The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (40 page)

The last leaf that is going to fall has fallen.

The robins are là-bas, the squirrels, in tree-caves,

Huddle together in the knowledge of squirrels.

The wind has blown the silence of summer away.

It buzzes beyond the horizon or in the ground:

In mud under ponds, where the sky used to be reflected.

The barrenness that appears is an exposing.

It is not part of what is absent, a halt

For farewells, a sad hanging on for remembrances.

It is a coming on and a coming forth.

The pines that were fans and fragrances emerge,

Staked solidly in a gusty grappling with rocks.

The glass of the air becomes an element—

It was something imagined that has been washed away.

A clearness has returned. It stands restored.

It is not an empty clearness, a bottomless sight.

It is a visibility of thought,

In which hundreds of eyes, in one mind, see at once.

XXXI

The less legible meanings of sounds, the little reds

Not often realized, the lighter words

In the heavy drum of speech, the inner men

Behind the outer shields, the sheets of music

In the strokes of thunder, dead candles at the window

When day comes, fire-foams in the motions of the sea,

Flickings from finikin to fine finikin

And the general fidget from busts of Constantine

To photographs of the late president, Mr. Blank,

These are the edgings and inchings of final form,

The swarming activities of the formulae

Of statement, directly and indirectly getting at,

Like an evening evoking the spectrum of violet,

A philosopher practicing scales on his piano,

A woman writing a note and tearing it up.

It is not in the premise that reality

Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses

A dust, a force that traverses a shade.

I

These locusts by day, these crickets by night

Are the instruments on which to play

Of an old and disused ambit of the soul

Or of a new aspect, bright in discovery—

A disused ambit of the spirit’s way,

The sort of thing that August crooners sing,

By a pure fountain, that was a ghost, and is,

Under the sun-slides of a sloping mountain;

Or else a new aspect, say the spirit’s sex,

Its attitudes, its answers to attitudes

And the sex of its voices, as the voice of one

Meets nakedly another’s naked voice.

Nothing is lost, loud locusts. No note fails.

These sounds are long in the living of the ear.

The honky-tonk out of the somnolent grasses

Is a memorizing, a trying out, to keep.

II

We make, although inside an egg,

Variations on the words spread sail.

The morning-glories grow in the egg.

It is full of the myrrh and camphor of summer

And Adirondack glittering. The cat hawks it

And the hawk cats it and we say spread sail,

Spread sail, we say spread white, spread way.

The shell is a shore. The egg of the sea

And the egg of the sky are in shells, in walls, in skins

And the egg of the earth lies deep within an egg.

Spread outward. Crack the round dome. Break through.

Have liberty not as the air within a grave

Or down a well. Breathe freedom, oh, my native,

In the space of horizons that neither love nor hate.

III

High poetry and low:

Experience in perihelion

Or in the penumbra of summer night—

The solemn sentences,

Like interior intonations,

The speech of truth in its true solitude,

A nature that is created in what it says,

The peace of the last intelligence;

Or the same thing without desire,

He that in this intelligence

Mistakes it for a world of objects,

Which, being green and blue, appease him,

By chance, or happy chance, or happiness,

According to his thought, in the Mediterranean

Of the quiet of the middle of the night,

With the broken statues standing on the shore.

IV

The sad smell of the lilacs—one remembered it,

Not as the fragrance of Persephone,

Nor of a widow Dooley,

But as of an exhumation returned to earth,

The rich earth, of its own self made rich,

Fertile of its own leaves and days and wars,

Of its brown wheat rapturous in the wind,

The nature of its women in the air,

The stern voices of its necessitous men,

This chorus as of those that wanted to live.

The sentiment of the fatal is a part

Of filial love. Or is it the element,

An approximation of an element,

A little thing to think of on Sunday walks,

Something not to be mentioned to Mrs. Dooley,

An arrogant dagger darting its arrogance,

In the parent’s hand, perhaps parental love?

One wished that there had been a season,

Longer and later, in which the lilacs opened

And spread about them a warmer, rosier odor.

V

We’ll give the week-end to wisdom, to Weisheit, the rabbi,

Lucidity of his city, joy of his nation,

The state of circumstance.

The thinker as reader reads what has been written.

He wears the words he reads to look upon

Within his being,

A crown within him of crispest diamonds,

A reddened garment falling to his feet,

A hand of light to turn the page,

A finger with a ring to guide his eye

From line to line, as we lie on the grass and listen

To that which has no speech,

The voluble intentions of the symbols,

The ghostly celebrations of the picnic,

The secretions of insight.

VI

The world images for the beholder.

