The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (14 page)

Remote and call it merciful?

The strings are cold on the blue guitar.

VIII

The vivid, florid, turgid sky,

The drenching thunder rolling by,

The morning deluged still by night,

The clouds tumultuously bright

And the feeling heavy in cold chords

Struggling toward impassioned choirs,

Crying among the clouds, enraged

By gold antagonists in air—

I know my lazy, leaden twang

Is like the reason in a storm;

And yet it brings the storm to bear.

I twang it out and leave it there.

IX

And the color, the overcast blue

Of the air, in which the blue guitar

Is a form, described but difficult,

And I am merely a shadow hunched

Above the arrowy, still strings,

The maker of a thing yet to be made;

The color like a thought that grows

Out of a mood, the tragic robe

Of the actor, half his gesture, half

His speech, the dress of his meaning, silk

Sodden with his melancholy words,

The weather of his stage, himself.

X

Raise reddest columns. Toll a bell

And clap the hollows full of tin.

Throw papers in the streets, the wills

Of the dead, majestic in their seals.

And the beautiful trombones—behold

The approach of him whom none believes,

Whom all believe that all believe,

A pagan in a varnished car.

Roll a drum upon the blue guitar.

Lean from the steeple. Cry aloud,

“Here am I, my adversary, that

Confront you, hoo-ing the slick trombones,

Yet with a petty misery

At heart, a petty misery,

Ever the prelude to your end,

The touch that topples men and rock.”

XI

Slowly the ivy on the stones

Becomes the stones. Women become

The cities, children become the fields

And men in waves become the sea.

It is the chord that falsifies.

The sea returns upon the men,

The fields entrap the children, brick

Is a weed and all the flies are caught,

Wingless and withered, but living alive.

The discord merely magnifies.

Deeper within the belly’s dark

Of time, time grows upon the rock.

XII

Tom-tom, c’est moi. The blue guitar

And I are one. The orchestra

Fills the high hall with shuffling men

High as the hall. The whirling noise

Of a multitude dwindles, all said,

To his breath that lies awake at night.

I know that timid breathing. Where

Do I begin and end? And where,

As I strum the thing, do I pick up

That which momentously declares

Itself not to be I and yet

Must be. It could be nothing else.

XIII

The pale intrusions into blue

Are corrupting pallors … ay di mi,

Blue buds or pitchy blooms. Be content—

Expansions, diffusions—content to be

The unspotted imbecile revery,

The heraldic center of the world

Of blue, blue sleek with a hundred chins,

The amorist Adjective aflame…

XIV

First one beam, then another, then

A thousand are radiant in the sky.

Each is both star and orb; and day

Is the riches of their atmosphere.

The sea appends its tattery hues.

The shores are banks of muffling mist.

One says a German chandelier—

A candle is enough to light the world.

It makes it clear. Even at noon

It glistens in essential dark.

At night, it lights the fruit and wine,

The book and bread, things as they are,

In a chiaroscuro where

One sits and plays the blue guitar.

XV

Is this picture of Picasso’s, this “hoard

Of destructions,” a picture of ourselves,

Now, an image of our society?

Do I sit, deformed, a naked egg,

Catching at Good-bye, harvest moon,

Without seeing the harvest or the moon?

Things as they are have been destroyed.

Have I? Am I a man that is dead

At a table on which the food is cold?

Is my thought a memory, not alive?

Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood

And whichever it may be, is it mine?

XVI

The earth is not earth but a stone,

Not the mother that held men as they fell

But stone, but like a stone, no: not

The mother, but an oppressor, but like

An oppressor that grudges them their death,

As it grudges the living that they live.

To live in war, to live at war,

To chop the sullen psaltery,

To improve the sewers in Jerusalem,

To electrify the nimbuses—

Place honey on the altars and die,

You lovers that are bitter at heart.

XVII

The person has a mould. But not

Its animal. The angelic ones

Speak of the soul, the mind. It is

An animal. The blue guitar—

On that its claws propound, its fangs

Articulate its desert days.

The blue guitar a mould? That shell?

Well, after all, the north wind blows

A horn, on which its victory

Is a worm composing on a straw.

XVIII

A dream (to call it a dream) in which

I can believe, in face of the object,

A dream no longer a dream, a thing,

Of things as they are, as the blue guitar

After long strumming on certain nights

Gives the touch of the senses, not of the hand,

But the very senses as they touch

The wind-gloss. Or as daylight comes,

Like light in a mirroring of cliffs,

Rising upward from a sea of ex.

