The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (24 page)

XVI

Last night at the end of night his starry head,

Like the head of fate, looked out in darkness, part

Thereof and part desire and part the sense

Of what men are. The collective being knew

There were others like him safely under roof:

XVII

The captain squalid on his pillow, the great

Cardinal, saying the prayers of earliest day;

The stone, the categorical effigy;

And the mother, the music, the name; the scholar,

Whose green mind bulges with complicated hues:

XVIII

True transfigurers fetched out of the human mountain,

True genii for the diminished, spheres,

Gigantic embryos of populations,

Blue friends in shadows, rich conspirators,

Confiders and comforters and lofty kin.

XIX

To say more than human things with human voice,

That cannot be; to say human things with more

Than human voice, that, also, cannot be;

To speak humanly from the height or from the depth

Of human things, that is acutest speech.

XX

Now, I, Chocorua, speak of this shadow as

A human thing. It is an eminence,

But of nothing, trash of sleep that will disappear

With the special things of night, little by little,

In day’s constellation, and yet remain, yet be,

XXI

Not father, but bare brother, megalfrere,

Or by whatever boorish name a man

Might call the common self, interior fons.

And fond, the total man of glubbal glub,

Political tramp with an heraldic air,

XXII

Cloud-casual, metaphysical metaphor,

But resting on me, thinking in my snow,

Physical if the eye is quick enough,

So that, where he was, there is an enkindling, where

He is, the air changes and grows fresh to breathe.

XXIII

The air changes, creates and re-creates, like strength,

And to breathe is a fulfilling of desire,

A clearing, a detecting, a completing,

A largeness lived and not conceived, a space

That is an instant nature, brilliantly.

XXIV

Integration for integration, the great arms

Of the armies, the solid men, make big the fable.

This is their captain and philosopher,

He that is fortelleze, though he be

Hard to perceive and harder still to touch.

XXV

Last night at the end of night and in the sky,

The lesser night, the less than morning light,

Fell on him, high and cold, searching for what

Was native to him in that height, searching

The pleasure of his spirit in the cold.

XXVI

How singular he was as man, how large,

If nothing more than that, for the moment, large

In my presence, the companion of presences

Greater than mine, of his demanding, head

And, of human realizings, rugged roy…

The brooks are bristling in the field,

Now, brooks are bristling in the fields

And gelid Januar has gone to hell.

II

The water puddles puddles are

And ice is still in Februar.

It still is ice in Februar.

III

The figures of the past go cloaked.

They walk in mist and rain and snow

And go, go slowly, but they go.

IV

The greenhouse on the village green

Is brighter than the sun itself.

Cinerarias have a speaking sheen.

A young man seated at his table

Holds in his hand a book you have never written

Staring at the secretions of the words as

They reveal themselves.

It is not midnight. It is mid-day,

The young man is well-disclosed, one of the gang,

Andrew Jackson Something. But this book

Is a cloud in which a voice mumbles.

It is a ghost that inhabits a cloud,

But a ghost for Andrew, not lean, catarrhal

And pallid. It is the grandfather he liked,

With an understanding compounded by death

And the associations beyond death, even if only

Time. What a thing it is to believe that

One understands, in the intense disclosures

Of a parent in the French sense.

And not yet to have written a book in which

One is already a grandfather and to have put there

A few sounds of meaning, a momentary end

To the complication, is good, is a good.

On an old shore, the vulgar ocean rolls

Noiselessly, noiselessly, resembling a thin bird,

That thinks of settling, yet never settles, on a nest.

The wings keep spreading and yet are never wings.

The claws keep scratching on the shale, the shallow shale,

The sounding shallow, until by water washed away.

The generations of the bird are all

By water washed away. They follow after.

They follow, follow, follow, in water washed away.

Without this bird that never settles, without

Its generations that follow in their universe,

The ocean, falling and falling on the hollow shore,

Would be a geography of the dead: not of that land

To which they may have gone, but of the place in which

They lived, in which they lacked a pervasive being,

In which no scholar, separately dwelling,

Poured forth the fine fins, the gawky beaks, the personalia,

Which, as a man feeling everything, were his.

Thought is false happiness: the idea

That merely by thinking one can,

Or may, penetrate, not may,

But can, that one is sure to be able—

That there lies at the end of thought

A foyer of the spirit in a landscape

Of the mind, in which we sit

And wear humanity’s bleak crown;

In which we read the critique of paradise

And say it is the work

Of a comedian, this critique;

In which we sit and breathe

An innocence of an absolute,

False happiness, since we know that we use

Only the eye as faculty, that the mind

Is the eye, and that this landscape of the mind

Is a landscape only of the eye; and that

We are ignorant men incapable

Of the least, minor, vital metaphor, content,

At last, there, when it turns out to be here.

