The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (26 page)

XI

Life is a bitter aspic. We are not

At the centre of a diamond. At dawn,

The paratroopers fall and as they fall

They mow the lawn. A vessel sinks in waves

Of people, as big bell-billows from its bell

Bell-bellow in the village steeple. Violets,

Great tufts, spring up from buried houses

Of poor, dishonest people, for whom the steeple,

Long since, rang out farewell, farewell, farewell.

Natives of poverty, children of malheur,

The gaiety of language is our seigneur.

A man of bitter appetite despises

A well-made scene in which paratroopers

Select adieux; and he despises this:

A ship that rolls on a confected ocean,

The weather pink, the wind in motion; and this:

A steeple that tip-tops the classic sun’s

Arrangements; and the violets’ exhumo.

The tongue caresses these exacerbations.

They press it as epicure, distinguishing

Themselves from its essential savor,

Like hunger that feeds on its own hungriness.

XII

He disposes the world in categories, thus:

The peopled and the unpeopled. In both, he is

Alone. But in the peopled world, there is,

Besides the people, his knowledge of them. In

The unpeopled, there is his knowledge of himself.

Which is more desperate in the moments when

The will demands that what he thinks be true?

Is it himself in them that he knows or they

In him? If it is himself in them, they have

No secret from him. If it is they in him,

He has no secret from them. This knowledge

Of them and of himself destroys both worlds,

Except when he escapes from it. To be

Alone is not to know them or himself.

This creates a third world without knowledge,

In which no one peers, in which the will makes no

Demands. It accepts whatever is as true,

Including pain, which, otherwise, is false.

In the third world, then, there is no pain. Yes, but

What lover has one in such rocks, what woman,

However known, at the centre of the heart?

XIII

It may be that one life is a punishment

For another, as the son’s life for the father’s.

But that concerns the secondary characters.

It is a fragmentary tragedy

Within the universal whole. The son

And the father alike and equally are spent,

Each one, by the necessity of being

Himself, the unalterable necessity

Of being this unalterable animal.

This force of nature in action is the major

Tragedy. This is destiny unperplexed,

The happiest enemy. And it may be

That in his Mediterranean cloister a man,

Reclining, eased of desire, establishes

The visible, a zone of blue and orange

Versicolorings, establishes a time

To watch the fire-feinting sea and calls it good,

The ultimate good, sure of a reality

Of the longest meditation, the maximum,

The assassin’s scene. Evil in evil is

Comparative. The assassin discloses himself,

The force that destroys us is disclosed, within

This maximum, an adventure to be endured

With the politest helplessness. Ay-mi!

One feels its action moving in the blood.

XIV

Victor Serge said, “I followed his argument

With the blank uneasiness which one might feel

In the presence of a logical lunatic.”

He said it of Konstantinov. Revolution

Is the affair of logical lunatics.

The politics of emotion must appear

To be an intellectual structure. The cause

Creates a logic not to be distinguished

From lunacy … One wants to be able to walk

By the lake at Geneva and consider logic:

To think of the logicians in their graves

And of the worlds of logic in their great tombs.

Lakes are more reasonable than oceans. Hence,

A promenade amid the grandeurs of the mind,

By a lake, with clouds like lights among great tombs,

Gives one a blank uneasiness, as if

One might meet Konstantinov, who would interrupt

With his lunacy. He would not be aware of the lake.

He would be the lunatic of one idea

In a world of ideas, who would have all the people

Live, work, suffer and die in that idea

In a world of ideas. He would not be aware of the clouds,

Lighting the martyrs of logic with white fire.

His extreme of logic would be illogical.

XV

The greatest poverty is not to live

In a physical world, to feel that one’s desire

Is too difficult to tell from despair. Perhaps,

After death, the non-physical people, in paradise,

Itself non-physical, may, by chance, observe

The green corn gleaming and experience

The minor of what we feel. The adventurer

In humanity has not conceived of a race

Completely physical in a physical world.

The green corn gleams and the metaphysicals

Lie sprawling in majors of the August heat,

The rotund emotions, paradise unknown.

This is the thesis scrivened in delight,

The reverberating psalm, the right chorale.

One might have thought of sight, but who could think

Of what it sees, for all the ill it sees?

Speech found the ear, for all the evil sound,

But the dark italics it could not propound.

And out of what one sees and hears and out

Of what one feels, who could have thought to make

So many selves, so many sensuous worlds,

As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming

With the metaphysical changes that occur,

Merely in living as and where we live.

