The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (20 page)

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

Some things, niño, some things are like this,

That instantly and in themselves they are gay

And you and I are such things, O most miserable…

For a moment they are gay and are a part

Of an element, the exactest element for us,

In which we pronounce joy like a word of our own.

It is there, being imperfect, and with these things

And erudite in happiness, with nothing learned,

That we are joyously ourselves and we think

Without the labor of thought, in that element,

And we feel, in a way apart, for a moment, as if

There was a bright
scienza
outside of ourselves,

A gaiety that is being, not merely knowing,

The will to be and to be total in belief,

Provoking a laughter, an agreement, by surprise.

So what said the others and the sun went down

And, in the brown blues of evening, the lady said,

In the donkey’s ear, “I fear that elegance

Must struggle like the rest.” She climbed until

The moonlight in her lap, mewing her velvet,

And her dress were one and she said, “I have said no

To everything, in order to get at myself.

I have wiped away moonlight like mud. Your innocent ear

And I, if I rode naked, are what remain.”

The moonlight crumbled to degenerate forms,

While she approached the real, upon her mountain,

With lofty darkness. The donkey was there to ride,

To hold by the ear, even though it wished for a bell,

Wished faithfully for a falsifying bell.

Neither the moonlight could change it. And for her,

To be, regardless of velvet, could never be more

Than to be, she could never differently be,

Her no and no made yes impossible.

Who was it passed her there on a horse all will,

What figure of capable imagination?

Whose horse clattered on the road on which she rose,

As it descended, blind to her velvet and

The moonlight? Was it a rider intent on the sun,

A youth, a lover with phosphorescent hair,

Dressed poorly, arrogant of his streaming forces,

Lost in an integration of the martyrs’ bones,

Rushing from what was real; and capable?

The villages slept as the capable man went down,

Time swished on the village clocks and dreams were alive,

The enormous gongs gave edges to their sounds,

As the rider, no chevalere and poorly dressed,

Impatient of the bells and midnight forms,

Rode over the picket rocks, rode down the road,

And, capable, created in his mind,

Eventual victor, out of the martyrs’ bones,

The ultimate elegance: the imagined land.

The prologues are over. It is a question, now,

Of final belief. So, say that final belief

Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.

I

That obsolete fiction of the wide river in

An empty land; the gods that Boucher killed;

And the metal heroes that time granulates—

The philosophers’ man alone still walks in dew,

Still by the sea-side mutters milky lines

Concerning an immaculate imagery.

If you say on the hautboy man is not enough,

Can never stand as god, is ever wrong

In the end, however naked, tall, there is still

The impossible possible philosophers’ man,

The man who has had the time to think enough,

The central man, the human globe, responsive

As a mirror with a voice, the man of glass,

Who in a million diamonds sums us up.

II

He is the transparence of the place in which

He is and in his poems we find peace.

He sets this peddler’s pie and cries in summer,

The glass man, cold and numbered, dewily cries,

“Thou art not August unless I make thee so.”

Clandestine steps upon imagined stairs

Climb through the night, because his cuckoos call.

III

One year, death and war prevented the jasmine scent

And the jasmine islands were bloody martyrdoms.

How was it then with the central man? Did we

Find peace? We found the sum of men. We found,

If we found the central evil, the central good.

We buried the fallen without jasmine crowns.

There was nothing he did not suffer, no; nor we.

It was not as if the jasmine ever returned.

But we and the diamond globe at last were one.

We had always been partly one. It was as we came

To see him, that we were wholly one, as we heard

Him chanting for those buried in their blood,

In the jasmine haunted forests, that we knew

The glass man, without external reference.

I

A crinkled paper makes a brilliant sound.

The wrinkled roses tinkle, the paper ones,

And the ear is glass, in which the noises pelt,

The false roses—Compare the silent rose of the sun

And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell,

With this paper, this dust. That states the point.

It is an artificial world. The rose

Of paper is of the nature of its world.

The sea is so many written words; the sky

Is blue, clear, cloudy, high, dark, wide and round;

The mountains inscribe themselves upon the walls.

And, otherwise, the rainy rose belongs

To naked men, to women naked as rain.

Where is that summer warm enough to walk

Among the lascivious poisons, clean of them,

And in what covert may we, naked, be

Beyond the knowledge of nakedness, as part

Of reality, beyond the knowledge of what

Is real, part of a land beyond the mind?

Rain is an unbearable tyranny. Sun is

A monster-maker, an eye, only an eye,

A shapener of shapes for only the eye,

Of things no better than paper things, of days

That are paper days. The false and true are one.

II

The eye believes and its communion takes.

The spirit laughs to see the eye believe

And its communion take. And now of that.

Let the Secretary for Porcelain observe

That evil made magic, as in catastrophe,

If neatly glazed, becomes the same as the fruit

Of an emperor, the egg-plant of a prince.

The good is evil’s last invention. Thus

The maker of catastrophe invents the eye

And through the eye equates ten thousand deaths

With a single well-tempered apricot, or, say,

An egg-plant of good air.

To the laughter of evil: the fierce ricanery

With the ferocious chu-chot-chu between, the sobs

For breath to laugh the louder, the deeper gasps

Uplifting the completest rhetoric

Of sneers, the fugues commencing at the toes

And ending at the finger-tips.… It is death

That is ten thousand deaths and evil death.