XIX

That I may reduce the monster to

Myself, and then may be myself

In face of the monster, be more than part

Of it, more than the monstrous player of

One of its monstrous lutes, not be

Alone, but reduce the monster and be,

Two things, the two together as one,

And play of the monster and of myself,

Or better not of myself at all,

But of that as its intelligence,

Being the lion in the lute

Before the lion locked in stone.

XX

What is there in life except one’s ideas,

Good air, good friend, what is there in life?

Is it ideas that I believe?

Good air, my only friend, believe,

Believe would be a brother full

Of love, believe would be a friend,

Friendlier than my only friend,

Good air. Poor pale, poor pale guitar…

XXI

A substitute for all the gods:

This self, not that gold self aloft,

Alone, one’s shadow magnified,

Lord of the body, looking down,

As now and called most high,

The shadow of Chocorua

In an immenser heaven, aloft,

Alone, lord of the land and lord

Of the men that live in the land, high lord.

One’s self and the mountains of one’s land,

Without shadows, without magnificence,

The flesh, the bone, the dirt, the stone.

XXII

Poetry is the subject of the poem,

From this the poem issues and

To this returns. Between the two,

Between issue and return, there is

An absence in reality,

Things as they are. Or so we say.

But are these separate? Is it

An absence for the poem, which acquires

Its true appearances there, sun’s green,

Cloud’s red, earth feeling, sky that thinks?

From these it takes. Perhaps it gives,

In the universal intercourse.

XXIII

A few final solutions, like a duet

With the undertaker: a voice in the clouds,

Another on earth, the one a voice

Of ether, the other smelling of drink,

The voice of ether prevailing, the swell

Of the undertaker’s song in the snow

Apostrophizing wreaths, the voice

In the clouds serene and final, next

The grunted breath serene and final,

The imagined and the real, thought

And the truth, Dichtung und Wahrheit, all

Confusion solved, as in a refrain

One keeps on playing year by year,

Concerning the nature of things as they are.

XXIV

A poem like a missal found

In the mud, a missal for that young man,

That scholar hungriest for that book,

The very book, or, less, a page

Or, at the least, a phrase, that phrase,

A hawk of life, that latined phrase:

To know; a missal for brooding-sight.

To meet that hawk’s eye and to flinch

Not at the eye but at the joy of it.

I play. But this is what I think.

XXV

He held the world upon his nose

And this-a-way he gave a fling.

His robes and symbols, ai-yi-yi—

And that-a-way he twirled the thing.

Sombre as fir-trees, liquid cats

Moved in the grass without a sound.

They did not know the grass went round.

The cats had cats and the grass turned gray

And the world had worlds, ai, this-a-way:

The grass turned green and the grass turned gray.

And the nose is eternal, that-a-way.

Things as they were, things as they are,

Things as they will be by and by…

A fat thumb beats out ai-yi-yi.

XXVI

The world washed in his imagination,

The world was a shore, whether sound or form

Or light, the relic of farewells,

Rock, of valedictory echoings,

To which his imagination returned,

From which it sped, a bar in space,

Sand heaped in the clouds, giant that fought

Against the murderous alphabet:

The swarm of thoughts, the swarm of dreams

Of inaccessible Utopia.

A mountainous music always seemed

To be falling and to be passing away.

XXVII

It is the sea that whitens the roof.

The sea drifts through the winter air.

It is the sea that the north wind makes.

The sea is in the falling snow.

This gloom is the darkness of the sea.

Geographers and philosophers,

Regard. But for that salty cup,

But for the icicles on the eaves—

The sea is a form of ridicule.

The iceberg settings satirize

The demon that cannot be himself,

That tours to shift the shifting scene.

XXVIII

I am a native in this world

And think in it as a native thinks,

Gesu, not native of a mind

Thinking the thoughts I call my own,

Native, a native in the world

And like a native think in it.

It could not be a mind, the wave

In which the watery grasses flow

And yet are fixed as a photograph,

The wind in which the dead leaves blow.

Here I inhale profounder strength

And as I am, I speak and move

And things are as I think they are

And say they are on the blue guitar.

XXIX

In the cathedral, I sat there, and read,

Alone, a lean Review and said,

“These degustations in the vaults

Oppose the past and the festival,

What is beyond the cathedral, outside,

Balances with nuptial song.

So it is to sit and to balance things

To and to and to the point of still,

To say of one mask it is like,

To say of another it is like,

To know that the balance does not quite rest,

That the mask is strange, however like.”

The shapes are wrong and the sounds are false.

The bells are the bellowing of bulls.

Yet Franciscan don was never more

Himself than in this fertile glass.

XXX

From this I shall evolve a man.

This is his essence: the old fantoche