The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (11 page)

There was the cold wind and the sound

It made, away from the muck of the land

That they had left, heroic sound

Joyous and jubilant and sure.

Tell me more of the eagle, Cotton,

And you, black Sly,

Tell me how he descended

Out of the morning sky.

Describe with deepened voice

And noble imagery

His slowly-falling round

Down to the fishy sea.

Here was a sovereign sight,

Fit for a kinky clan.

Tell me again of the point

At which the flight began,

Say how his heavy wings,

Spread on the sun-bronzed air,

Turned tip and tip away,

Down to the sand, the glare

Of the pine trees edging the sand,

Dropping in sovereign rings

Out of his fiery lair.

Speak of the dazzling wings.

That would be waving and that would be crying,

Crying and shouting and meaning farewell,

Farewell in the eyes and farewell at the centre,

Just to stand still without moving a hand.

In a world without heaven to follow, the stops

Would be endings, more poignant than partings, profounder,

And that would be saying farewell, repeating farewell,

Just to be there and just to behold.

To be one’s singular self, to despise

The being that yielded so little, acquired

So little, too little to care, to turn

To the ever-jubilant weather, to sip

One’s cup and never to say a word,

Or to sleep or just to lie there still,

Just to be there, just to be beheld,

That would be bidding farewell, be bidding farewell.

One likes to practice the thing. They practice,

Enough, for heaven. Ever-jubilant,

What is there here but weather, what spirit

Have I except it comes from the sun?

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.

The water never formed to mind or voice,

Like a body wholly body, fluttering

Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion

Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,

That was not ours although we understood,

Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.

The song and water were not medleyed sound

Even if what she sang was what she heard,

Since what she sang was uttered word by word.

It may be that in all her phrases stirred

The grinding water and the gasping wind;

But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.

The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea

Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.

Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew

It was the spirit that we sought and knew

That we should ask this often as she sang.

If it was only the dark voice of the sea

That rose, or even colored by many waves;

If it was only the outer voice of sky

And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,

However clear, it would have been deep air,

The heaving speech of air, a summer sound

Repeated in a summer without end

And sound alone. But it was more than that,

More even than her voice, and ours, among

The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,

Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped

On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres

Of sky and sea.

               It was her voice that made

The sky acutest at its vanishing.

She measured to the hour its solitude.

She was the single artificer of the world

In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,

Whatever self it had, became the self

That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,

As we beheld her striding there alone,

Knew that there never was a world for her

Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,

Why, when the singing ended and we turned

Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,

The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,

As the night descended, tilting in the air,

Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,

Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,

Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,

The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,

Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,

And of ourselves and of our origins,

In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

How does one stand

To behold the sublime,

To confront the mockers,

The mickey mockers

And plated pairs?

When General Jackson

Posed for his statue

He knew how one feels.

Shall a man go barefoot

Blinking and blank?

But how does one feel?

One grows used to the weather,

The landscape and that;

And the sublime comes down

To the spirit itself,

The spirit and space,

The empty spirit

In vacant space.

What wine does one drink?

What bread does one eat?

Poet, be seated at the piano.

Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo,

Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic,

Its envious cachinnation.

If they throw stones upon the roof

While you practice arpeggios,

It is because they carry down the stairs

A body in rags.

Be seated at the piano.

That lucid souvenir of the past,

The divertimento;

That airy dream of the future,

The unclouded concerto…

The snow is falling.

Strike the piercing chord.

Be thou the voice,

Not you. Be thou, be thou

The voice of angry fear,

The voice of this besieging pain.

Be thou that wintry sound

As of the great wind howling,

By which sorrow is released,

Dismissed, absolved

In a starry placating.

We may return to Mozart.

He was young, and we, we are old.

The snow is falling

And the streets are full of cries.

Be seated, thou.

The grackles sing avant the spring

Most spiss—oh! Yes, most spissantly.

They sing right puissantly.

This robe of snow and winter stars,

The devil take it, wear it, too.

It might become his hole of blue.

Let him remove it to his regions,

White and star-furred for his legions,

And make much bing, high bing.

It would be ransom for the willow

And fill the hill and fill it full

Of ding, ding, dong.

The exceeding brightness of this early sun

Makes me conceive how dark I have become,

And re-illumines things that used to turn

To gold in broadest blue, and be a part

Of a turning spirit in an earlier self.