I

A tempest cracked on the theatre. Quickly,

The wind beat in the roof and half the walls.

The ruin stood still in an external world.

It had been real. It was something overseas

That I remembered, something that I remembered

Overseas, that stood in an external world.

It had been real. It was not now. The rip

Of the wind and the glittering were real now,

In the spectacle of a new reality.

II

The people sat in the theatre, in the ruin,

As if nothing had happened. The dim actor spoke.

His hands became his feelings. His thick shape

Issued thin seconds glibly gapering.

Then faintly encrusted, a tissue of the moon

Walked toward him on the stage and they embraced.

They polished the embracings of a pair

Born old, familiar with the depths of the heart,

Like a machine left running, and running down.

It was a blue scene washing white in the rain,

Like something I remembered overseas.

It was something overseas that I remembered.

III

Millions of major men against their like

Make more than thunder’s rural rumbling. They make

The giants that each one of them becomes

In a calculated chaos: he that takes form

From the others, being larger than he was,

Accoutred in a little of the strength

That sweats the sun up on its morning way

To giant red, sweats up a giant sense

To the make-matter, matter-nothing mind,

Until this matter-makes in years of war.

This being in a reality beyond

The finikin spectres in the memory,

This elevation, in which he seems to be tall,

Makes him rise above the houses, looking down.

His route lies through an image in his mind:

My route lies through an image in my mind,

It is the route that milky millions find,

An image that leaves nothing much behind.

IV

If these were only words that I am speaking

Indifferent sounds and not the heraldic-ho

Of the clear sovereign that is reality,

Of the clearest reality that is sovereign,

How should I repeat them, keep repeating them,

As if they were desperate with a know-and-know,

Central responses to a central fear,

The adobe of the angels? Constantly,

At the railway station, a soldier steps away,

Sees a familiar building drenched in cloud

And goes to an external world, having

Nothing of place. There is no change of place

Nor of time. The departing soldier is as he is,

Yet in that form will not return. But does

He find another? The giant of sense remains

A giant without a body. If, as giant,

He shares a gigantic life, it is because

The gigantic has a reality of its own.

V

On a few words of what is real in the world

I nourish myself. I defend myself against

Whatever remains. Of what is real I say,

Is it the old, the roseate parent or

The bride come jingling, kissed and cupped, or else

The spirit and all ensigns of the self?

A few words, a memorandum voluble

Of the giant sense, the enormous harnesses

And writhing wheels of this world’s business,

The drivers in the wind-blows cracking whips,

The pulling into the sky and the setting there

Of the expanses that are mountainous rock and sea;

And beyond the days, beyond the slow-foot litters

Of the nights, the actual, universal strength,

Without a word of rhetoric—there it is.

A memorandum of the people sprung

From that strength, whose armies set their own expanses.

A few words of what is real or may be

Or of glistening reference to what is real,

The universe that supplements the manqué,

The soldier seeking his point between the two,

The organic consolation, the complete

Society of the spirit when it is

Alone, the half-arc hanging in mid-air

Composed, appropriate to the incomplete,

Supported by a half-arc in mid-earth.

Millions of instances of which I am one.

VI

And if it be theatre for theatre,

The powdered personals against the giants’ rage,

Blue and its deep inversions in the moon

Against gold whipped reddened in big-shadowed black,

Her vague “Secrete me from reality,”

His “That reality secrete itself,”

The choice is made. Green is the orator

Of our passionate height. He wears a tufted green,

And tosses green for those for whom green speaks.

Secrete us in reality. It is there

My orator. Let this giantness fall down

And come to nothing. Let the rainy arcs

And pathetic magnificences dry in the sky.

Secrete us in reality. Discover

A civil nakedness in which to be,

In which to bear with the exactest force

The precisions of fate, nothing fobbed off, nor changed

In a beau language without a drop of blood.

If the poetry of X was music,

So that it came to him of its own,

Without understanding, out of the wall

Or in the ceiling, in sounds not chosen,

Or chosen quickly, in a freedom

That was their element, we should not know

That X is an obstruction, a man

Too exactly himself, and that there are words

Better without an author, without a poet,

Or having a separate author, a different poet,

An accretion from ourselves, intelligent

Beyond intelligence, an artificial man

At a distance, a secondary expositor,

A being of sound, whom one does not approach

Through any exaggeration. From him, we collect.

Tell X that speech is not dirty silence

Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.

It is more than an imitation for the ear.

He lacks this venerable complication.

His poems are not of the second part of life.

They do not make the visible a little hard