The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (13 page)

XXII

The comedy of hollow sounds derives

From truth and not from satire on our lives.

Clog, therefore, purple Jack and crimson Jill.

XXIII

The fish are in the fishman’s window,

The grain is in the baker’s shop,

The hunter shouts as the pheasant falls.

Consider the odd morphology of regret.

XXIV

A bridge above the bright and blue of water

And the same bridge when the river is frozen.

Rich Tweedle-dum, poor Tweedle-dee.

XXV

From oriole to crow, note the decline

In music. Crow is realist. But, then,

Oriole, also, may be realist.

XXVI

This fat pistache of Belgian grapes exceeds

The total gala of auburn aureoles.

Cochon!
Master, the grapes are here and now.

XXVII

John Constable they could never quite transplant

And our streams rejected the dim Academy.

Granted the Picts impressed us otherwise

In the taste for iron dogs and iron deer.

XXVIII

A pear should come to the table popped with juice,

Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On terms

Like these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.

XXIX

Choke every ghost with acted violence,

Stamp down the phosphorescent toes, tear off

The spittling tissues tight across the bones.

The heavy bells are tolling rowdy-dow.

XXX

The hen-cock crows at midnight and lays no egg,

The cock-hen crows all day. But cockerel shrieks,

Hen shudders: the copious egg is made and laid.

XXXI

A teeming millpond or a furious mind.

Gray grasses rolling windily away

And bristling thorn-trees spinning on the bank

The actual is a deft beneficence.

XXXII

Poetry is a finikin thing of air

That lives uncertainly and not for long

Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.

XXXIII

For all his purple, the purple bird must have

Notes for his comfort that he may repeat

Through the gross tedium of being rare.

A calm November. Sunday in the fields.

A reflection stagnant in a stagnant stream.

Yet invisible currents clearly circulate.

XXXV

Men and the affairs of men seldom concerned

This pundit of the weather, who never ceased

To think of man the abstraction, the comic sum.

XXXVI

The children will be crying on the stair,

Half-way to bed, when the phrase will be spoken,

The starry voluptuary will be born.

XXXVII

Yesterday the roses were rising upward,

Pushing their buds above the dark green leaves,

Noble in autumn, yet nobler than autumn.

XXXVIII

The album of Corot is premature,

A little later when the sky is black.

Mist that is golden is not wholly mist.

XXXIX

Not the ocean of the virtuosi

But the ugly alien, the mask that speaks

Things unintelligible, yet understood.

XL

Always the standard repertoire in line

And that would be perfection, if each began

Not by beginning but at the last man’s end.

XLI

The chrysanthemums’ astringent fragrance comes

Each year to disguise the clanking mechanism

Of machine within machine within machine.

XLII

God of the sausage-makers, sacred guild,

Or possibly, the merest patron saint

Ennobled as in a mirror to sanctity.

XLIII

It is curious that the density of life

On a given plane is ascertainable

By dividing the number of legs one sees by two.

At least the number of people may thus be fixed.

XLIV

Freshness is more than the east wind blowing round one.

There is no such thing as innocence in autumn,

Yet, it may be, innocence is never lost.

XLV

Encore un instant de bonheur
. The words

Are a woman’s words, unlikely to satisfy

The taste of even a country connoisseur.

XLVI

Everything ticks like a clock. The cabinet

Of a man gone mad, after all, for time, in spite

Of the cuckoos, a man with a mania for clocks.

XLVII

The sun is seeking something bright to shine on.

The trees are wooden, the grass is yellow and thin.

The ponds are not the surfaces it seeks.

It must create its colors out of itself.

XLVIII

Music is not yet written but is to be.

The preparation is long and of long intent

For the time when sound shall be subtler than we ourselves.

XLIX

It needed the heavy nights of drenching weather

To make him return to people, to find among them

Whatever it was that he found in their absence,

A pleasure, an indulgence, an infatuation.

L

Union of the weakest develops strength

Not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge

One of the leaves that have fallen in autumn?

But the wise man avenges by building his city in snow.

Children picking up our bones

Will never know that these were once

As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes

Made sharp air sharper by their smell

These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones

We left much more, left what still is

The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow

Above the shuttered mansion-house,

Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.

