The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (17 page)

And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,

In which everything is meant for you

And nothing need be explained;

Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;

And east rushes west and west rushes down,

No matter. The grass is full

And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,

The whole of the wideness of night is for you,

A self that touches all edges,

You become a self that fills the four corners of night.

The red cat hides away in the fur-light

And there you are humped high, humped up,

You are humped higher and higher, black as stone—

You sit with your head like a carving in space

And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.

The deer and the dachshund are one.

Well, the gods grow out of the weather.

The people grow out of the weather;

The gods grow out of the people.

Encore, encore, encore les dieux…

The distance between the dark steeple

And cobble ten thousand and three

Is more than a seven-foot inchworm

Could measure by moonlight in June.

Kiss, cats: for the deer and the dachshund

Are one. My window is twenty-nine three

And plenty of window for me.

The steeples are empty and so are the people,

There’s nothing whatever to see

Except Polacks that pass in their motors

And play concertinas all night.

They think that things are all right,

Since the deer and the dachshund are one.

Under the eglantine

The fretful concubine

Said, “Phooey! Phoo!”

She whispered, “Pfui!”

The demi-monde

On the mezzanine

Said, “Phooey!” too,

And a “Hey-de-i-do!”

The bee may have all sweet

For his honey-hive-o,

From the eglantine-o.

And the chandeliers are neat…

But their mignon, marblish glare!

We are cold, the parrots cried,

In a place so debonair.

The Johannisberger, Hans.

I love the metal grapes,

The rusty, battered shapes

Of the pears and of the cheese

And the window’s lemon light,

The very will of the nerves,

The crack across the pane,

The dirt along the sill.

There was the butcher’s hand.

He squeezed it and the blood

Spurted from between the fingers

And fell to the floor.

And then the body fell.

So afterward, at night,

The wind of Iceland and

The wind of Ceylon,

Meeting, gripped my mind,

Gripped it and grappled my thoughts.

The black wind of the sea

And the green wind

Whirled upon me.

The blood of the mind fell

To the floor. I slept.

Yet there was a man within me

Could have risen to the clouds,

Could have touched these winds,

Bent and broken them down,

Could have stood up sharply in the sky.

Where do you think, serpent,

Where do you lie, beneath snow,

And with eyes closed

Breathe in a crevice of earth?

In what camera do you taste

Poison, in what darkness set

Glittering scales and point

The tipping tongue?

And where is it, you, people,

Where is it that you think, baffled

By the trash of life,

Through winter’s meditative light?

In what crevice do you find

Forehead’s cold, spite of the eye

Seeing that which is refused,

Vengeful, shadowed by gestures

Of the life that you will not live,

Of days that will be wasted,

Of nights that will not be more than

Surly masks and destroyers?

(This is one of the thoughts

Of the mind that forms itself

Out of all the minds,

One of the songs of that dominance.)

Lights out. Shades up.

A look at the weather.

There has been a booming all the spring,

A refrain from the end of the boulevards.

This is the silence of night,

This is what could not be shaken,

Full of stars and the images of stars—

And that booming wintry and dull,

Like a tottering, a falling and an end,

Again and again, always there,

Massive drums and leaden trumpets,

Perceived by feeling instead of sense,

A revolution of things colliding.

Phrases! But of fear and of fate.

The night should be warm and fluters’ fortune

Should play in the trees when morning comes.

Once it was, the repose of night,

Was a place, strong place, in which to sleep.

It is shaken now. It will burst into flames,

Either now or tomorrow or the day after that.

I

A
.   A violent order is disorder; and

B
.   A great disorder is an order. These

Two things are one. (Pages of illustrations.)

II

If all the green of spring was blue, and it is;

If the flowers of South Africa were bright

On the tables of Connecticut, and they are;

If Englishmen lived without tea in Ceylon, and they do;

And if it all went on in an orderly way,

And it does; a law of inherent opposites,

Of essential unity, is as pleasant as port,

As pleasant as the brush-strokes of a bough,

An upper, particular bough in, say, Marchand.

III

After all the pretty contrast of life and death

Proves that these opposite things partake of one,

At least that was the theory, when bishops’ books

Resolved the world. We cannot go back to that.

The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,

If one may say so. And yet relation appears,

A small relation expanding like the shade

Of a cloud on sand, a shape on the side of a hill.

IV

A
.   Well, an old order is a violent one.

This proves nothing. Just one more truth, one more

Element in the immense disorder of truths.

B
.   It is April as I write. The wind

Is blowing after days of constant rain.

All this, of course, will come to summer soon.

But suppose the disorder of truths should ever come

To an order, most Plantagenet, most fixed…

A great disorder is an order. Now, A

And B are not like statuary, posed

For a vista in the Louvre. They are things chalked

On the sidewalk so that the pensive man may see.

