The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (34 page)

Existing in the idea of it, alone,

In the sense against calamity, it is not

Less real. For the oldest and coldest philosopher,

There is or may be a time of innocence

As pure principle. Its nature is its end,

That it should be, and yet not be, a thing

That pinches the pity of the pitiful man,

Like a book at evening beautiful but untrue,

Like a book on rising beautiful and true.

It is like a thing of ether that exists

Almost as predicate. But it exists,

It exists, it is visible, it is, it is.

So, then, these lights are not a spell of light,

A saying out of a cloud, but innocence.

An innocence of the earth and no false sign

Or symbol of malice. That we partake thereof,

Lie down like children in this holiness,

As if, awake, we lay in the quiet of sleep,

As if the innocent mother sang in the dark

Of the room and on an accordion, half-heard,

Created the time and place in which we breathed…

IX

And of each other thought—in the idiom

Of the work, in the idiom of an innocent earth,

Not of the enigma of the guilty dream.

We were as Danes in Denmark all day long

And knew each other well, hale-hearted landsmen,

For whom the outlandish was another day

Of the week, queerer than Sunday. We thought alike

And that made brothers of us in a home

In which we fed on being brothers, fed

And fattened as on a decorous honeycomb.

This drama that we live—We lay sticky with sleep.

This sense of the activity of fate—

The rendezvous, when she came alone,

By her coming became a freedom of the two,

An isolation which only the two could share.

Shall we be found hanging in the trees next spring?

Of what disaster is this the imminence:

Bare limbs, bare trees and a wind as sharp as salt?

The stars are putting on their glittering belts.

They throw around their shoulders cloaks that flash

Like a great shadow’s last embellishment.

It may come tomorrow in the simplest word,

Almost as part of innocence, almost,

Almost as the tenderest and the truest part.

X

An unhappy people in a happy world—

Read, rabbi, the phases of this difference.

An unhappy people in an unhappy world—

Here are too many mirrors for misery.

A happy people in an unhappy world—

It cannot be. There’s nothing there to roll

On the expressive tongue, the finding fang.

A happy people in a happy world—

Buffo! A ball, an opera, a bar.

Turn back to where we were when we began:

An unhappy people in a happy world.

Now, solemnize the secretive syllables.

Read to the congregation, for today

And for tomorrow, this extremity,

This contrivance of the spectre of the spheres,

Contriving balance to contrive a whole,

The vital, the never-failing genius,

Fulfilling his meditations, great and small.

In these unhappy he meditates a whole,

The full of fortune and the full of fate,

As if he lived all lives, that he might know,

In hall harridan, not hushful paradise,

To a haggling of wind and weather, by these lights

Like a blaze of summer straw, in winter’s nick.

In the hard brightness of that winter day

The sea was frozen solid and Hans heard,

By his drift-fire, on the shore, the difference

Between loud water and loud wind, between that

Which has no accurate syllables and that

Which cries
so blau
and cries again
so lind

Und so lau
, between sound without meaning and speech,

Of clay and wattles made
as it ascends

And
hear it
as it falls
in the deep heart’s core
.

A steamer lay near him, foundered in the ice.

So
blau
,
so blau
…Hans listened by the fire.

New stars that were a foot across came out

And shone.
And a small cabin build there
.

So lind
. The wind blazed as they sang.
So lau
.

The great ship, Balayne, lay frozen in the sea.

The one-foot stars were couriers of its death

To the wild limits of its habitation.

These were not tepid stars of torpid places

But bravest at midnight and in lonely spaces,

They looked back at Hans’ look with savage faces.

The wet weed sputtered, the fire died down, the cold

Was like a sleep. The sea was a sea he dreamed.

Yet Hans lay wide awake.
And live alone

In the bee-loud glade
. Lights on the steamer moved.

Men would be starting at dawn to walk ashore.

They would be afraid of the sun: what it might be,

Afraid of the country angels of those skies,

The finned flutterings and gaspings of the ice,

As if whatever in water strove to speak

Broke dialect in a break of memory.

The sun might rise and it might not and if

It rose, ashen and red and yellow, each

Opaque, in orange circlet, nearer than it

Had ever been before, no longer known,

No more that which most of all brings back the known,

But that which destroys it completely by this light

For that, or a motion not in the astronomies,

Beyond the habit of sense, anarchic shape

Afire—it might and it might not in that

Gothic blue, speed home its portents to their ends.

It might become a wheel spoked red and white

In alternate stripes converging at a point

Of flame on the line, with a second wheel below,

Just rising, accompanying, arranged to cross,

Through weltering illuminations, humps

Of billows, downward, toward the drift-fire shore.

It might come bearing, out of chaos, kin

Smeared, smoked, and drunken of thin potencies,

Lashing at images in the atmosphere,

Ringed round and barred, with eyes held in their hands,

And capable of incapably evil thought:

Slight gestures that could rend the palpable ice,

Or melt Arcturus to ingots dropping drops,

Or spill night out in brilliant vanishings,

Whirlpools of darkness in whirlwinds of light…

The miff-maff-muff of water, the vocables

Of the wind, the glassily-sparkling particles

Of the mind—They would soon climb down the side of the ship.

