The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (10 page)

II

The body walks forth naked in the sun

And, out of tenderness or grief, the sun

Gives comfort, so that other bodies come,

Twinning our phantasy and our device,

And apt in versatile motion, touch and sound

To make the body covetous in desire

Of the still finer, more implacable chords.

So be it. Yet the spaciousness and light

In which the body walks and is deceived,

Falls from that fatal and that barer sky,

And this the spirit sees and is aggrieved.

A slash of angular blacks

Like a fractured edifice

That was buttressed by blue slants

In a coma of the moon.

A slash and the edifice fell,

Pylon and pier fell down.

A mountain-blue cloud arose

Like a thing in which they fell,

Fell slowly as when at night

A languid janitor bears

His lantern through colonnades

And the architecture swoons.

It turned cold and silent. Then

The square began to clear.

The bijou of Atlas, the moon,

Was last with its porcelain leer.

If any duck in any brook,

Fluttering the water

For your crumb,

Seemed the helpless daughter

Of a mother

Regretful that she bore her;

Or of another,

Barren, and longing for her;

What of the dove,

Or thrush, or any singing mysteries?

What of the trees

And intonations of the trees?

What of the night

That lights and dims the stars?

Do you know, Hans Christian,

Now that you see the night?

The mountains between our lands and the sea—

This conjunction of mountains and sea and our lands—

Have I stopped and thought of its point before?

When I think of our lands I think of the house

And the table that holds a platter of pears,

Vermilion smeared over green, arranged for show.

But this gross blue under rolling bronzes

Belittles those carefully chosen daubs.

Flashier fruits! A flip for the sun and moon,

If they mean no more than that. But they do.

And mountains and the sea do. And our lands.

And the welter of frost and the fox cries do.

Much more than that. Autumnal passages

Are overhung by the shadows of the rocks

And his nostrils blow out salt around each man.

Mow the grass in the cemetery, darkies,

Study the symbols and the requiescats,

But leave a bed beneath the myrtles.

This skeleton had a daughter and that, a son.

In his time, this one had little to speak of,

The softest word went gurrituck in his skull.

For him the moon was always in Scandinavia

And his daughter was a foreign thing.

And that one was never a man of heart.

The making of his son was one more duty.

When the music of the boy fell like a fountain,

He praised Johann Sebastian, as he should.

The dark shadows of the funereal magnolias

Are full of the songs of Jamanda and Carlotta;

The son and the daughter, who come to the darkness,

He for her burning breast and she for his arms.

And these two never meet in the air so full of summer

And touch each other, even touching closely,

Without an escape in the lapses of their kisses.

Make a bed and leave the iris in it.

The trade-wind jingles the rings in the nets around the racks by the docks on Indian River.

It is the same jingle of the water among the roots under the banks of the palmettoes,

It is the same jingle of the red-bird breasting the orange-trees out of the cedars.

Yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu, nor on the nunnery beaches.

When the elephant’s-ear in the park

Shrivelled in frost,

And the leaves on the paths

Ran like rats,

Your lamp-light fell

On shining pillows,

Of sea-shades and sky-shades,

Like umbrellas in Java.

What syllable are you seeking,

Vocalissimus,

In the distances of sleep?

Speak it.

I

Go on, high ship, since now, upon the shore,

The snake has left its skin upon the floor.

Key West sank downward under massive clouds

And silvers and greens spread over the sea. The moon

Is at the mast-head and the past is dead.

Her mind will never speak to me again.

I am free. High above the mast the moon

Rides clear of her mind and the waves make a refrain

Of this: that the snake has shed its skin upon

The floor. Go on through the darkness. The waves fly back.

II

Her mind had bound me round. The palms were hot

As if I lived in ashen ground, as if

The leaves in which the wind kept up its sound

From my North of cold whistled in a sepulchral South,

Her South of pine and coral and coraline sea,

Her home, not mine, in the ever-freshened Keys,

Her days, her oceanic nights, calling

For music, for whisperings from the reefs.

How content I shall be in the North to which I sail

And to feel sure and to forget the bleaching sand…

III

I hated the weathery yawl from which the pools

Disclosed the sea floor and the wilderness

Of waving weeds. I hated the vivid blooms

Curled over the shadowless hut, the rust and bones,

The trees likes bones and the leaves half sand, half sun.

To stand here on the deck in the dark and say

Farewell and to know that that land is forever gone

And that she will not follow in any word

Or look, nor ever again in thought, except

That I loved her once … Farewell. Go on, high ship.

IV

My North is leafless and lies in a wintry slime

Both of men and clouds, a slime of men in crowds.

The men are moving as the water moves,

This darkened water cloven by sullen swells

Against your sides, then shoving and slithering,

The darkness shattered, turbulent with foam.

To be free again, to return to the violent mind

That is their mind, these men, and that will bind

Me round, carry me, misty deck, carry me

To the cold, go on, high ship, go on, plunge on.

The grass is in seed. The young birds are flying.

