The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (25 page)

To see nor, reverberating, eke out the mind

On peculiar horns, themselves eked out

By the spontaneous particulars of sound.

We do not say ourselves like that in poems.

We say ourselves in syllables that rise

From the floor, rising in speech we do not speak.

I

It was something to see that their white was different,

Sharp as white paint in the January sun;

Something to feel that they needed another yellow,

Less Aix than Stockholm, hardly a yellow at all,

A vibrancy not to be taken for granted, from

A sun in an almost colorless, cold heaven.

They had known that there was not even a common speech,

Palabra of a common man who did not exist.

Why should they not know they had everything of their own

As each had a particular woman and her touch?

After all, they knew that to be real each had

To find for himself his earth, his sky, his sea.

And the words for them and the colors that they possessed.

It was impossible to breathe at Durand-Ruel’s.

II

The flowering Judas grows from the belly or not at all.

The breast is covered with violets. It is a green leaf.

Spring is umbilical or else it is not spring.

Spring is the truth of spring or nothing, a waste, a fake.

These trees and their argentines, their dark-spiced branches,

Grow out of the spirit or they are fantastic dust.

The bud of the apple is desire, the down-falling gold,

The catbird’s gobble in the morning half-awake—

These are real only if I make them so. Whistle

For me, grow green for me and, as you whistle and grow green,

Intangible arrows quiver and stick in the skin

And I taste at the root of the tongue the unreal of what is real.

I

He was at Naples writing letters home

And, between his letters, reading paragraphs

On the sublime. Vesuvius had groaned

For a month. It was pleasant to be sitting there,

While the sultriest fulgurations, flickering,

Cast corners in the glass. He could describe

The terror of the sound because the sound

Was ancient. He tried to remember the phrases: pain

Audible at noon, pain torturing itself,

Pain killing pain on the very point of pain.

The volcano trembled in another ether,

As the body trembles at the end of life.

It was almost time for lunch. Pain is human.

There were roses in the cool café. His book

Made sure of the most correct catastrophe.

Except for us, Vesuvius might consume

In solid fire the utmost earth and know

No pain (ignoring the cocks that crow us up

To die). This is a part of the sublime

From which we shrink. And yet, except for us,

The total past felt nothing when destroyed.

II

At a town in which acacias grew, he lay

On his balcony at night. Warblings became

Too dark, too far, too much the accents of

Afflicted sleep, too much the syllables

That would form themselves, in time, and communicate

The intelligence of his despair, express

What meditation never quite achieved.

The moon rose up as if it had escaped

His meditation. It evaded his mind.

It was part of a supremacy always

Above him. The moon was always free from him,

As night was free from him. The shadow touched

Or merely seemed to touch him as he spoke

A kind of elegy he found in space:

It is pain that is indifferent to the sky

In spite of the yellow of the acacias, the scent

Of them in the air still hanging heavily

In the hoary-hanging night. It does not regard

This freedom, this supremacy, and in

Its own hallucination never sees

How that which rejects it saves it in the end.

III

His firm stanzas hang like hives in hell

Or what hell was, since now both heaven and hell

Are one, and here, O terra infidel.

The fault lies with an over-human god,

Who by sympathy has made himself a man

And is not to be distinguished, when we cry

Because we suffer, our oldest parent, peer

Of the populace of the heart, the reddest lord,

Who has gone before us in experience.

If only he would not pity us so much,

Weaken our fate, relieve us of woe both great

And small, a constant fellow of destiny,

A too, too human god, self-pity’s kin

And uncourageous genesis … It seems

As if the health of the world might be enough.

It seems as if the honey of common summer

Might be enough, as if the golden combs

Were part of a sustenance itself enough,

As if hell, so modified, had disappeared,

As if pain, no longer satanic mimicry,

Could be borne, as if we were sure to find our way.

IV

Livre de Toutes Sortes de Fleurs d’après Nature.

All sorts of flowers. That’s the sentimentalist.

When B. sat down at the piano and made

A transparence in which we heard music, made music,

In which we heard transparent sounds, did he play

All sorts of notes? Or did he play only one

In an ecstasy of its associates,

Variations in the tones of a single sound,

The last, or sounds so single they seemed one?

And then that Spaniard of the rose, itself

Hot-hooded and dark-blooded, rescued the rose

From nature, each time he saw it, making it,

As he saw it, exist in his own especial eye.

Can we conceive of him as rescuing less,

As muffing the mistress for her several maids,

As foregoing the nakedest passion for barefoot

Philandering? … The genius of misfortune

Is not a sentimentalist. He is

That evil, that evil in the self, from which

In desperate hallow, rugged gesture, fault

Falls out on everything: the genius of

The mind, which is our being, wrong and wrong,

The genius of the body, which is our world,

Spent in the false engagements of the mind.

V

Softly let all true sympathizers come,

Without the inventions of sorrow or the sob

Beyond invention. Within what we permit,

Within the actual, the warm, the near,

So great a unity, that it is bliss,

Ties us to those we love. For this familiar,

This brother even in the father’s eye,

This brother half-spoken in the mother’s throat

And these regalia, these things disclosed,

These nebulous brilliancies in the smallest look

Of the being’s deepest darling, we forego

Lament, willingly forfeit the ai-ai

Of parades in the obscurer selvages.

