are you now, in this wakefulness inside a sleep.

His place, as he sat and as he thought, was not

In anything that he constructed, so frail,

So barely lit, so shadowed over and naught,

As, for example, a world in which, like snow,

He became an inhabitant, obedient

To gallant notions on the part of cold.

It was here. This was the setting and the time

Of year. Here in his house and in his room,

In his chair, the most tranquil thought grew peaked

And the oldest and the warmest heart was cut

By gallant notions on the part of night—

Both late and alone, above the crickets’ chords,

Babbling, each one, the uniqueness of its sound.

There was no fury in transcendent forms.

But his actual candle blazed with artifice.

Light the first light of evening, as in a room

In which we rest and, for small reason, think

The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.

It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,

Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl

Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,

A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.

We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,

A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.

We say God and the imagination are one…

How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,

We make a dwelling in the evening air,

In which being there together is enough.

I

Seventy Years Later

It is an illusion that we were ever alive,

Lived in the houses of mothers, arranged ourselves

By our own motions in a freedom of air.

Regard the freedom of seventy years ago.

It is no longer air. The houses still stand,

Though they are rigid in rigid emptiness.

Even our shadows, their shadows, no longer remain.

The lives these lived in the mind are at an end.

They never were … The sounds of the guitar

Were not and are not. Absurd. The words spoken

Were not and are not. It is not to be believed.

The meeting at noon at the edge of the field seems like

An invention, an embrace between one desperate clod

And another in a fantastic consciousness,

In a queer assertion of humanity:

A theorem proposed between the two—

Two figures in a nature of the sun,

In the sun’s design of its own happiness,

As if nothingness contained a métier,

A vital assumption, an impermanence

In its permanent cold, an illusion so desired

That the green leaves came and covered the high rock,

That the lilacs came and bloomed, like a blindness cleaned,

Exclaiming bright sight, as it was satisfied,

In a birth of sight. The blooming and the musk

Were being alive, an incessant being alive,

A particular of being, that gross universe.

II

The Poem as Icon

It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves.

We must be cured of it by a cure of the ground

Or a cure of ourselves, that is equal to a cure

Of the ground, a cure beyond forgetfulness.

And yet the leaves, if they broke into bud,

If they broke into bloom, if they bore fruit,

And if we ate the incipient colorings

Of their fresh culls might be a cure of the ground.

The fiction of the leaves is the icon

Of the poem, the figuration of blessedness,

And the icon is the man. The pearled chaplet of spring,

The magnum wreath of summer, time’s autumn snood,

Its copy of the sun, these cover the rock.

These leaves are the poem, the icon and the man.

These are a cure of the ground and of ourselves,

In the predicate that there is nothing else.

They bud and bloom and bear their fruit without change.

They are more than leaves that cover the barren rock

They bud the whitest eye, the pallidest sprout,

New senses in the engenderings of sense,

The desire to be at the end of distances,

The body quickened and the mind in root.

They bloom as a man loves, as he lives in love.

They bear their fruit so that the year is known,

As if its understanding was brown skin,

The honey in its pulp, the final found,

The plenty of the year and of the world.

In this plenty, the poem makes meanings of the rock,

Of such mixed motion and such imagery

That its barrenness becomes a thousand things

And so exists no more. This is the cure

Of leaves and of the ground and of ourselves.

His words are both the icon and the man.

III

Forms of the Rock in a Night-Hymn

The rock is the gray particular of man’s life,

The stone from which he rises, up—and—ho,

The step to the bleaker depths of his descents…

The rock is the stern particular of the air,

The mirror of the planets, one by one,

But through man’s eye, their silent rhapsodist,

Turquoise the rock, at odious evening bright

With redness that sticks fast to evil dreams;

The difficult rightness of half-risen day.

The rock is the habitation of the whole,

Its strength and measure, that which is near, point A

In a perspective that begins again

At B: the origin of the mango’s rind.

It is the rock where tranquil must adduce

Its tranquil self, the main of things, the mind,

The starting point of the human and the end,

That in which space itself is contained, the gate

To the enclosure, day, the things illumined