Yet the house is not built, not even begun.

The vetch has turned purple. But where is the bride?

It is easy to say to those bidden—But where,

Where, butcher, seducer, bloodman, reveller,

Where is sun and music and highest heaven’s lust,

For which more than any words cries deeplier?

This mangled, smutted semi-world hacked out

Of dirt … It is not possible for the moon

To blot this with its dove-winged blendings.

She must come now. The grass is in seed and high.

Come now. Those to be born have need

Of the bride, love being a birth, have need to see

And to touch her, have need to say to her,

“The fly on the rose prevents us, O season

Excelling summer, ghost of fragrance falling

On dung.” Come now, pearled and pasted, bloomy-leafed,

While the domes resound with chant involving chant.

It is the word
pejorative
that hurts.

My old boat goes round on a crutch

And doesn’t get under way.

It’s the time of the year

And the time of the day.

Perhaps it’s the lunch that we had

Or the lunch that we should have had.

But I am, in any case,

A most inappropriate man

In a most unpropitious place.

Mon Dieu, hear the poet’s prayer.

The romantic should be here.

The romantic should be there.

It ought to be everywhere.

But the romantic must never remain,

Mon Dieu, and must never again return.

This heavy historical sail

Through the mustiest blue of the lake

In a really vertiginous boat

Is wholly the vapidest fake.…

It is least what one ever sees.

It is only the way one feels, to say

Where my spirit is I am,

To say the light wind worries the sail,

To say the water is swift today,

To expunge all people and be a pupil

Of the gorgeous wheel and so to give

That slight transcendence to the dirty sail,

By light, the way one feels, sharp white,

And then rush brightly through the summer air.

The truth is that there comes a time

When we can mourn no more over music

That is so much motionless sound.

There comes a time when the waltz

Is no longer a mode of desire, a mode

Of revealing desire and is empty of shadows.

Too many waltzes have ended. And then

There’s that mountain-minded Hoon,

For whom desire was never that of the waltz,

Who found all form and order in solitude,

For whom the shapes were never the figures of men.

Now, for him, his forms have vanished.

There is order in neither sea nor sun.

The shapes have lost their glistening.

There are these sudden mobs of men,

These sudden clouds of faces and arms,

An immense suppression, freed,

These voices crying without knowing for what,

Except to be happy, without knowing how,

Imposing forms they cannot describe,

Requiring order beyond their speech.

Too many waltzes have ended. Yet the shapes

For which the voices cry, these, too, may be

Modes of desire, modes of revealing desire.

Too many waltzes—The epic of disbelief

Blares oftener and soon, will soon be constant.

Some harmonious skeptic soon in a skeptical music

Will unite these figures of men and their shapes

Will glisten again with motion, the music

Will be motion and full of shadows.

In the land of turkeys in turkey weather

At the base of the statue, we go round and round.

What a beautiful history, beautiful surprise!

Monsieur is on horseback. The horse is covered with mice.

This dance has no name. It is a hungry dance.

We dance it out to the tip of Monsieur’s sword,

Reading the lordly language of the inscription,

Which is like zithers and tambourines combined:

The Founder of the State. Whoever founded

A state that was free, in the dead of winter, from mice?

What a beautiful tableau tinted and towering,

The arm of bronze outstretched against all evil!

The wild warblers are warbling in the jungle

Of life and spring and of the lustrous inundations,

Flood on flood, of our returning sun.

Day after day, throughout the winter,

We hardened ourselves to live by bluest reason

In a world of wind and frost,

And by will, unshaken and florid

In mornings of angular ice,

That passed beyond us through the narrow sky.

But what are radiant reason and radiant will

To warblings early in the hilarious trees

Of summer, the drunken mother?

No more phrases, Swenson: I was once

A hunter of those sovereigns of the soul

And savings banks, Fides, the sculptor’s prize,

All eyes and size, and galled Justitia,

Trained to poise the tables of the law,

Patientia, forever soothing wounds,

And mighty Fortitudo, frantic bass.

But these shall not adorn my souvenirs,

These lions, these majestic images.

If the fault is with the soul, the sovereigns

Of the soul must likewise be at fault, and first.

Are the soul itself. And the whole of the soul, Swenson,

As every man in Sweden will concede,

Still hankers after lions, or, to shift,

Still hankers after sovereign images.

If the fault is with the lions, send them back

To Monsieur Dufy’s Hamburg whence they came.

The vegetation still abounds with forms.

Last evening the moon rose above this rock

Impure upon a world unpurged.

The man and his companion stopped

To rest before the heroic height.

Coldly the wind fell upon them

In many majesties of sound:

They that had left the flame-freaked sun

To seek a sun of fuller fire.

Instead there was this tufted rock

Massively rising high and bare

Beyond all trees, the ridges thrown

Like giant arms among the clouds.

There was neither voice nor crested image,

No chorister, nor priest. There was

Only the great height of the rock

And the two of them standing still to rest.