Be near me, come closer, touch my hand, phrases

Compounded of dear relation, spoken twice,

Once by the lips, once by the services

Of central sense, these minutiae mean more

Than clouds, benevolences, distant heads.

These are within what we permit, in-bar

Exquisite in poverty against the suns

Of ex-bar, in-bar retaining attributes

With which we vested, once, the golden forms

And the damasked memory of the golden forms

And ex-bar’s flower and fire of the festivals

Of the damasked memory of the golden forms,

Before we were wholly human and knew ourselves.

VI

The sun, in clownish yellow, but not a clown,

Brings the day to perfection and then fails. He dwells

In a consummate prime, yet still desires

A further consummation. For the lunar month

He makes the tenderest research, intent

On a transmutation which, when seen, appears

To be askew. And space is filled with his

Rejected years. A big bird pecks at him

For food. The big bird’s bony appetite

Is as insatiable as the sun’s. The bird

Rose from an imperfection of its own

To feed on the yellow bloom of the yellow fruit

Dropped down from turquoise leaves. In the landscape of

The sun, its grossest appetite becomes less gross,

Yet, when corrected, has its curious lapses,

Its glitters, its divinations of serene

Indulgence out of all celestial sight.

The sun is the country wherever he is. The bird

In the brightest landscape downwardly revolves

Disdaining each astringent ripening,

Evading the point of redness, not content

To repose in an hour or season or long era

Of the country colors crowding against it, since

The yellow grassman’s mind is still immense,

Still promises perfections cast away.

VII

How red the rose that is the soldier’s wound,

The wounds of many soldiers, the wounds of all

The soldiers that have fallen, red in blood,

The soldier of time grown deathless in great size.

A mountain in which no ease is ever found,

Unless indifference to deeper death

Is ease, stands in the dark, a shadows’ hill,

And there the soldier of time has deathless rest.

Concentric circles of shadows, motionless

Of their own part, yet moving on the wind,

Form mystical convolutions in the sleep

Of time’s red soldier deathless on his bed.

The shadows of his fellows ring him round

In the high night, the summer breathes for them

Its fragrance, a heavy somnolence, and for him,

For the soldier of time, it breathes a summer sleep,

In which his wound is good because life was.

No part of him was ever part of death.

A woman smoothes her forehead with her hand

And the soldier of time lies calm beneath that stroke.

VIII

The death of Satan was a tragedy

For the imagination. A capital

Negation destroyed him in his tenement

And, with him, many blue phenomena.

It was not the end he had foreseen. He knew

That his revenge created filial

Revenges. And negation was eccentric.

It had nothing of the Julian thunder-cloud:

The assassin flash and rumble … He was denied.

Phantoms, what have you left? What underground?

What place in which to be is not enough

To be? You go, poor phantoms, without place

Like silver in the sheathing of the sight,

As the eye closes … How cold the vacancy

When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist

First sees reality. The mortal no

Has its emptiness and tragic expirations.

The tragedy, however, may have begun,

Again, in the imagination’s new beginning,

In the yes of the realist spoken because he must

Say yes, spoken because under every no

Lay a passion for yes that had never been broken.

IX

Panic in the face of the moon—round effendi

Or the phosphored sleep in which he walks abroad

Or the majolica dish heaped up with phosphored fruit

That he sends ahead, out of the goodness of his heart,

To anyone that comes—panic, because

The moon is no longer these nor anything

And nothing is left but comic ugliness

Or a lustred nothingness. Effendi, he

That has lost the folly of the moon becomes

The prince of the proverbs of pure poverty.

To lose sensibility, to see what one sees,

As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift,

To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone,

As if the paradise of meaning ceased

To be paradise, it is this to be destitute.

This is the sky divested of its fountains.

Here in the west indifferent crickets chant

Through our indifferent crises. Yet we require

Another chant, an incantation, as in

Another and later genesis, music

That buffets the shapes of its possible halcyon

Against the haggardie … A loud, large water

Bubbles up in the night and drowns the crickets’ sound.

It is a declaration, a primitive ecstasy,

Truth’s favors sonorously exhibited.

X

He had studied the nostalgias. In these

He sought the most grossly maternal, the creature

Who most fecundly assuaged him, the softest

Woman with a vague moustache and not the mauve

Maman
. His anima liked its animal

And liked it unsubjugated, so that home

Was a return to birth, a being born

Again in the savagest severity,

Desiring fiercely, the child of a mother fierce

In his body, fiercer in his mind, merciless

To accomplish the truth in his intelligence.

It is true there were other mothers, singular

In form, lovers of heaven and earth, she-wolves

And forest tigresses and women mixed

With the sea. These were fantastic. There were homes

Like things submerged with their englutted sounds,

That were never wholly still. The softest woman,

Because she is as she was, reality,

The gross, the fecund, proved him against the touch

Of impersonal pain. Reality explained.

It was the last nostalgia: that he

Should understand. That he might suffer or that

He might die was the innocence of living, if life

Itself was innocent. To say that it was

Disentangled him from sleek ensolacings.