The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (12 page)

The Jew did not go to his synagogue

To be flogged.

But it was solemn,

That church without bells.

He preferred the brightness of bells,

The
mille fiori
of vestments,

The voice of centuries

On the priestly gramophones.

It was the custom

For his rage against chaos

To abate on the way to church,

In regulations of his spirit.

How good life is, on the basis of propriety,

To be followed by a platter of capon!

Yet he kept promising himself

To go to Florida one of these days,

And in one of the little arrondissements

Of the sea there,

To give this further thought.

I

Canaries in the morning, orchestras

In the afternoon, balloons at night. That is

A difference, at least, from nightingales,

Jehovah and the great sea-worm. The air

Is not so elemental nor the earth

So near.

               But the sustenance of the wilderness

Does not sustain us in the metropoles.

II

Life is an old casino in a park.

The bills of the swans are flat upon the ground.

A most desolate wind has chilled Rouge-Fatima

And a grand decadence settles down like cold.

III

The swans … Before the bills of the swans fell flat

Upon the ground, and before the chronicle

Of affected homage foxed so many books,

They warded the blank waters of the lakes

And island canopies which were entailed

To that casino. Long before the rain

Swept through its boarded windows and the leaves

Filled its encrusted fountains, they arrayed

The twilights of the mythy goober khan.

The centuries of excellence to be

Rose out of promise and became the sooth

Of trombones floating in the trees.

                         The toil

Of thought evoked a peace eccentric to

The eye and tinkling to the ear. Gruff drums

Could beat, yet not alarm the populace.

The indolent progressions of the swans

Made earth come right; a peanut parody

For peanut people.

                         And serener myth

Conceiving from its perfect plenitude,

Lusty as June, more fruitful than the weeks

Of ripest summer, always lingering

To touch again the hottest bloom, to strike

Once more the longest resonance, to cap

The clearest woman with apt weed, to mount

The thickest man on thickest stallion-back,

This urgent, competent, serener myth

Passed like a circus.

                         Politic man ordained

Imagination as the fateful sin.

Grandmother and her basketful of pears

Must be the crux for our compendia.

That’s world enough, and more, if one includes

Her daughters to the peached and ivory wench

For whom the towers are built. The burgher’s breast,

And not a delicate ether star-impaled,

Must be the place for prodigy, unless

Prodigious things are tricks. The world is not

The bauble of the sleepless nor a word

That should import a universal pith

To Cuba. Jot these milky matters down.

They nourish Jupiters. Their casual pap

Will drop like sweetness in the empty nights

When too great rhapsody is left annulled

And liquorish prayer provokes new sweats: so, so:

Life is an old casino in a wood.

IV

Is the function of the poet here mere sound,

Subtler than the ornatest prophecy,

To stuff the ear? It causes him to make

His infinite repetition and alloys

Of pick of ebon, pick of halcyon.

It weights him with nice logic for the prim.

As part of nature he is part of us.

His rarities are ours: may they be fit

And reconcile us to our selves in those

True reconcilings, dark, pacific words,

And the adroiter harmonies of their fall.

Close the cantina. Hood the chandelier.

The moonlight is not yellow but a white

That silences the ever-faithful town.

How pale and how possessed a night it is,

How full of exhalations of the sea…

All this is older than its oldest hymn,

Has no more meaning than tomorrow’s bread.

But let the poet on his balcony

Speak and the sleepers in their sleep shall move,

Waken, and watch the moonlight on their floors.

This may be benediction, sepulcher,

And epitaph. It may, however, be

An incantation that the moon defines

By mere example opulently clear.

And the old casino likewise may define

An infinite incantation of our selves

In the grand decadence of the perished swans.

But nakedness, woolen massa, concerns an innermost atom.

If that remains concealed, what does the bottom matter?

Black man, bright nouveautés leave one, at best, pseudonymous.

Thus one is most disclosed when one is most anonymous.

The night knows nothing of the chants of night

It is what it is as I am what I am:

And in perceiving this I best perceive myself

And you. Only we two may interchange

Each in the other what each has to give.

Only we two are one, not you and night,

Nor night and I, but you and I, alone,

So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,

So far beyond the casual solitudes,

That night is only the background of our selves,

Supremely true each to its separate self,

In the pale light that each upon the other throws.

All night I sat reading a book,

Sat reading as if in a book

Of sombre pages.

It was autumn and falling stars

Covered the shrivelled forms

Crouched in the moonlight.

No lamp was burning as I read,

A voice was mumbling, “Everything

Falls back to coldness,

Even the musky muscadines,

The melons, the vermilion pears

Of the leafless garden.”

