The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (9 page)

VIII

I know noble accents

And lucid, inescapable rhythms;

But I know, too,

That the blackbird is involved

In what I know.

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,

It marked the edge

Of one of many circles.

X

At the sight of blackbirds

Flying in a green light,

Even the bawds of euphony

Would cry out sharply.

XI

He rode over Connecticut

In a glass coach.

Once, a fear pierced him,

In that he mistook

The shadow of his equipage

For blackbirds.

XII

The river is moving.

The blackbird must be flying.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.

It was snowing

And it was going to snow.

The blackbird sat

In the cedar-limbs.

As the immense dew of Florida

Brings forth

The big-finned palm

And green vine angering for life,

As the immense dew of Florida

Brings forth hymn and hymn

From the beholder,

Beholding all these green sides

And gold sides of green sides,

And blessed mornings,

Meet for the eye of the young alligator,

And lightning colors

So, in me, come flinging

Forms, flames, and the flakes of flames.

The time of year has grown indifferent.

Mildew of summer and the deepening snow

Are both alike in the routine I know.

I am too dumbly in my being pent.

The wind attendant on the solstices

Blows on the shutters of the metropoles,

Stirring no poet in his sleep, and tolls

The grand ideas of the villages.

The malady of the quotidian.…

Perhaps, if winter once could penetrate

Through all its purples to the final slate,

Persisting bleakly in an icy haze,

One might in turn become less diffident,

Out of such mildew plucking neater mould

And spouting new orations of the cold.

One might. One might. But time will not relent.

Life contracts and death is expected,

As in a season of autumn.

The soldier falls.

He does not become a three-days personage,

Imposing his separation,

Calling for pomp.

Death is absolute and without memorial,

As in a season of autumn,

When the wind stops,

When the wind stops and, over the heavens,

The clouds go, nevertheless,

In their direction.

Hi! The creator too is blind,

Struggling toward his harmonious whole,

Rejecting intermediate parts,

Horrors and falsities and wrongs;

Incapable master of all force,

Too vague idealist, overwhelmed

By an afflatus that persists.

For this, then, we endure brief lives,

The evanescent symmetries

From that meticulous potter’s thumb.

The palais de justice of chambermaids

Tops the horizon with its colonnades.

If it were lost in Übermenschlichkeit,

Perhaps our wretched state would soon come right.

For somehow the brave dicta of its kings

Make more awry our faulty human things.

I

In that November off Tehuantepec,

The slopping of the sea grew still one night

And in the morning summer hued the deck

And made one think of rosy chocolate

And gilt umbrellas. Paradisal green

Gave suavity to the perplexed machine

Of ocean, which like limpid water lay.

Who, then, in that ambrosial latitude

Out of the light evolved the moving blooms,

Who, then, evolved the sea-blooms from the clouds

Diffusing balm in that Pacific calm?

C’était mon enfant, mon bijou, mon âme
.

The sea-clouds whitened far below the calm

And moved, as blooms move, in the swimming green

And in its watery radiance, while the hue

Of heaven in an antique reflection rolled

Round those flotillas. And sometimes the sea

Poured brilliant iris on the glistening blue.

II

In that November off Tehuantepec

The slopping of the sea grew still one night.

At breakfast jelly yellow streaked the deck

And made one think of chop-house chocolate

And sham umbrellas. And a sham-like green

Capped summer-seeming on the tense machine

Of ocean, which in sinister flatness lay.

Who, then, beheld the rising of the clouds

That strode submerged in that malevolent sheen,

Who saw the mortal massives of the blooms

Of water moving on the water-floor?

C’était mon frère du ciel, ma vie, mon or
.

The gongs rang loudly as the windy booms

Hoo-hooed it in the darkened ocean-blooms.

The gongs grew still. And then blue heaven spread

Its crystalline pendentives on the sea

And the macabre of the water-glooms

In an enormous undulation fled.

III

In that November off Tehuantepec,

The slopping of the sea grew still one night

And a pale silver patterned on the deck

And made one think of porcelain chocolate

And pied umbrellas. An uncertain green,

Piano-polished, held the tranced machine

Of ocean, as a prelude holds and holds.

Who, seeing silver petals of white blooms

Unfolding in the water, feeling sure

Of the milk within the saltiest spurge, heard, then,

The sea unfolding in the sunken clouds?

Oh! C’était mon extase et mon amour
.

So deeply sunken were they that the shrouds,

The shrouding shadows, made the petals black

Until the rolling heaven made them blue,

A blue beyond the rainy hyacinth,

And smiting the crevasses of the leaves

Deluged the ocean with a sapphire blue.

IV

In that November off Tehuantepec

The night-long slopping of the sea grew still.

A mallow morning dozed upon the deck

And made one think of musky chocolate

And frail umbrellas. A too-fluent green

Suggested malice in the dry machine

Of ocean, pondering dank stratagem.