We knew for long the mansion’s look

And what we said of it became

A part of what it is … Children,

Still weaving budded aureoles,

Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems

As if he that lived there left behind

A spirit storming in blank walls,

A dirty house in a gutted world,

A tatter of shadows peaked to white,

Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

The skreak and skritter of evening gone

And grackles gone and sorrows of the sun,

The sorrows of sun, too, gone … the moon and moon,

The yellow moon of words about the nightingale

In measureless measures, not a bird for me

But the name of a bird and the name of a nameless air

I have never—shall never hear. And yet beneath

The stillness of everything gone, and being still,

Being and sitting still, something resides,

Some skreaking and skrittering residuum,

And grates these evasions of the nightingale

Though I have never—shall never hear that bird.

And the stillness is in the key, all of it is,

The stillness is all in the key of that desolate sound.

Melodious skeletons, for all of last night’s music

Today is today and the dancing is done.

Dew lies on the instruments of straw that you were playing,

The ruts in your empty road are red.

You Jim and you Margaret and you singer of La Paloma,

The cocks are crowing and crowing loud,

And although my mind perceives the force behind the moment,

The mind is smaller than the eye.

The sun rises green and blue in the fields and in the heavens.

The clouds foretell a swampy rain.

Is it bad to have come here

And to have found the bed empty?

One might have found tragic hair,

Bitter eyes, hands hostile and cold.

There might have been a light on a book

Lighting a pitiless verse or two.

There might have been the immense solitude

Of the wind upon the curtains.

Pitiless verse? A few words tuned

And tuned and tuned and tuned.

It is good. The bed is empty,

The curtains are stiff and prim and still.

A very felicitous eve,

Herr Doktor, and that’s enough,

Though the brow in your palm may grieve

At the vernacular of light

(Omitting reefs of cloud):

Empurpled garden grass;

The spruces’ outstretched hands;

The twilight overfull

Of wormy metaphors.

I

The man bent over his guitar,

A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, “You have a blue guitar,

You do not play things as they are.”

The man replied, “Things as they are

Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

And they said then, “But play, you must,

A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar

Of things exactly as they are.”

II

I cannot bring a world quite round,

Although I patch it as I can.

I sing a hero’s head, large eye

And bearded bronze, but not a man,

Although I patch him as I can

And reach through him almost to man.

If to serenade almost to man

Is to miss, by that, things as they are,

Say that it is the serenade

Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

III

Ah, but to play man number one,

To drive the dagger in his heart,

To lay his brain upon the board

And pick the acrid colors out,

To nail his thought across the door,

Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,

To strike his living hi and ho,

To tick it, tock it, turn it true,

To bang it from a savage blue,

Jangling the metal of the strings…

IV

So that’s life, then: things as they are?

It picks its way on the blue guitar.

A million people on one string?

And all their manner in the thing,

And all their manner, right and wrong,

And all their manner, weak and strong?

The feelings crazily, craftily call,

Like a buzzing of flies in autumn air,

And that’s life, then: things as they are,

This buzzing of the blue guitar.

V

Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry,

Of the torches wisping in the underground,

Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light.

There are no shadows in our sun,

Day is desire and night is sleep.

There are no shadows anywhere.

The earth, for us, is flat and bare.

There are no shadows. Poetry

Exceeding music must take the place

Of empty heaven and its hymns,

Ourselves in poetry must take their place,

Even in the chattering of your guitar.

VI

A tune beyond us as we are,

Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar;

Ourselves in the tune as if in space,

Yet nothing changed, except the place

Of things as they are and only the place

As you play them, on the blue guitar,

Placed, so, beyond the compass of change,

Perceived in a final atmosphere;

For a moment final, in the way

The thinking of art seems final when

The thinking of god is smoky dew.

The tune is space. The blue guitar

Becomes the place of things as they are,

A composing of senses of the guitar.

VII

It is the sun that shares our works.

The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.

When shall I come to say of the sun,

It is a sea; it shares nothing;

The sun no longer shares our works

And the earth is alive with creeping men,

Mechanical beetles never quite warm?

And shall I then stand in the sun, as now

I stand in the moon, and call it good,

The immaculate, the merciful good,

Detached from us, from things as they are?

Not to be part of the sun? To stand