The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (31 page)

V

The lion roars at the enraging desert,

Reddens the sand with his red-colored noise,

Defies red emptiness to evolve his match,

Master by foot and jaws and by the mane,

Most supple challenger. The elephant

Breaches the darkness of Ceylon with blares,

The glitter-goes on surfaces of tanks,

Shattering velvetest far-away. The bear,

The ponderous cinnamon, snarls in his mountain

At summer thunder and sleeps through winter snow.

But you, ephebe, look from your attic window,

Your mansard with a rented piano. You lie

In silence upon your bed. You clutch the corner

Of the pillow in your hand. You writhe and press

A bitter utterance from your writhing, dumb,

Yet voluble dumb violence. You look

Across the roofs as sigil and as ward

And in your centre mark them and are cowed…

These are the heroic children whom time breeds

Against the first idea—to lash the lion,

Caparison elephants, teach bears to juggle.

VI

Not to be realized because not to

Be seen, not to be loved nor hated because

Not to be realized. Weather by Franz Hals,

Brushed up by brushy winds in brushy clouds,

Wetted by blue, colder for white. Not to

Be spoken to, without a roof, without

First fruits, without the virginal of birds,

The dark-blown ceinture loosened, not relinquished.

Gay is, gay was, the gay forsythia

And yellow, yellow thins the Northern blue.

Without a name and nothing to be desired,

If only imagined but imagined well.

My house has changed a little in the sun.

The fragrance of the magnolias comes close,

False flick, false form, but falseness close to kin.

It must be visible or invisible,

Invisible or visible or both:

A seeing and unseeing in the eye.

The weather and the giant of the weather,

Say the weather, the mere weather, the mere air:

An abstraction blooded, as a man by thought.

VII

It feels good as it is without the giant,

A thinker of the first idea. Perhaps

The truth depends on a walk around a lake,

A composing as the body tires, a stop

To see hepatica, a stop to watch

A definition growing certain and

A wait within that certainty, a rest

In the swags of pine-trees bordering the lake.

Perhaps there are times of inherent excellence,

As when the cock crows on the left and all

Is well, incalculable balances,

At which a kind of Swiss perfection comes

And a familiar music of the machine

Sets up its Schwärmerei, not balances

That we achieve but balances that happen,

As a man and woman meet and love forthwith.

Perhaps there are moments of awakening,

Extreme, fortuitous, personal, in which

We more than awaken, sit on the edge of sleep,

As on an elevation, and behold

The academies like structures in a mist.

VIII

Can we compose a castle-fortress-home,

Even with the help of Viollet-le-Duc,

And set the MacCullough there as major man?

The first idea is an imagined thing.

The pensive giant prone in violet space

May be the MacCullough, an expedient,

Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis,

Incipit and a form to speak the word

And every latent double in the word,

Beau linguist. But the MacCullough is MacCullough.

It does not follow that major man is man.

If MacCullough himself lay lounging by the sea,

Drowned in its washes, reading in the sound,

About the thinker of the first idea,

He might take habit, whether from wave or phrase,

Or power of the wave, or deepened speech,

Or a leaner being, moving in on him,

Of greater aptitude and apprehension,

As if the waves at last were never broken,

As if the language suddenly, with ease,

Said things it had laboriously spoken.

IX

The romantic intoning, the declaimed clairvoyance

Are parts of apotheosis, appropriate

And of its nature, the idiom thereof.

They differ from reason’s click-clack, its applied

Enflashings. But apotheosis is not

The origin of the major man. He comes,

Compact in invincible foils, from reason,

Lighted at midnight by the studious eye,

Swaddled in revery, the object of

The hum of thoughts evaded in the mind,

Hidden from other thoughts, he that reposes

On a breast forever precious for that touch,

For whom the good of April falls tenderly,

Falls down, the cock-birds calling at the time.

My dame, sing for this person accurate songs.

He is and may be but oh! he is, he is,

This foundling of the infected past, so bright,

So moving in the manner of his hand.

Yet look not at his colored eyes. Give him

No names. Dismiss him from your images.

The hot of him is purest in the heart.

X

The major abstraction is the idea of man

And major man is its exponent, abler

In the abstract than in his singular,

More fecund as principle than particle,

Happy fecundity, flor-abundant force,

In being more than an exception, part,

Though an heroic part, of the commonal.

The major abstraction is the commonal,

The inanimate, difficult visage. Who is it?

What rabbi, grown furious with human wish,

What chieftain, walking by himself, crying

Most miserable, most victorious,

Does not see these separate figures one by one,

And yet see only one, in his old coat,

His slouching pantaloons, beyond the town,

Looking for what was, where it used to be?

Cloudless the morning. It is he. The man

In that old coat, those sagging pantaloons,

It is of him, ephebe, to make, to confect

The final elegance, not to console

Nor sanctify, but plainly to propound.

It Must Change

I

The old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets

Inhaled the appointed odor, while the doves

Rose up like phantoms from chronologies.