That, too, returns from out the winter’s air,

Like an hallucination come to daze

The corner of the eye. Our element,

Cold is our element and winter’s air

Brings voices as of lions coming down.

Oh! Rabbi, rabbi, fend my soul for me

And true savant of this dark nature be.

Panoramas are not what they used to be.

Claude has been dead a long time

And apostrophes are forbidden on the funicular.

Marx has ruined Nature,

For the moment.

For myself, I live by leaves,

So that corridors of clouds,

Corridors of cloudy thoughts,

Seem pretty much one:

I don’t know what.

But in Claude how near one was

(In a world that was resting on pillars,

That was seen through arches)

To the central composition,

The essential theme.

What composition is there in all this:

Stockholm slender in a slender light,

An Adriatic
riva
rising,

Statues and stars,

Without a theme?

The pillars are prostrate, the arches are haggard,

The hotel is boarded and bare.

Yet the panorama of despair

Cannot be the specialty

Of this ecstatic air.

The crosses on the convent roofs

Gleam sharply as the sun comes up.

What’s down below is in the past

Like last night’s crickets, far below.

And what’s above is in the past

As sure as all the angels are.

Why should the future leap the clouds

The bays of heaven, brighted, blued?

Chant, O ye faithful, in your paths

The poem of long celestial death;

For who could tolerate the earth

Without that poem, or without

An earthier one, tum, tum-ti-tum,

As of those crosses, glittering,

And merely of their glittering,

A mirror of a mere delight?

the great interests of man: air and light, the joy of having a body, the voluptuousness of looking
.

MARIO ROSSI

Why seraphim like lutanists arranged

Above the trees? And why the poet as

Eternal
chef d’orchestre?

Its vacancy glitters round us everywhere.

Its sounds are not angelic syllables

But our unfashioned spirits realized

More sharply in more furious selves.

That fosters seraphim and is to them

Coiffeur of haloes, fecund jeweller—

Was the sun concoct for angels or for men?

Sad men made angels of the sun, and of

The moon they made their own attendant ghosts,

Which led them back to angels, after death.

Let this be clear that we are men of sun

And men of day and never of pointed night,

Men that repeat antiquest sounds of air

In an accord of repetitions. Yet,

If we repeat, it is because the wind

Encircling us, speaks always with our speech.

Light, too, encrusts us making visible

The motions of the mind and giving form

To moodiest nothings, as, desire for day

Accomplished in the immensely flashing East,

Desire for rest, in that descending sea

Of dark, which in its very darkening

Is rest and silence spreading into sleep.

…Evening, when the measure skips a beat

And then another, one by one, and all

To a seething minor swiftly modulate.

Bare night is best. Bare earth is best. Bare, bare,

Except for our own houses, huddled low

Beneath the arches and their spangled air,

Beneath the rhapsodies of fire and fire,

Where the voice that is in us makes a true response,

Where the voice that is great within us rises up,

As we stand gazing at the rounded moon.

The sun, that brave man,

Comes through boughs that lie in wait,

That brave man.

Green and gloomy eyes

In dark forms of the grass

Run away.

The good stars,

Pale helms and spiky spurs,

Run away.

Fears of my bed,

Fears of life and fears of death,

Run away.

That brave man comes up

From below and walks without meditation,

That brave man.

Who can think of the sun costuming clouds

When all people are shaken

Or of night endazzled, proud,

When people awaken

And cry and cry for help?

The warm antiquity of self,

Everyone, grows suddenly cold.

The tea is bad, bread sad.

How can the world so old be so mad

That the people die?

If joy shall be without a book

It lies, themselves within themselves,

If they will look

Within themselves

And cry and cry for help?

Within as pillars of the sun,

Supports of night. The tea,

The wine is good. The bread,

The meat is sweet.

And they will not die.

The archbishop is away. The church is gray.

He has left his robes folded in camphor

And, dressed in black, he walks

Among fireflies.

The bony buttresses, the bony spires

Arranged under the stony clouds

Stand in a fixed light.

The bishop rests.

He is away. The church is gray.

This is his holiday.

The sexton moves with a sexton’s stare

In the air.

A dithery gold falls everywhere.

It wets the pigeons,

It goes and the birds go,

Turn dry,

Birds that never fly

Except when the bishop passes by,

Globed in today and tomorrow,

Dressed in his colored robes.