The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (21 page)

VIII

We live in a camp … Stanzas of final peace

Lie in the heart’s residuum … Amen.

But would it be amen, in choirs, if once

In total war we died and after death

Returned, unable to die again, fated

To endure thereafter every mortal wound,

Beyond a second death, as evil’s end?

It is only that we are able to die, to escape

The wounds. Yet to lie buried in evil earth,

If evil never ends, is to return

To evil after death, unable to die

Again and fated to endure beyond

Any mortal end. The chants of final peace

Lie in the heart’s residuum.

We chant if we live in evil and afterward

Lie harshly buried there?

Its evil after death, it dissolves it while

We live. Thence come the final chants, the chants

Of the brooder seeking the acutest end

Of speech: to pierce the heart’s residuum

And there to find music for a single line,

Equal to memory, one line in which

The vital music formulates the words.

Behold the men in helmets borne on steel,

Discolored, how they are going to defeat.

What more is there to love than I have loved?

And if there be nothing more, O bright, O bright,

The chick, the chidder-barn and grassy chives

And great moon, cricket-impresario,

And, hoy, the impopulous purple-plated past,

Hoy, hoy, the blue bulls kneeling down to rest.

Chome! clicks the clock, if there be nothing more.

But if, but if there be something more to love,

Something in now a senseless syllable,

A shadow in the mind, a flourisher

Of sounds resembling sounds, efflorisant,

Approaching the feelings or come down from them,

These other shadows, not in the mind, players

Of aphonies, tuned in from zero and

Beyond, futura’s fuddle-fiddling lumps,

But if there be something more to love, amen,

Amen to the feelings about familiar things,

The blessed regal dropped in daggers’ dew,

Amen to thought, our singular skeleton,

Salt-flicker, amen to our accustomed cell,

The moonlight in the cell, words on the wall.

To-night, night’s undeciphered murmuring

Comes close to the prisoner’s ear, becomes a throat

The hand can touch, neither green bronze nor marble,

The hero’s throat in which the words are spoken,

From which the chant comes close upon the ear,

Out of the hero’s being, the deliverer

Delivering the prisoner by his words,

So that the skeleton in the moonlight sings,

Sings of an heroic world beyond the cell,

No, not believing, but to make the cell

A hero’s world in which he is the hero.

Man must become the hero of his world.

The salty skeleton must dance because

He must, in the aroma of summer nights,

Licentious violet and lascive rose,

Midsummer love and softest silences,

Weather of night creatures, whistling all day, too,

And echoing rhetorics more than our own.

He hears the earliest poems of the world

In which man is the hero. He hears the words,

Before the speaker’s youngest breath is taken!

Fear never the brute clouds nor winter-stop

And let the water-belly of ocean roar,

Nor feel the x malisons of other men,

Since in the hero-land to which we go,

A little nearer by each multitude,

To which we come as into bezeled plain,

The poison in the blood will have been purged,

An inner miracle and sun-sacrament,

One of the major miracles, that fall

As apples fall, without astronomy,

One of the sacraments between two breaths,

Magical only for the change they make.

The skeleton said it is a question of

The naked man, the naked man as last

And tallest hero and plus gaudiest vir.

Consider how the speechless, invisible gods

Ruled us before, from over Asia, by

Our merest apprehension of their will.

There must be mercy in Asia and divine

Shadows of scholars bent upon their books,

Divine orations from lean sacristans

Of the good, speaking of good in the voice of men.

All men can speak of it in the voice of gods.

But to speak simply of good is like to love,

To equate the root-man and the super-man,

The root-man swarming, tortured by his mass,

The super-man friseured, possessing and possessed.

A little while of Terra Paradise

I dreamed, of autumn rivers, silvas green,

Of sanctimonious mountains high in snow,

But in that dream a heavy difference

Kept waking and a mournful sense sought out,

In vain, life’s season or death’s element.

Bastard chateaux and smoky demoiselles,

No more. I can build towers of my own,

There to behold, there to proclaim, the grace

And free requiting of responsive fact,

To project the naked man in a state of fact,

As acutest virtue and ascetic trove.

Item: The cocks crow and the birds cry and

The sun expands, like a repetition on

One string, an absolute, not varying

Toward an inaccessible, pure sound.

Item: The wind is never rounding O

And, imageless, it is itself the most,

Mouthing its constant smatter throughout space.

Item: The green fish pensive in green reeds

Is an absolute. Item: The cataracts

As facts fall like rejuvenating rain,

Fall down through nakedness to nakedness,

To the auroral creature musing in the mind.

Item: Breathe, breathe upon the centre of

The breath life’s latest, thousand senses.

But let this one sense be the single main.

And yet what good were yesterday’s devotions?

I affirm and then at midnight the great cat

Leaps quickly from the fireside and is gone.

I

The blue sun in his red cockade

Walked the United States today,

Taller than any eye could see,

Older than any man could be.