He is born the blank mechanic of the mountains,

The blank frere of fields, their matin laborer.

He is the possessed of sense not the possessor.

He does not change the sea from crumpled tinfoil

To chromatic crawler. But it is changed.

He does not raise the rousing of fresh light

On the still, black-slatted eastward shutters.

The woman is chosen but not

Among the endlessly emerging accords.

The world? The inhuman as human? That which thinks not,

Feels not, resembling thought, resembling feeling?

It habituates him to the invisible,

By its faculty of the exceptional,

The faculty of ellipses and deviations,

In which he exists but never as himself.

VII

He turned from the tower to the house,

From the spun sky and the high and deadly view,

To the novels on the table,

The geraniums on the sill.

He could understand the things at home.

And being up high had helped him when up high,

As if on a taller tower

He would be certain to see

That, in the shadowless atmosphere,

The knowledge of things lay round but unperceived:

The height was not quite proper;

The position was wrong.

It was curious to have to descend

And, seated in the nature of his chair,

To feel the satisfactions

Of that transparent air.

VIII

When was it that the particles became

The whole man, that tempers and beliefs became

Temper and belief and that differences lost

Difference and were one? It had to be

In the presence of a solitude of the self,

An expanse and the abstraction of an expanse,

A zone of time without the ticking of clocks,

A color that moved us with forgetfulness.

When was it that we heard the voice of union?

Was it as we sat in the park and the archaic form

Of a woman with a cloud on her shoulder rose

Against the trees and then against the sky

And the sense of the archaic touched us at once

In a movement of the outlines of similarity?

We resembled one another at the sight.

The forgetful color of the autumn day

Was full of these archaic forms, giants

Of sense, evoking one thing in many men,

Evoking an archaic space, vanishing

In the space, leaving an outline of the size

Of the impersonal person, the wanderer,

The father, the ancestor, the bearded peer,

The total of human shadows bright as glass.

IX

A new text of the world,

A scribble of fret and fear and fate,

From a bravura of the mind,

A courage of the eye,

In which, for all the breathings

From the edge of night,

And for all the white voices

That were rosen once,

The meanings are our own—

It is a text that we shall be needing,

To be the footing of noon,

The pillar of midnight,

That comes from ourselves, neither from knowing

Nor not knowing, yet free from question,

Because we wanted it so

And it had to be,

A text of intelligent men

At the centre of the unintelligible,

As in a hermitage, for us to think,

Writing and reading the rigid inscription.

X

The mornings grow silent, the never-tiring wonder.

The trees are reappearing in poverty.

Without rain, there is the sadness of rain

And an air of lateness. The moon is a tricorn

Waved in pale adieu. The rex Impolitor

Will come stamping here, the ruler of less than men,

In less than nature. He is not here yet.

Here the adult one is still banded with fulgor,

Is still warm with the love with which she came,

Still touches solemnly with what she was

And willed. She has given too much, but not enough.

She is exhausted and a little old.

One of the countrymen:

                                        There is

    A welcome at the door to which no one comes?

The angel:

    I am the angel of reality,

    Seen for a moment standing in the door.

    I have neither ashen wing nor wear of ore

    And live without a tepid aureole,

    Or stars that follow me, not to attend,

    But, of my being and its knowing, part.

    I am one of you and being one of you

    Is being and knowing what I am and know.

    Yet I am the necessary angel of earth,

    Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,

    
Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set,

    And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone

    Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings,

    Like watery words awash; like meanings said

    By repetitions of half-meanings. Am I not,

    Myself, only half of a figure of a sort,

    A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man

    Of the mind, an apparition apparelled in

    Apparels of such lightest look that a turn

    Of my shoulder and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?

The two worlds are asleep, are sleeping, now.

A dumb sense possesses them in a kind of solemnity.

The self and the earth—your thoughts, your feelings,

Your beliefs and disbeliefs, your whole peculiar plot;

The redness of your reddish chestnut trees,

The river motion, the drowsy motion of the river R.

Who is my father in this world, in this house,

At the spirit’s base?

My father’s father, his father’s father, his—

Shadows like winds

Go back to a parent before thought, before speech,

At the head of the past.

They go to the cliffs of Moher rising out of the mist,

Above the real,

Rising out of present time and place, above

The wet, green grass.

This is not landscape, full of the somnambulations

Of poetry

And the sea. This is my father or, maybe,

It is as he was,

A likeness, one of the race of fathers: earth

And sea and air.

After the leaves have fallen, we return

To a plain sense of things. It is as if

We had come to an end of the imagination,

Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective

For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.

The great structure has become a minor house.

No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.

The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.

A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition

In a repetitiousness of men and flies.