The sombre pages bore no print

Except the trace of burning stars

In the frosty heaven.

The muddy rivers of spring

Are snarling

Under muddy skies.

The mind is muddy.

As yet, for the mind, new banks

Of bulging green

Are not;

Sky-sides of gold

Are not.

The mind snarls.

Blackest of pickanines,

There is a master of mud.

The shaft of light

Falling, far off, from sky to land,

That is he—

The peach-bud maker,

The mud master,

The master of the mind.

A little less returned for him each spring.

Music began to fail him. Brahms, although

His dark familiar, often walked apart.

His spirit grew uncertain of delight,

Certain of its uncertainty, in which

That dark companion left him unconsoled

For a self returning mostly memory.

Only last year he said that the naked moon

Was not the moon he used to see, to feel

(In the pale coherences of moon and mood

When he was young), naked and alien,

More leanly shining from a lankier sky.

Its ruddy pallor had grown cadaverous.

He used his reason, exercised his will,

Turning in time to Brahms as alternate

In speech. He was that music and himself.

They were particles of order, a single majesty:

But he remembered the time when he stood alone.

He stood at last by God’s help and the police;

But he remembered the time when he stood alone.

He yielded himself to that single majesty;

But he remembered the time when he stood alone,

When to be and delight to be seemed to be one,

Before the colors deepened and grew small.

The garden flew round with the angel,

The angel flew round with the clouds,

And the clouds flew round and the clouds flew round

And the clouds flew round with the clouds.

Is there any secret in skulls,

The cattle skulls in the woods?

Do the drummers in black hoods

Rumble anything out of their drums?

Mrs. Anderson’s Swedish baby

Might well have been German or Spanish,

Yet that things go round and again go round

Has rather a classical sound.

[for Arthur Powell]

I

In the far South the sun of autumn is passing

Like Walt Whitman walking along a ruddy shore.

He is singing and chanting the things that are part of him,

The worlds that were and will be, death and day.

Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end.

His beard is of fire and his staff is a leaping flame.

II

Sigh for me, night-wind, in the noisy leaves of the oak.

I am tired. Sleep for me, heaven over the hill.

Shout for me, loudly and loudly, joyful sun, when you rise.

III

It was when the trees were leafless first in November

And their blackness became apparent, that one first

Knew the eccentric to be the base of design.

IV

Under the mat of frost and over the mat of clouds.

But in between lies the sphere of my fortune

And the fortunes of frost and of clouds,

All alike, except for the rules of the rabbis,

Happy men, distinguishing frost and clouds.

V

If ever the search for a tranquil belief should end,

The future might stop emerging out of the past,

Out of what is full of us; yet the search

And the future emerging out of us seem to be one.

VI

We should die except for Death

In his chalk and violet robes.

Not to die a parish death.

VII

How easily the feelings flow this afternoon

Over the simplest words:

It is too cold for work, now, in the fields.

VIII

Out of the spirit of the holy temples,

Empty and grandiose, let us make hymns

And sing them in secrecy as lovers do.

IX

In a world of universal poverty

The philosophers alone will be fat

Against the autumn winds

In an autumn that will be perpetual.

X

Between farewell and the absence of farewell,

The final mercy and the final loss,

The wind and the sudden falling of the wind.

XI

The cloud rose upward like a heavy stone

That lost its heaviness through that same will,

Which changed light green to olive then to blue.

XII

The sense of the serpent in you, Ananke,

And your averted stride

Add nothing to the horror of the frost

That glistens on your face and hair.

XIII

The birds are singing in the yellow patios,

Pecking at more lascivious rinds than ours,

From sheer Gemütlichkeit.

XIV

The leaden pigeon on the entrance gate

Must miss the symmetry of a leaden mate,

Must see her fans of silver undulate.

XV

Serve the rouged fruits in early snow.

They resemble a page of Toulet

Read in the ruins of a new society,

Furtively, by candle and out of need.

XVI

If thinking could be blown away

Yet this remain the dwelling-place

Of those with a sense for simple space.

XVII

The sun of Asia creeps above the horizon

Into this haggard and tenuous air,

A tiger lamed by nothingness and frost.

XVIII

Shall I grapple with my destroyers

In the muscular poses of the museums?

But my destroyers avoid the museums.

XIX

An opening of portals when night ends,

A running forward, arms stretched out as drilled.

Act I, Scene i, at a German Staats-Oper.

XX

Ah, but the meaningless, natural effigy!

The revealing aberration should appear,

The agate in the eye, the tufted ear,

The rabbit fat, at last, in glassy grass.

XXI

She was a shadow as thin in memory

As an autumn ancient underneath the snow,

Which one recalls at a concert or in a café.