He caught the flags and the picket-lines

Of people, round the auto-works:

His manner slickened them. He milled

In the rowdy serpentines. He drilled.

His red cockade topped off a parade.

His manner took what it could find,

In the greenish greens he flung behind

And the sound of pianos in his mind.

II

Solange, the magnolia to whom I spoke,

A nigger tree and with a nigger name,

To which I spoke, near which I stood and spoke,

I am Solange, euphonious bane, she said.

I am a poison at the winter’s end,

Taken with withered weather, crumpled clouds,

To smother the wry spirit’s misery.

Inhale the purple fragrance. It becomes

Almost a nigger fragment, a
mystique

For the spirit left helpless by the intelligence.

There’s a moment in the year, Solange,

When the deep breath fetches another year of life.

Yillow, yillow, yillow,

Old worm, my pretty quirk,

How the wind spells out

Sep - tem - ber.…

Summer is in bones.

Cock-robin’s at Caracas.

Make o, make o, make o,

Oto - otu - bre.

And the rude leaves fall.

The rain falls. The sky

Falls and lies with the worms.

The street lamps

Are those that have been hanged,

Dangling in an illogical

To and to and fro

Fro Niz - nil - imbo.

Now grapes are plush upon the vines.

A soldier walks before my door.

The hives are heavy with the combs.

Before, before, before my door.

And seraphs cluster on the domes,

And saints are brilliant in fresh cloaks.

Before, before, before my door.

The shadows lessen on the walls.

The bareness of the house returns.

An acid sunlight fills the halls.

Before, before. Blood smears the oaks.

A soldier stalks before my door.

It is difficult to read. The page is dark.

Yet he knows what it is that he expects.

The page is blank or a frame without a glass

Or a glass that is empty when he looks.

The greenness of night lies on the page and goes

Down deeply in the empty glass…

Look, realist, not knowing what you expect.

The green falls on you as you look,

Falls on and makes and gives, even a speech.

And you think that that is what you expect,

That elemental parent, the green night,

Teaching a fusky alphabet.

All afternoon the gramophone

Parl-parled the West-Indian weather.

The zebra leaves, the sea

And it all spoke together.

The many-stanzaed sea, the leaves

And it spoke all together.

But you, you used the word,

Your self its honor.

All afternoon the gramaphoon,

All afternoon the gramaphoon,

The world as word,

Parl-parled the West-Indian hurricane.

The world lives as you live,

Speaks as you speak, a creature that

Repeats its vital words, yet balances

The syllable of a syllable.

The trees were plucked like iron bars

And jumbo, the loud general-large

Singsonged and singsonged, wildly free.

Who was the musician, fatly soft

And wildly free, whose clawing thumb

Clawed on the ear these consonants?

Who the transformer, himself transformed,

Whose single being, single form

Were their resemblances to ours?

The companion in nothingness,

Loud, general, large, fat, soft

And wild and free, the secondary man,

Cloud-clown, blue painter, sun as horn,

Hill-scholar, man that never is,

The bad-bespoken lacker,

Ancestor of Narcissus, prince

Of the secondary men. There are no rocks

And stones, only this imager.

One chemical afternoon in mid-autumn,

When the grand mechanics of earth and sky were near,

Even the leaves of the locust were yellow then,

He walked with his year-old boy on his shoulder.

The sun shone and the dog barked and the baby slept.

The leaves, even of the locust, the green locust.

He wanted and looked for a final refuge,

From the bombastic intimations of winter

And the martyrs à la mode. He walked toward

An abstract, of which the sun, the dog, the boy

Were contours. Cold was chilling the wide-moving swans.

The leaves were falling like notes from a piano.

The abstract was suddenly there and gone again.

The negroes were playing football in the park.

The abstract that he saw, like the locust-leaves, plainly:

The premiss from which all things were conclusions,

The noble, Alexandrine verve. The flies

And the bees still sought the chrysanthemums’ odor.

In the first canto of the final canticle,

Too conscious of too many things at once,

Our man beheld the naked, nameless dame,

Seized her and wondered: why beneath the tree

She held her hand before him in the air,

For him to see, wove round her glittering hair.

Too conscious of too many things at once,

In the first canto of the final canticle,

Her hand composed him and composed the tree.

The wind had seized the tree and ha, and ha,

It held the shivering, the shaken limbs,

Then bathed its body in the leaping lake.

Her hand composed him like a hand appeared,

Of an impersonal gesture, a stranger’s hand.

He was too conscious of too many things

In the first canto of the final canticle.

Her hand took his and drew him near to her.

Her hair fell on him and the mi-bird flew

To the ruddier bushes at the garden’s end.

Of her, of her alone, at last he knew

And lay beside her underneath the tree.

In Hydaspia, by Howzen,

Lived a lady, Lady Lowzen,

For whom what is was other things.

Flora she was once. She was florid

A bachelor of feen masquerie,

Evasive and metamorphorid.

Mac Mort she had been, ago,

Twelve-legged in her ancestral hells,

Weaving and weaving many arms.