The Italian girls wore jonquils in their hair

And these the seraph saw, had seen long since,

In the bandeaux of the mothers, would see again.

The bees came booming as if they had never gone,

As if hyacinths had never gone. We say

This changes and that changes. Thus the constant

Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths

Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause

In a universe of inconstancy. This means

Night-blue is an inconstant thing. The seraph

Is satyr in Saturn, according to his thoughts.

It means the distaste we feel for this withered scene

Is that it has not changed enough. It remains,

It is a repetition. The bees come booming

As if—The pigeons clatter in the air.

An erotic perfume, half of the body, half

Of an obvious acid is sure what it intends

And the booming is blunt, not broken in subtleties.

II

The President ordains the bee to be

Immortal. The President ordains. But does

The body lift its heavy wing, take up,

Again, an inexhaustible being, rise

Over the loftiest antagonist

To drone the green phrases of its juvenal?

Why should the bee recapture a lost blague,

Find a deep echo in a horn and buzz

The bottomless trophy, new hornsman after old?

The President has apples on the table

And barefoot servants round him, who adjust

The curtains to a metaphysical t

And the banners of the nation flutter, burst

On the flag-poles in a red-blue dazzle, whack

At the halyards. Why, then, when in golden fury

Spring vanishes the scraps of winter, why

Should there be a question of returning or

Of death in memory’s dream? Is spring a sleep?

This warmth is for lovers at last accomplishing

Their love, this beginning, not resuming, this

Booming and booming of the new-come bee.

III

The great statue of the General Du Puy

Rested immobile, though neighboring catafalques

Bore off the residents of its noble Place.

The right, uplifted foreleg of the horse

Suggested that, at the final funeral,

The music halted and the horse stood still.

On Sundays, lawyers in their promenades

Approached this strongly-heightened effigy

To study the past, and doctors, having bathed

Themselves with care, sought out the nerveless frame

Of a suspension, a permanence, so rigid

That it made the General a bit absurd,

Changed his true flesh to an inhuman bronze.

There never had been, never could be, such

A man. The lawyers disbelieved, the doctors

Said that as keen, illustrious ornament,

As a setting for geraniums, the General,

The very Place Du Puy, in fact, belonged

Among our more vestigial states of mind.

Nothing had happened because nothing had changed.

Yet the General was rubbish in the end.

IV

Two things of opposite natures seem to depend

On one another, as a man depends

On a woman, day on night, the imagined

On the real. This is the origin of change.

Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace

And forth the particulars of rapture come.

Music falls on the silence like a sense,

A passion that we feel, not understand.

Morning and afternoon are clasped together

And North and South are an intrinsic couple

And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers

That walk away as one in the greenest body.

In solitude the trumpets of solitude

Are not of another solitude resounding;

A little string speaks for a crowd of voices.

The partaker partakes of that which changes him.

The child that touches takes character from the thing,

The body, it touches. The captain and his men

Are one and the sailor and the sea are one.

Follow after, O my companion, my fellow, my self,

Sister and solace, brother and delight.

V

On a blue island in a sky-wide water

The wild orange trees continued to bloom and to bear,

Long after the planter’s death. A few limes remained,

Where his house had fallen, three scraggy trees weighted

With garbled green. These were the planter’s turquoise

And his orange blotches, these were his zero green,

A green baked greener in the greenest sun.

These were his beaches, his sea-myrtles in

White sand, his patter of the long sea-slushes.

There was an island beyond him on which rested,

An island to the South, on which rested like

A mountain, a pineapple pungent as Cuban summer.

And là-bas, là-bas, the cool bananas grew,

Hung heavily on the great banana tree,

Which pierces clouds and bends on half the world.

He thought often of the land from which he came,

How that whole country was a melon, pink

If seen rightly and yet a possible red.

An unaffected man in a negative light

Could not have borne his labor nor have died

Sighing that he should leave the banjo’s twang.

VI

Bethou me, said sparrow, to the crackled blade,

And you, and you, bethou me as you blow,

When in my coppice you behold me be.

Ah, ké! the bloody wren, the felon jay,

Ké-ké, the jug-throated robin pouring out,

Bethou, bethou, bethou me in my glade.

There was such idiot minstrelsy in rain,

So many clappers going without bells,

That these bethous compose a heavenly gong.

One voice repeating, one tireless chorister,

The phrases of a single phrase, ké-ké,

A single text, granite monotony,

One sole face, like a photograph of fate,

Glass-blower’s destiny, bloodless episcopus,

Eye without lid, mind without any dream—

These are of minstrels lacking minstrelsy,

Of an earth in which the first leaf is the tale

Of leaves, in which the sparrow is a bird

Of stone, that never changes. Bethou him, you

And you, bethou him and bethou. It is

A sound like any other. It will end.

VII

After a lustre of the moon, we say

We have not the need of any paradise,

We have not the need of any seducing hymn.