The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (32 page)

It is true. Tonight the lilacs magnify

The easy passion, the ever-ready love

Of the lover that lies within us and we breathe

An odor evoking nothing, absolute.

We encounter in the dead middle of the night

The purple odor, the abundant bloom.

The lover sighs as for accessible bliss,

Which he can take within him on his breath,

Possess in his heart, conceal and nothing known.

For easy passion and ever-ready love

Are of our earthy birth and here and now

And where we live and everywhere we live,

As in the top-cloud of a May night-evening,

As in the courage of the ignorant man,

Who chants by book, in the heat of the scholar, who writes

The book, hot for another accessible bliss:

The fluctuations of certainty, the change

Of degrees of perception in the scholar’s dark.

VIII

On her trip around the world, Nanzia Nunzio

Confronted Ozymandias. She went

Alone and like a vestal long-prepared.

I am the spouse. She took her necklace off

And laid it in the sand. As I am, I am

The spouse. She opened her stone-studded belt.

I am the spouse, divested of bright gold,

The spouse beyond emerald or amethyst,

Beyond the burning body that I bear.

I am the woman stripped more nakedly

Than nakedness, standing before an inflexible

Order, saying I am the contemplated spouse.

Speak to me that, which spoken, will array me

In its own only precious ornament.

Set on me the spirit’s diamond coronal.

Clothe me entire in the final filament,

So that I tremble with such love so known

And myself am precious for your perfecting.

Then Ozymandias said the spouse, the bride

Is never naked. A fictive covering

Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind.

IX

The poem goes from the poet’s gibberish to

The gibberish of the vulgate and back again.

Does it move to and fro or is it of both

At once? Is it a luminous flittering

Or the concentration of a cloudy day?

Is there a poem that never reaches words

And one that chaffers the time away?

Is the poem both peculiar and general?

There’s a meditation there, in which there seems

To be an evasion, a thing not apprehended or

Not apprehended well. Does the poet

Evade us, as in a senseless element?

Evade, this hot, dependent orator,

The spokesman at our bluntest barriers,

Exponent by a form of speech, the speaker

Of a speech only a little of the tongue?

It is the gibberish of the vulgate that he seeks.

He tries by a peculiar speech to speak

The peculiar potency of the general,

To compound the imagination’s Latin with

The lingua franca et jocundissima.

X

A bench was his catalepsy, Theatre

Of Trope. He sat in the park. The water of

The lake was full of artificial things,

Like a page of music, like an upper air,

Like a momentary color, in which swans

Were seraphs, were saints, were changing essences.

The west wind was the music, the motion, the force

To which the swans curveted, a will to change,

A will to make iris frettings on the blank.

There was a will to change, a necessitous

And present way, a presentation, a kind

Of volatile world, too constant to be denied,

The eye of a vagabond in metaphor

That catches our own. The casual is not

Enough. The freshness of transformation is

The freshness of a world. It is our own,

It is ourselves, the freshness of ourselves,

And that necessity and that presentation

Are rubbings of a glass in which we peer.

Of these beginnings, gay and green, propose

The suitable amours. Time will write them down.

It Must Give Pleasure

I

To sing jubilas at exact, accustomed times,

To be crested and wear the mane of a multitude

And so, as part, to exult with its great throat,

To speak of joy and to sing of it, borne on

The shoulders of joyous men, to feel the heart

That is the common, the bravest fundament,

This is a facile exercise. Jerome

Begat the tubas and the fire-wind strings,

The golden fingers picking dark-blue air:

For companies of voices moving there,

To find of sound the bleakest ancestor,

To find of light a music issuing

Whereon it falls in more than sensual mode.

But the difficultest rigor is forthwith,

On the image of what we see, to catch from that

Irrational moment its unreasoning,

As when the sun comes rising, when the sea

Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall

Of heaven-haven. These are not things transformed.

Yet we are shaken by them as if they were.

We reason about them with a later reason.

II

The blue woman, linked and lacquered, at her window

Did not desire that feathery argentines

Should be cold silver, neither that frothy clouds

Should foam, be foamy waves, should move like them,

Nor that the sexual blossoms should repose

Without their fierce addictions, nor that the heat

Of summer, growing fragrant in the night,

Should strengthen her abortive dreams and take

In sleep its natural form. It was enough

For her that she remembered: the argentines

Of spring come to their places in the grape leaves

To cool their ruddy pulses; the frothy clouds

Are nothing but frothy clouds; the frothy blooms

Waste without puberty; and afterward,

When the harmonious heat of August pines

Enters the room, it drowses and is the night.

It was enough for her that she remembered.

The blue woman looked and from her window named

The corals of the dogwood, cold and clear,

Cold, coldly delineating, being real,

Clear and, except for the eye, without intrusion.