Be tranquil in your wounds. It is good death

That puts an end to evil death and dies.

Be tranquil in your wounds. The placating star

Shall be the gentler for the death you die

And the helpless philosophers say still helpful things.

Plato, the reddened flower, the erotic bird.

III

The lean cats of the arches of the churches,

That’s the old world. In the new, all men are priests.

They preach and they are preaching in a land

To be described. They are preaching in a time

To be described. Evangelists of what?

If they could gather their theses into one,

Collect their thoughts together into one,

Into a single thought, thus: into a queen,

An intercessor by innate rapport,

Or into a dark-blue king,
un roi tonnerre
,

Whose merely being was his valiance,

Panjandrum and central heart and mind of minds—

If they could! Or is it the multitude of thoughts,

Like insects in the depths of the mind, that kill

The single thought? The multitudes of men

That kill the single man, starvation’s head,

One man, their bread and their remembered wine?

The lean cats of the arches of the churches

Bask in the sun in which they feel transparent,

As if designed by X, the per-noble master.

They have a sense of their design and savor

The sunlight. They bear brightly the little beyond

Themselves, the slightly unjust drawing that is

Their genius: the exquisite errors of time.

IV

On an early Sunday in April, a feeble day,

He felt curious about the winter hills

And wondered about the water in the lake.

It had been cold since December. Snow fell, first,

At New Year and, from then until April, lay

On everything. Now it had melted, leaving

The gray grass like a pallet, closely pressed;

And dirt. The wind blew in the empty place.

The winter wind blew in an empty place—

There was that difference between the and an,

The difference between himself and no man,

No man that heard a wind in an empty place.

It was time to be himself again, to see

If the place, in spite of its witheredness, was still

Within the difference. He felt curious

Whether the water was black and lashed about

Or whether the ice still covered the lake. There was still

Snow under the trees and on the northern rocks,

The dead rocks not the green rocks, the live rocks. If,

When he looked, the water ran up the air or grew white

Against the edge of the ice, the abstraction would

Be broken and winter would be broken and done,

And being would be being himself again,

Being, becoming seeing and feeling and self,

Black water breaking into reality.

V

The law of chaos is the law of ideas,

Of improvisations and seasons of belief.

Ideas are men. The mass of meaning and

The mass of men are one. Chaos is not

The mass of meaning. It is three or four

Ideas or, say, five men or, possibly, six.

In the end, these philosophic assassins pull

Revolvers and shoot each other. One remains.

The mass of meaning becomes composed again.

He that remains plays on an instrument

A good agreement between himself and night,

A chord between the mass of men and himself,

Far, far beyond the putative canzones

Of love and summer. The assassin sings

In chaos and his song is a consolation.

It is the music of the mass of meaning.

And yet it is a singular romance,

This warmth in the blood-world for the pure idea,

This inability to find a sound,

That clings to the mind like that right sound, that song

Of the assassin that remains and sings

In the high imagination, triumphantly.

VI

Of systematic thinking … Ercole,

O, skin and spine and hair of you, Ercole,

Of what do you lie thinking in your cavern?

To think it is to think the way to death…

That other one wanted to think his way to life,

Sure that the ultimate poem was the mind,

Or of the mind, or of the mind in these

Elysia, these days, half earth, half mind;

Half sun, half thinking of the sun; half sky,

Half desire for indifference about the sky.

He, that one, wanted to think his way to life,

To be happy because people were thinking to be.

They had to think it to be. He wanted that,

To face the weather and be unable to tell

How much of it was light and how much thought,

In these Elysia, these origins,

This single place in which we are and stay,

Except for the images we make of it,

And for it, and by which we think the way,

And, being unhappy, talk of happiness

And, talking of happiness, know that it means

That the mind is the end and must be satisfied.

It cannot be half earth, half mind; half sun,

Half thinking; until the mind has been satisfied,

Until, for him, his mind is satisfied.

Time troubles to produce the redeeming thought.

Sometimes at sleepy mid-days it succeeds,

Too vaguely that it be written in character.

VII

To have satisfied the mind and turn to see,

(That being as much belief as we may have,)

And turn to look and say there is no more

Than this, in this alone I may believe,

Whatever it may be; then one’s belief

Resists each past apocalypse, rejects

Ceylon, wants nothing from the sea,
la belle

Aux crinolines
, smears out mad mountains.

One believes is what matters. Ecstatic identities

Between one’s self and the weather and the things

Of the weather are the belief in one’s element,

The casual reunions, the long-pondered

Surrenders, the repeated sayings that

There is nothing more and that it is enough

To believe in the weather and in the things and men

Of the weather and in one’s self, as part of that

And nothing more. So that if one went to the moon,

Or anywhere beyond, to a different element,

One would be drowned in the air of difference,

Incapable of belief, in the difference.

And then returning from the moon, if one breathed

The cold evening, without any scent or the shade

Of any woman, watched the thinnest light

And the most distant, single color, about to change,

And naked of any illusion, in poverty,

In the exactest poverty, if then

One breathed the cold evening, the deepest inhalation

Would come from that return to the subtle centre.