V

The pensive man … He sees that eagle float

For which the intricate Alps are a single nest.

I

Cotton Mather died when I was a boy. The books

He read, all day, all night and all the nights,

Had got him nowhere. There was always the doubt,

That made him preach the louder, long for a church

In which his voice would roll its cadences,

After the sermon, to quiet that mouse in the wall.

II

Over wooden Boston, the sparkling Byzantine

Was everything that Cotton Mather was

And more. Yet the eminent thunder from the mouse,

The grinding in the arches of the church,

The plaster dropping, even dripping, down,

The mouse, the moss, the woman on the shore…

III

If the mouse should swallow the steeple, in its time…

It was a theologian’s needle, much

Too sharp for that. The shore, the sea, the sun,

Their brilliance through the lattices, crippled

The chandeliers, their morning glazes spread

In opal blobs along the walls and floor.

IV

Look down now, Cotton Mather, from the blank.

Was heaven where you thought? It must be there.

It must be where you think it is, in the light

On bed-clothes, in an apple on a plate.

It is the honey-comb of the seeing man.

It is the leaf the bird brings back to the boat.

V

Go, mouse, go nibble at Lenin in his tomb.

Are you not le plus pur, you ancient one?

Cut summer down to find the honey-comb.

You are one … Go hunt for honey in his hair.

You are one of the not-numberable mice

Searching all day, all night, for the honey-comb.

I

Tonight there are only the winter stars.

The sky is no longer a junk-shop,

Full of javelins and old fire-balls,

Triangles and the names of girls.

II

Over and over again you have said,

This great world, it divides itself in two,

One part is man, the other god:

Imagined man, the monkish mask, the face.

III

Tonight the stars are like a crowd of faces

Moving round the sky and singing

And laughing, a crowd of men,

Whose singing is a mode of laughter,

IV

Never angels, nothing of the dead,

Faces to people night’s brilliancy,

Laughing and singing and being happy,

Filling the imagination’s need.

V

In this rigid room, an intenser love,

Not toys, not thing-a-ma-jigs—

The reason can give nothing at all

Like the response to desire.

A sunny day’s complete Poussiniana

Divide it from itself. It is this or that

And it is not.

               By metaphor you paint

A thing. Thus, the pineapple was a leather fruit,

A fruit for pewter, thorned and palmed and blue,

To be served by men of ice.

                                        The senses paint

By metaphor. The juice was fragranter

Than wettest cinnamon. It was cribled pears

Dripping a morning sap.

                                        The truth must be

That you do not see, you experience, you feel,

That the buxom eye brings merely its element

To the total thing, a shapeless giant forced

Upward.

               Green were the curls upon that head.

Sure enough, moving, the thunder became men,

Ten thousand, men hewn and tumbling,

Mobs of ten thousand, clashing together,

This way and that.

Slowly, one man, savager than the rest,

Rose up, tallest, in the black sun,

Stood up straight in the air, struck off

The clutch of the others.

And, according to the composer, this butcher,

Held in his hand the suave egg-diamond

That had flashed (like vicious music that ends

In transparent accords).

It would have been better, the time conceived,

To have had him holding—what?

His arm would be trembling, he would be weak,

Even though he shouted.

The sky would be full of bodies like wood.

There would have been the cries of the dead

And the living would be speaking,

As a self that lives on itself.

It would have been better for his hands

To be convulsed, to have remained the hands

Of one wilder than the rest (like music blunted,

Yet the sound of that).

That’s the down-town frieze,

Principally the church steeple,

A black line beside a white line;

And the stack of the electric plant,

A black line drawn on flat air.

It is a morbid light

In which they stand,

Like an electric lamp

On a page of Euclid.

In this light a man is a result,

A demonstration, and a woman,

Without rose and without violet,

The shadows that are absent from Euclid,

Is not a woman for a man.

The paper is whiter

For these black lines.

It glares beneath the webs

Of wire, the designs of ink,

The planes that ought to have genius,

The volumes like marble ruins

Outlined and having alphabetical

Notations and footnotes.

The paper is whiter.

The men have no shadows

And the women have only one side.

One’s grand flights, one’s Sunday baths,

One’s tootings at the weddings of the soul

Occur as they occur. So bluish clouds

Occurred above the empty house and the leaves

Of the rhododendrons rattled their gold,

As if someone lived there. Such floods of white

Came bursting from the clouds. So the wind

Threw its contorted strength around the sky.

Could you have said the bluejay suddenly

Would swoop to earth? It is a wheel, the rays

Around the sun. The wheel survives the myths.

The fire eye in the clouds survives the gods.

To think of a dove with an eye of grenadine

And pines that are cornets, so it occurs,

And a little island full of geese and stars:

It may be that the ignorant man, alone,

Has any chance to mate his life with life

That is the sensual, pearly spouse, the life

That is fluent in even the wintriest bronze.