III

A lasting visage in a lasting bush,

A face of stone in an unending red,

Red-emerald, red-slitted-blue, a face of slate,

An ancient forehead hung with heavy hair,

The channel slots of rain, the red-rose-red

And weathered and the ruby-water-worn,

The vines around the throat, the shapeless lips,

The frown like serpents basking on the brow,

The spent feeling leaving nothing of itself,

Red-in-red repetitions never going

Away, a little rusty, a little rouged,

A little roughened and ruder, a crown

The eye could not escape, a red renown

Blowing itself upon the tedious ear.

An effulgence faded, dull cornelian

Too venerably used. That might have been.

It might and might have been. But as it was,

A dead shepherd brought tremendous chords from hell

And bade the sheep carouse. Or so they said.

Children in love with them brought early flowers

And scattered them about, no two alike.

IV

We reason of these things with later reason

And we make of what we see, what we see clearly

And have seen, a place dependent on ourselves.

There was a mystic marriage in Catawba,

At noon it was on the mid-day of the year

Between a great captain and the maiden Bawda.

This was their ceremonial hymn: Anon

We loved but would no marriage make. Anon

The one refused the other one to take,

Foreswore the sipping of the marriage wine.

Each must the other take not for his high,

His puissant front nor for her subtle sound,

The shoo-shoo-shoo of secret cymbals round.

Each must the other take as sign, short sign

To stop the whirlwind, balk the elements.

The great captain loved the ever-hill Catawba

And therefore married Bawda, whom he found there,

And Bawda loved the captain as she loved the sun.

They married well because the marriage-place

Was what they loved. It was neither heaven nor hell.

They were love’s characters come face to face.

V

We drank Meursault, ate lobster Bombay with mango

Chutney. Then the Canon Aspirin declaimed

Of his sister, in what a sensible ecstasy

She lived in her house. She had two daughters, one

Of four, and one of seven, whom she dressed

The way a painter of pauvred color paints.

But still she painted them, appropriate to

Their poverty, a gray-blue yellowed out

With ribbon, a rigid statement of them, white,

With Sunday pearls, her widow’s gayety.

She hid them under simple names. She held

Them closelier to her by rejecting dreams.

The words they spoke were voices that she heard.

She looked at them and saw them as they were

And what she felt fought off the barest phrase.

The Canon Aspirin, having said these things,

Reflected, humming an outline of a fugue

Of praise, a conjugation done by choirs.

Yet when her children slept, his sister herself

Demanded of sleep, in the excitements of silence

Only the unmuddled self of sleep, for them.

VI

When at long midnight the Canon came to sleep

And normal things had yawned themselves away,

The nothingness was a nakedness, a point,

Beyond which fact could not progress as fact.

Thereon the learning of the man conceived

Once more night’s pale illuminations, gold

Beneath, far underneath, the surface of

His eye and audible in the mountain of

His ear, the very material of his mind.

So that he was the ascending wings he saw

And moved on them in orbits’ outer stars

Descending to the children’s bed, on which

They lay. Forth then with huge pathetic force

Straight to the utmost crown of night he flew.

The nothingness was a nakedness, a point

Beyond which thought could not progress as thought.

He had to choose. But it was not a choice

Between excluding things. It was not a choice

Between, but of. He chose to include the things

That in each other are included, the whole,

The complicate, the amassing harmony.

VII

He imposes orders as he thinks of them,

As the fox and snake do. It is a brave affair.

Next he builds capitols and in their corridors,

Whiter than wax, sonorous, fame as it is,

He establishes statues of reasonable men,

Who surpassed the most literate owl, the most erudite

Of elephants. But to impose is not

To discover. To discover an order as of

A season, to discover summer and know it,

To discover winter and know it well, to find,

Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all,

Out of nothing to have come on major weather,

It is possible, possible, possible. It must

Be possible. It must be that in time

The real will from its crude compoundings come,

Seeming, at first, a beast disgorged, unlike,

Warmed by a desperate milk. To find the real,

To be stripped of every fiction except one,

The fiction of an absolute—Angel,

Be silent in your luminous cloud and hear

The luminous melody of proper sound.

VIII

What am I to believe? If the angel in his cloud,

Serenely gazing at the violent abyss,

Plucks on his strings to pluck abysmal glory,

Leaps downward through evening’s revelations, and

On his spredden wings, needs nothing but deep space,

Forgets the gold centre, the golden destiny.

Grows warm in the motionless motion of his flight,

Am I that imagine this angel less satisfied?

Are the wings his, the lapis-haunted air?

Is it he or is it I that experience this?

Is it I then that keep saying there is an hour

Filled with expressible bliss, in which I have

No need, am happy, forget need’s golden hand,

Am satisfied without solacing majesty,

And if there is an hour there is a day,

There is a month, a year, there is a time

In which majesty is a mirror of the self:

I have not but I am and as I am, I am.

These external regions, what do we fill them with

Except reflections, the escapades of death,

Cinderella fulfilling herself beneath the roof?

IX

Whistle aloud, too weedy wren. I can

Do all that angels can. I enjoy like them,

Like men besides, like men in light secluded,