The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (30 page)

And fill the foliage with arrested peace,

Joy of such permanence, right ignorance

Of change still possible. Exile desire

For what is not. This is the barrenness

Of the fertile thing that can attain no more.

III

It is the natural tower of all the world,

The point of survey, green’s green apogee,

But a tower more precious than the view beyond,

A point of survey squatting like a throne,

Axis of everything, green’s apogee

And happiest folk-land, mostly marriage-hymns.

It is the mountain on which the tower stands,

It is the final mountain. Here the sun,

Sleepless, inhales his proper air, and rests.

This is the refuge that the end creates.

It is the old man standing on the tower,

Who reads no book. His ruddy ancientness

Absorbs the ruddy summer and is appeased,

By an understanding that fulfils his age,

By a feeling capable of nothing more.

IV

One of the limits of reality

Presents itself in Oley when the hay,

Baked through long days, is piled in mows. It is

A land too ripe for enigmas, too serene.

There the distant fails the clairvoyant eye

And the secondary senses of the ear

Swarm, not with secondary sounds, but choirs,

Not evocations but last choirs, last sounds

With nothing else compounded, carried full,

Pure rhetoric of a language without words.

Things stop in that direction and since they stop

The direction stops and we accept what is

As good. The utmost must be good and is

And is our fortune and honey hived in the trees

And mingling of colors at a festival.

V

One day enriches a year. One woman makes

The rest look down. One man becomes a race,

Lofty like him, like him perpetual.

Or do the other days enrich the one?

And is the queen humble as she seems to be,

The charitable majesty of her whole kin?

The bristling soldier, weather-foxed, who looms

In the sunshine is a filial form and one

Of the land’s children, easily born, its flesh,

Not fustian. The more than casual blue

Contains the year and other years and hymns

And people, without souvenir. The day

Enriches the year, not as embellishment.

Stripped of remembrance, it displays its strength—

The youth, the vital son, the heroic power.

VI

The rock cannot be broken. It is the truth.

It rises from land and sea and covers them.

It is a mountain half way green and then,

The other immeasurable half, such rock

As placid air becomes. But it is not

A hermit’s truth nor symbol in hermitage.

It is the visible rock, the audible,

The brilliant mercy of a sure repose,

On this present ground, the vividest repose,

Things certain sustaining us in certainty.

It is the rock of summer, the extreme,

A mountain luminous half way in bloom

And then half way in the extremest light

Of sapphires flashing from the central sky,

As if twelve princes sat before a king.

VII

Far in the woods they sang their unreal songs,

Secure. It was difficult to sing in face

Of the object. The singers had to avert themselves

Or else avert the object. Deep in the woods

They sang of summer in the common fields.

They sang desiring an object that was near,

In face of which desire no longer moved,

Nor made of itself that which it could not find…

Three times the concentred self takes hold, three times

The thrice concentred self, having possessed

The object, grips it in savage scrutiny,

Once to make captive, once to subjugate

Or yield to subjugation, once to proclaim

The meaning of the capture, this hard prize,

Fully made, fully apparent, fully found.

VIII

The trumpet of morning blows in the clouds and through

The sky. It is the visible announced,

It is the more than visible, the more

Than sharp, illustrious scene. The trumpet cries

This is the successor of the invisible.

This is its substitute in stratagems

Of the spirit. This, in sight and memory,

Must take its place, as what is possible

Replaces what is not. The resounding cry

Is like ten thousand tumblers tumbling down

To share the day. The trumpet supposes that

A mind exists, aware of division, aware

Of its cry as clarion, its diction’s way

As that of a personage in a multitude:

Man’s mind grown venerable in the unreal.

IX

Fly low, cock bright, and stop on a bean pole. Let

Your brown breast redden, while you wait for warmth.

With one eye watch the willow, motionless.

The gardener’s cat is dead, the gardener gone

And last year’s garden grows salacious weeds.

A complex of emotions falls apart,

In an abandoned spot. Soft, civil bird,

The decay that you regard: of the arranged

And of the spirit of the arranged,
douceurs
,

Tristesses
, the fund of life and death, suave bush

And polished beast, this complex falls apart.

And on your bean pole, it may be, you detect

Another complex of other emotions, not

So soft, so civil, and you make a sound,

Which is not part of the listener’s own sense.

X

The personae of summer play the characters

Of an inhuman author, who meditates

With the gold bugs, in blue meadows, late at night.

He does not hear his characters talk. He sees

Them mottled, in the moodiest costumes,

Of blue and yellow, sky and sun, belted

And knotted, sashed and seamed, half pales of red,

Half pales of green, appropriate habit for

The huge decorum, the manner of the time,

Part of the mottled mood of summer’s whole,

In which the characters speak because they want

To speak, the fat, the roseate characters,

Free, for a moment, from malice and sudden cry,

Complete in a completed scene, speaking

Their parts as in a youthful happiness.

