The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (33 page)

Enjoying angels. Whistle, forced bugler,

That bugles for the mate, nearby the nest,

Cock bugler, whistle and bugle and stop just short,

Red robin, stop in your preludes, practicing

Mere repetitions. These things at least comprise

An occupation, an exercise, a work,

A thing final in itself and, therefore, good:

One of the vast repetitions final in

Themselves and, therefore, good, the going round

And round and round, the merely going round,

Until merely going round is a final good,

The way wine comes at a table in a wood.

And we enjoy like men, the way a leaf

Above the table spins its constant spin,

So that we look at it with pleasure, look

At it spinning its eccentric measure. Perhaps,

The man-hero is not the exceptional monster,

But he that of repetition is most master.

X

Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night,

How is it I find you in difference, see you there

In a moving contour, a change not quite completed?

You are familiar yet an aberration.

Civil, madam, I am, but underneath

A tree, this unprovoked sensation requires

That I should name you flatly, waste no words,

Check your evasions, hold you to yourself.

Even so when I think of you as strong or tired,

Bent over work, anxious, content, alone,

You remain the more than natural figure. You

Become the soft-footed phantom, the irrational

Distortion, however fragrant, however dear.

That’s it: the more than rational distortion,

The fiction that results from feeling. Yes, that.

They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.

We shall return at twilight from the lecture

Pleased that the irrational is rational,

Until flicked by feeling, in a gildered street,

I call you by name, my green, my fluent mundo.

You will have stopped revolving except in crystal.

Soldier, there is a war between the mind

And sky, between thought and day and night. It is

For that the poet is always in the sun,

Patches the moon together in his room

To his Virgilian cadences, up down,

Up down. It is a war that never ends.

Yet it depends on yours. The two are one.

They are a plural, a right and left, a pair,

Two parallels that meet if only in

The meeting of their shadows or that meet

In a book in a barrack, a letter from Malay.

But your war ends. And after it you return

With six meats and twelve wines or else without

To walk another room … Monsieur and comrade,

The soldier is poor without the poet’s lines,

His petty syllabi, the sounds that stick,

Inevitably modulating, in the blood.

And war for war, each has its gallant kind.

How simply the fictive hero becomes the real;

How gladly with proper words the soldier dies,

If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech.

I

This is where the serpent lives, the bodiless.

His head is air. Beneath his tip at night

Eyes open and fix on us in every sky.

Or is this another wriggling out of the egg,

Another image at the end of the cave,

Another bodiless for the body’s slough?

This is where the serpent lives. This is his nest,

These fields, these hills, these tinted distances,

And the pines above and along and beside the sea.

This is form gulping after formlessness,

Skin flashing to wished-for disappearances

And the serpent body flashing without the skin.

This is the height emerging and its base

These lights may finally attain a pole

In the midmost midnight and find the serpent there,

In another nest, the master of the maze

Of body and air and forms and images,

Relentlessly in possession of happiness.

This is his poison: that we should disbelieve

Even that. His meditations in the ferns,

When he moved so slightly to make sure of sun,

Made us no less as sure. We saw in his head,

Black beaded on the rock, the flecked animal,

The moving grass, the Indian in his glade.

II

Farewell to an idea … A cabin stands,

Deserted, on a beach. It is white,

As by a custom or according to

An ancestral theme or as a consequence

Of an infinite course. The flowers against the wall

Are white, a little dried, a kind of mark

Reminding, trying to remind, of a white

That was different, something else, last year

Or before, not the white of an aging afternoon,

Whether fresher or duller, whether of winter cloud

Or of winter sky, from horizon to horizon.

The wind is blowing the sand across the floor.

Here, being visible is being white,

Is being of the solid of white, the accomplishment

Of an extremist in an exercise…

The season changes. A cold wind chills the beach.

The long lines of it grow longer, emptier,

A darkness gathers though it does not fall

And the whiteness grows less vivid on the wall.

The man who is walking turns blankly on the sand.

He observes how the north is always enlarging the change,

With its frigid brilliances, its blue-red sweeps

And gusts of great enkindlings, its polar green,

The color of ice and fire and solitude.

III

Farewell to an idea … The mother’s face,

The purpose of the poem, fills the room.

They are together, here, and it is warm,

With none of the prescience of oncoming dreams,

It is evening. The house is evening, half dissolved.

Only the half they can never possess remains,

Still-starred. It is the mother they possess,

Who gives transparence to their present peace.

She makes that gentler that can gentle be.