This structure of ideas, these ghostly sequences

Of the mind, result only in disaster. It follows,

Casual poet, that to add your own disorder to disaster

Makes more of it. It is easy to wish for another structure

Of ideas and to say as usual that there must be

Other ghostly sequences and, it would be, luminous

Sequences, thought of among spheres in the old peak of night:

This is the habit of wishing, as if one’s grandfather lay

In one’s heart and wished as he had always wished, unable

To sleep in that bed for its disorder, talking of ghostly

Sequences that would be sleep and ting-tang tossing, so that

He might slowly forget. It is more difficult to evade

That habit of wishing and to accept the structure

Of things as the structure of ideas. It was the structure

Of things at least that was thought of in the old peak of night.

If there must be a god in the house, must be,

Saying things in the rooms and on the stair,

Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,

Or moonlight, silently, as Plato’s ghost

Or Aristotle’s skeleton. Let him hang out

His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.

He must be incapable of speaking, closed,

As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;

As color, even the closest to us, is;

As shapes, though they portend us, are.

It is the human that is the alien,

The human that has no cousin in the moon.

It is the human that demands his speech

From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.

If there must be a god in the house, let him be one

That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness,

A vermilioned nothingness, any stick of the mass

Of which we are too distantly a part.

The life of the world depends on that he is

Alive, on that people are alive, on that

There is village and village of them, without regard

To that be-misted one and apart from her.

Did we expect to live in other lives?

We grew used so soon, too soon, to earth itself,

As an element; to the sky, as an element.

People might share but were never an element,

Like earth and sky. Then he became nothing else

And they were nothing else. It was late in the year.

The wild ducks were enveloped. The weather was cold.

Yet, under the migrations to solitude,

There remained the smoke of the villages. Their fire

Was central in distances the wild ducks could

Not span, without any weather at all, except

The weather of other lives, from which there could

Be no migrating. It was that they were there

That held the distances off: the villages

Held off the final, fatal distances,

Between us and the place in which we stood.

I

All the Preludes to Felicity

It is time that beats in the breast and it is time

That batters against the mind, silent and proud,

The mind that knows it is destroyed by time.

Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse

Without a rider on a road at night.

The mind sits listening and hears it pass.

It is someone walking rapidly in the street.

The reader by the window has finished his book

And tells the hour by the lateness of the sounds.

Even breathing is the beating of time, in kind:

A retardation of its battering,

A horse grotesquely taut, a walker like

A shadow in mid-earth … If we propose

A large-sculptured, platonic person, free from time,

And imagine for him the speech he cannot speak,

A form, then, protected from the battering, may

Mature: A capable being may replace

Dark horse and walker walking rapidly.

Felicity, ah! Time is the hooded enemy,

The inimical music, the enchantered space

In which the enchanted preludes have their place.

II

Description of a Platonic Person

Then came Brazil to nourish the emaciated

Romantic with dreams of her avoirdupois, green glade

Of serpents like z rivers simmering,

Green glade and holiday hotel and world

Of the future, in which the memory had gone

From everything, flying the flag of the nude,

The flag of the nude above the holiday hotel.

But there was one invalid in that green glade

And beneath that handkerchief drapeau, severe,

Signal, a character out of solitude,

Who was what people had been and still were,

Who lay in bed on the west wall of the sea,

Ill of a question like a malady,

Ill of a constant question in his thought,

Unhappy about the sense of happiness.

Was it that—a sense and beyond intelligence?

Could the future rest on a sense and be beyond

Intelligence? On what does the present rest?

This platonic person discovered a soul in the world

And studied it in his holiday hotel.

He was a Jew from Europe or might have been.

III

Fire-monsters in the Milky Brain

Man, that is not born of woman but of air,

That comes here in the solar chariot,

Like rhetoric in a narration of the eye—

We knew one parent must have been divine,

Adam of beau regard, from fat Elysia,

Whose mind malformed this morning metaphor,

While all the leaves leaked gold. His mind made morning,

As he slept. He woke in a metaphor: this was

A metamorphosis of paradise,

Malformed, the world was paradise malformed…

Now, closely the ear attends the varying

Of this precarious music, the change of key

Not quite detected at the moment of change

And, now, it attends the difficult difference.

To say the solar chariot is junk

Is not a variation but an end.

Yet to speak of the whole world as metaphor

Is still to stick to the contents of the mind

And the desire to believe in a metaphor.

It is to stick to the nicer knowledge of

Belief, that what it believes in is not true.

IV

Dry Birds Are Fluttering in Blue Leaves

It is never the thing but the version of the thing:

The fragrance of the woman not her self,

Her self in her manner not the solid block,

The day in its color not perpending time,

Time in its weather, our most sovereign lord,

The weather in words and words in sounds of sound.

These devastations are the divertissements

Of a destroying spiritual that digs-a-dog,

Whines in its hole for puppies to come see,

Springs outward, being large, and, in the dust,

Being small, inscribes ferocious alphabets,

Flies like a bat expanding as it flies,

Until its wings bear off night’s middle witch;

And yet remains the same, the beast of light,

Groaning in half-exploited gutturals