They would march single file, with electric lamps, alert

For a tidal undulation underneath.

There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases,

As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae.

They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expected more.

There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of life,

Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips among them.

They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality,

That would have wept and been happy, have shivered in the frost

And cried out to feel it again, have run fingers over leaves

And against the most coiled thorn, have seized on what was ugly

And laughed, as he sat there reading, from out of the purple tabulae,

The outlines of being and its expressings, the syllables of its law:

Poesis, poesis
, the literal characters, the vatic lines,

Which in those ears and in those thin, those spended hearts,

Took on color, took on shape and the size of things as they are

And spoke the feeling for them, which was what they had lacked.

He never felt twice the same about the flecked river,

Which kept flowing and never the same way twice, flowing

Through many places, as if it stood still in one,

Fixed like a lake on which the wild ducks fluttered,

Ruffling its common reflections, thought-like Monadnocks.

There seemed to be an apostrophe that was not spoken.

There was so much that was real that was not real at all.

He wanted to feel the same way over and over.

He wanted the river to go on flowing the same way,

To keep on flowing. He wanted to walk beside it,

Under the buttonwoods, beneath a moon nailed fast.

He wanted his heart to stop beating and his mind to rest

In a permanent realization, without any wild ducks

Or mountains that were not mountains, just to know how it would be,

Just to know how it would feel, released from destruction,

To be a bronze man breathing under archaic lapis,

Without the oscillations of planetary pass-pass,

Breathing his bronzen breath at the azury centre of time.

If it is a world without a genius,

It is most happily contrived. Here, then,

We ask which means most, for us, all the genii

Or one man who, for us, is greater than they,

On his gold horse striding, like a conjured beast,

Miraculous in its panache and swish?

Birds twitter pandemoniums around

The idea of the chevalier of chevaliers,

The well-composed in his burnished solitude,

The tower, the ancient accent, the wintry size.

And the north wind’s mighty buskin seems to fall

In an excessive corridor, alas!

How mad would he have to be to say, “He beheld

An order and thereafter he belonged

To it”? He beheld the order of the northern sky.

But the beggar gazes on calamity

And thereafter he belongs to it, to bread

Hard found, and water tasting of misery.

For him cold’s glacial beauty is his fate.

Without understanding, he belongs to it

And the night, and midnight, and after, where it is.

What has he? What he has he has. But what?

It is not a question of captious repartee.

What has he that becomes his heart’s strong core?

He has his poverty and nothing more.

His poverty becomes his heart’s strong core—

A forgetfulness of summer at the pole.

Sordid Melpomene, why strut bare boards,

Without scenery or lights, in the theatre’s bricks,

Dressed high in heliotrope’s inconstant hue,

The muse of misery? Speak loftier lines.

Cry out, “I am the purple muse.” Make sure

The audience beholds you, not your gown.

So summer comes in the end to these few stains

And the rust and rot of the door through which she went.

The house is empty. But here is where she sat

To comb her dewy hair, a touchless light,

Perplexed by its darker iridescences.

This was the glass in which she used to look

At the moment’s being, without history,

The self of summer perfectly perceived,

And feel its country gayety and smile

And be surprised and tremble, hand and lip.

This is the chair from which she gathered up

Her dress, the carefulest, commodious weave

Inwoven by a weaver to twelve bells…

The dress is lying, cast-off, on the floor.

Now, the first tutoyers of tragedy

Speak softly, to begin with, in the eaves.

Swatara, Swatara, black river,

Descending, out of the cap of midnight,

Toward the cape at which

You enter the swarthy sea,

Swatara, Swatara, heavy the hills

Are, hanging above you, as you move,

Move blackly and without crystal.

A countryman walks beside you.

He broods of neither cap nor cape,

But only of your swarthy motion,

But always of the swarthy water,

Of which Swatara is the breathing,

The name. He does not speak beside you.

He is there because he wants to be

And because being there in the heavy hills

And along the moving of the water—

Being there is being in a place,

As of a character everywhere,

The place of a swarthy presence moving,

Slowly, to the look of a swarthy name.

This day writhes with what? The lecturer

On This Beautiful World Of Ours composes himself

And hems the planet rose and haws it ripe,

And red, and right. The particular question—here

The particular answer to the particular question

Is not in point—the question is in point.

If the day writhes, it is not with revelations.

One goes on asking questions. That, then, is one

Of the categories. So said, this placid space

Is changed. It is not so blue as we thought. To be blue,

There must be no questions. It is an intellect

Of windings round and dodges to and fro,

Writhings in wrong obliques and distances,

Not an intellect in which we are fleet: present

Everywhere in space at once, cloud-pole