And yet she too is dissolved, she is destroyed.

She gives transparence. But she has grown old.

The necklace is a carving not a kiss.

The soft hands are a motion not a touch.

The house will crumble and the books will burn.

They are at ease in a shelter of the mind

And the house is of the mind and they and time,

Together, all together. Boreal night

Will look like frost as it approaches them

And to the mother as she falls asleep

And as they say good-night, good-night. Upstairs

The windows will be lighted, not the rooms.

A wind will spread its windy grandeurs round

And knock like a rifle-butt against the door.

The wind will command them with invincible sound.

IV

Farewell to an idea … The cancellings,

The negations are never final. The father sits

In space, wherever he sits, of bleak regard,

As one that is strong in the bushes of his eyes.

He says no to no and yes to yes. He says yes

To no; and in saying yes he says farewell.

He measures the velocities of change.

He leaps from heaven to heaven more rapidly

Than bad angels leap from heaven to hell in flames.

But now he sits in quiet and green-a-day.

He assumes the great speeds of space and flutters them

From cloud to cloudless, cloudless to keen clear

In flights of eye and ear, the highest eye

And the lowest ear, the deep ear that discerns,

At evening, things that attend it until it hears

The supernatural preludes of its own,

At the moment when the angelic eye defines

Its actors approaching, in company, in their masks.

Master O master seated by the fire

And yet in space and motionless and yet

Of motion the ever-brightening origin,

Profound, and yet the king and yet the crown,

Look at this present throne. What company,

In masks, can choir it with the naked wind?

V

The mother invites humanity to her house

And table. The father fetches tellers of tales

And musicians who mute much, muse much, on the tales.

The father fetches negresses to dance,

Among the children, like curious ripenesses

Of pattern in the dance’s ripening.

For these the musicians make insidious tones,

Clawing the sing-song of their instruments.

The children laugh and jangle a tinny time.

The father fetches pageants out of air,

Scenes of the theatre, vistas and blocks of woods

And curtains like a naive pretence of sleep.

Among these the musicians strike the instinctive poem.

The father fetches his unherded herds,

Of barbarous tongue, slavered and panting halves

Of breath, obedient to his trumpet’s touch.

This then is Chatillon or as you please.

We stand in the tumult of a festival.

What festival? This loud, disordered mooch?

These hospitaliers? These brute-like guests?

These musicians dubbing at a tragedy,

A-dub, a-dub, which is made up of this:

That there are no lines to speak? There is no play.

Or, the persons act one merely by being here.

VI

It is a theatre floating through the clouds,

Itself a cloud, although of misted rock

And mountains running like water, wave on wave,

Through waves of light. It is of cloud transformed

To cloud transformed again, idly, the way

A season changes color to no end,

Except the lavishing of itself in change,

As light changes yellow into gold and gold

To its opal elements and fire’s delight,

Splashed wide-wise because it likes magnificence

And the solemn pleasures of magnificent space.

The cloud drifts idly through half-thought-of forms.

The theatre is filled with flying birds,

Wild wedges, as of a volcano’s smoke, palm-eyed

And vanishing, a web in a corridor

Or massive portico. A capitol,

It may be, is emerging or has just

Collapsed. The denouement has to be postponed…

This is nothing until in a single man contained,

Nothing until this named thing nameless is

And is destroyed. He opens the door of his house

On flames. The scholar of one candle sees

An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame

Of everything he is. And he feels afraid.

VII

Is there an imagination that sits enthroned

As grim as it is benevolent, the just

And the unjust, which in the midst of summer stops

To imagine winter? When the leaves are dead,

Does it take its place in the north and enfold itself,

Goat-leaper, crystalled and luminous, sitting

In highest night? And do these heavens adorn

And proclaim it, the white creator of black, jetted

By extinguishings, even of planets as may be,

Even of earth, even of sight, in snow,

Except as needed by way of majesty,

In the sky, as crown and diamond cabala?

It leaps through us, through all our heavens leaps,

Extinguishing our planets, one by one,

Leaving, of where we were and looked, of where

We knew each other and of each other thought,

A shivering residue, chilled and foregone,

Except for that crown and mystical cabala.

But it dare not leap by chance in its own dark.

It must change from destiny to slight caprice.

And thus its jetted tragedy, its stele

And shape and mournful making move to find

What must unmake it and, at last, what can,

Say, a flippant communication under the moon.

VIII

There may be always a time of innocence.

There is never a place. Or if there is no time,

If it is not a thing of time, nor of place,