Finally, in the last year of her age,

Having attained a present blessedness,

She said poetry and apotheosis are one.

This is the illustration that she used:

If I live according to this law I live

In an immense activity, in which

Everything becomes morning, summer, the hero,

The enraptured woman, the sequestered night,

The man that suffered, lying there at ease,

Without his envious pain in body, in mind,

The favorable transformations of the wind

As of a general being or human universe.

There was another illustration, in which

The two things compared their tight resemblances:

Each matters only in that which it conceives.

The importance of its hat to a form becomes

More definite. The sweeping brim of the hat

Makes of the form Most Merciful Capitan,

If the observer says so: grandiloquent

Locution of a hand in a rhapsody.

Its line moves quickly with the genius

Of its improvisation until, at length,

It enfolds the head in a vital ambiance,

A vital, linear ambiance. The flare

In the sweeping brim becomes the origin

Of a human evocation, so disclosed

That, nameless, it creates an affectionate name,

Derived from adjectives of deepest mine.

The actual form bears outwardly this grace,

An image of the mind, an inward mate,

Tall and unfretted, a figure meant to bear

Its poisoned laurels in this poisoned wood,

High in the height that is our total height.

The formidable helmet is nothing now.

These two go well together, the sinuous brim

And the green flauntings of the hours of peace.

To Henry Church

And for what, except for you, do I feel love?

Do I press the extremest book of the wisest man

Close to me, hidden in me day and night?

In the uncertain light of single, certain truth,

Equal in living changingness to the light

In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest,

For a moment in the central of our being,

The vivid transparence that you bring is peace.

It Must Be Abstract

I

Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea

Of this invention, this invented world,

The inconceivable idea of the sun.

You must become an ignorant man again

And see the sun again with an ignorant eye

And see it clearly in the idea of it.

Never suppose an inventing mind as source

Of this idea nor for that mind compose

A voluminous master folded in his fire.

How clean the sun when seen in its idea,

Washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven

That has expelled us and our images…

The death of one god is the death of all.

Let purple Phoebus lie in umber harvest,

Let Phoebus slumber and die in autumn umber,

Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was

A name for something that never could be named.

There was a project for the sun and is.

There is a project for the sun. The sun

Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be

In the difficulty of what it is to be.

II

It is the celestial ennui of apartments

That sends us back to the first idea, the quick

Of this invention; and yet so poisonous

Are the ravishments of truth, so fatal to

The truth itself, the first idea becomes

The hermit in a poet’s metaphors,

Who comes and goes and comes and goes all day.

May there be an ennui of the first idea?

What else, prodigious scholar, should there be?

The monastic man is an artist. The philosopher

Appoints man’s place in music, say, today.

But the priest desires. The philosopher desires.

And not to have is the beginning of desire.

To have what is not is its ancient cycle.

It is desire at the end of winter, when

It observes the effortless weather turning blue

And sees the myosotis on its bush.

Being virile, it hears the calendar hymn.

It knows that what it has is what is not

And throws it away like a thing of another time,

As morning throws off stale moonlight and shabby sleep.

III

The poem refreshes life so that we share,

For a moment, the first idea … It satisfies

Belief in an immaculate beginning

And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,

To an immaculate end. We move between these points:

From that ever-early candor to its late plural

And the candor of them is the strong exhilaration

Of what we feel from what we think, of thought

Beating in the heart, as if blood newly came,

An elixir, an excitation, a pure power.

The poem, through candor, brings back a power again

That gives a candid kind to everything.

We say: At night an Arabian in my room,

With his damned hoobla-hoobla-hoobla-how,

Inscribes a primitive astronomy

Across the unscrawled fores the future casts

And throws his stars around the floor. By day

The wood-dove used to chant his hoobla-hoo

And still the grossest iridescence of ocean

Howls hoo and rises and howls hoo and falls.

Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.

IV

The first idea was not our own. Adam

In Eden was the father of Descartes

And Eve made air the mirror of herself,

Of her sons and of her daughters. They found themselves

In heaven as in a glass; a second earth;

And in the earth itself they found a green—

The inhabitants of a very varnished green.

But the first idea was not to shape the clouds

In imitation. The clouds preceded us

There was a muddy centre before we breathed.

There was a myth before the myth began,

Venerable and articulate and complete.

From this the poem springs: that we live in a place

That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves

And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.

We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues

The air is not a mirror but bare board,

Coulisse bright-dark, tragic chiaroscuro

And comic color of the rose, in which

Abysmal instruments make sounds like pips

Of the sweeping meanings that we add to them.