Who then beheld the figures of the clouds

Like blooms secluded in the thick marine?

Like blooms? Like damasks that were shaken off

From the loosed girdles in the spangling must.

C’était ma foi, la nonchalance divine
.

The nakedness would rise and suddenly turn

Salt masks of beard and mouths of bellowing,

Would—But more suddenly the heaven rolled

Its bluest sea-clouds in the thinking green,

And the nakedness became the broadest blooms,

Mile-mallows that a mallow sun cajoled.

V

In that November off Tehuantepec

Night stilled the slopping of the sea. The day

Came, bowing and voluble, upon the deck,

Good clown.… One thought of Chinese chocolate

And large umbrellas. And a motley green

Followed the drift of the obese machine

Of ocean, perfected in indolence.

What pistache one, ingenious and droll,

Beheld the sovereign clouds as jugglery

And the sea as turquoise-turbaned Sambo, neat

At tossing saucers—cloudy-conjuring sea?

C’était mon esprit bâtard, l’ignominie
.

The sovereign clouds came clustering. The conch

Of loyal conjuration trumped. The wind

Of green blooms turning crisped the motley hue

To clearing opalescence. Then the sea

And heaven rolled as one and from the two

Came fresh transfigurings of freshest blue.

Capitán profundo, capitán geloso,

Ask us not to sing standing in the sun,

Hairy-backed and hump-armed,

Flat-ribbed and big-bagged.

There is no pith in music

Except in something false.

Bellissimo, pomposo,

Sing a song of serpent-kin,

Necks among the thousand leaves,

Tongues around the fruit.

Sing in clownish boots

Strapped and buckled bright.

Wear the breeches of a mask,

Coat half-flare and half galloon;

Wear a helmet without reason,

Tufted, tilted, twirled, and twisted.

Start the singing in a voice

Rougher than a grinding shale.

Hang a feather by your eye,

Nod and look a little sly.

This must be the vent of pity,

Deeper than a truer ditty

Of the real that wrenches,

Of the quick that’s wry.

I

The Whole World Including the Speaker

Why nag at the ideas of Hercules, Don Don?

Widen your sense. All things in the sun are sun.

II

The Whole World Excluding the Speaker

I found between moon-rising and moon-setting

The world was round. But not from my begetting.

III

Soupe Aux Perles

Health-o, when ginger and fromage bewitch

The vile antithesis of poor and rich.

IV

Soupe Sans Perles

I crossed in ’38 in the
Western Head
.

It depends which way you crossed, the tea-belle said.

V

Boston with a Note-book

Lean encyclopædists, inscribe an Iliad.

There’s a Weltanschauung of the penny pad.

VI

Boston without a Note-book

Let us erect in the Basin a lofty fountain.

Suckled on ponds, the spirit craves a watery mountain.

VII

Artist in Tropic

Of Phœbus Apothicaire the first beatitude:

Blessed, who is his nation’s multitude.

VIII

Artist in Arctic

And of Phoebus the Tailor the second saying goes:

Blessed, whose beard is cloak against the snows.

IX

Statue against a Clear Sky

Ashen man on ashen cliff above the salt halloo,

O ashen admiral of the hale, hard blue.…

X

Statue against a Cloudy Sky

Scaffolds and derricks rise from the reeds to the clouds

Meditating the will of men in formless crowds.

XI

Land of Locust

Patron and patriarch of couplets, walk

In fragrant leaves heat-heavy yet nimble in talk.

XII

Land of Pine and Marble

Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints

Of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.

XIII

The Male Nude

Dark cynic, strip and bathe and bask at will.

Without cap or strap, you are the cynic still.

XIV

The Female Nude

Ballatta dozed in the cool on a straw divan

At home, a bit like the slenderest courtesan.

XV

Scène Flétrie

The purple dress in autumn and the belfry breath

Hinted autumnal farewells of academic death.

XVI

Scène Fleurie

A perfect fruit in perfect atmosphere.

Nature as Pinakothek. Whist! Chanticleer.…

The moon is the mother of pathos and pity.

When, at the wearier end of November,

Her old light moves along the branches,

Feebly, slowly, depending upon them;

When the body of Jesus hangs in a pallor,

Humanly near, and the figure of Mary,

Touched on by hoar-frost, shrinks in a shelter

Made by the leaves, that have rotted and fallen;

When over the houses, a golden illusion

Brings back an earlier season of quiet

And quieting dreams in the sleepers in darkness—

The moon is the mother of pathos and pity.

I

If from the earth we came, it was an earth

That bore us as a part of all the things

It breeds and that was lewder than it is.

Our nature is her nature; Hence it comes,

Since by our nature we grow old, earth grows

The same. We parallel the mother’s death.

She walks an autumn ampler than the wind

Cries up for us and colder than the frost

Pricks in our spirits at the summer’s end,

And over the bare spaces of our skies

She sees a barer sky that does not bend.