The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (35 page)

Of communication. It would be enough

If we were ever, just once, at the middle, fixed

In This Beautiful World Of Ours and not as now,

Helplessly at the edge, enough to be

Complete, because at the middle, if only in sense,

And in that enormous sense, merely enjoy.

Say that it is a crude effect, black reds,

Pink yellows, orange whites, too much as they are

To be anything else in the sunlight of the room,

Too much as they are to be changed by metaphor,

Too actual, things that in being real

Make any imaginings of them lesser things.

And yet this effect is a consequence of the way

We feel and, therefore, is not real, except

In our sense of it, our sense of the fertilest red,

Of yellow as first color and of white,

In which the sense lies still, as a man lies,

Enormous, in a completing of his truth.

Our sense of these things changes and they change,

Not as in metaphor, but in our sense

Of them. So sense exceeds all metaphor.

It exceeds the heavy changes of the light.

It is like a flow of meanings with no speech

And of as many meanings as of men.

We are two that use these roses as we are,

In seeing them. This is what makes them seem

So far beyond the rhetorician’s touch.

I

Two forms move among the dead, high sleep

Who by his highness quiets them, high peace

Upon whose shoulders even the heavens rest,

Two brothers. And a third form, she that says

Good-by in the darkness, speaking quietly there,

To those that cannot say good-by themselves.

These forms are visible to the eye that needs,

Needs out of the whole necessity of sight.

The third form speaks, because the ear repeats,

Without a voice, inventions of farewell.

These forms are not abortive figures, rocks,

Impenetrable symbols, motionless. They move

About the night. They live without our light,

In an element not the heaviness of time,

In which reality is prodigy.

There sleep the brother is the father, too,

And peace is cousin by a hundred names

And she that in the syllable between life

And death cries quickly, in a flash of voice,

Keep you, keep you, I am gone, oh keep you as

My memory, is the mother of us all,

The earthly mother and the mother of

The dead. Only the thought of those dark three

Is dark, thought of the forms of dark desire.

II

There came a day, there was a day—one day

A man walked living among the forms of thought

To see their lustre truly as it is

And in harmonious prodigy to be,

A while, conceiving his passage as into a time

That of itself stood still, perennial,

Less time than place, less place than thought of place

And, if of substance, a likeness of the earth,

That by resemblance twanged him through and through,

Releasing an abysmal melody,

A meeting, an emerging in the light,

A dazzle of remembrance and of sight.

III

There he saw well the foldings in the height

Of sleep, the whiteness folded into less,

Like many robings, as moving masses are,

As a moving mountain is, moving through day

And night, colored from distances, central

Where luminous agitations come to rest,

In an ever-changing, calmest unity,

The unique composure, harshest streakings joined

In a vanishing-vanished violet that wraps round

The giant body the meanings of its folds,

The weaving and the crinkling and the vex,

As on water of an afternoon in the wind

After the wind has passed. Sleep realized

Was the whiteness that is the ultimate intellect,

A diamond jubilance beyond the fire,

That gives its power to the wild-ringed eye.

Then he breathed deeply the deep atmosphere

Of sleep, the accomplished, the fulfilling air.

IV

There peace, the godolphin and fellow, estranged, estranged,

Hewn in their middle as the beam of leaves,

The prince of shither-shade and tinsel lights,

Stood flourishing the world. The brilliant height

And hollow of him by its brilliance calmed,

Its brightness burned the way good solace seethes.

This was peace after death, the brother of sleep,

The inhuman brother so much like, so near,

Yet vested in a foreign absolute,

Adorned with cryptic stones and sliding shines,

An immaculate personage in nothingness,

With the whole spirit sparkling in its cloth,

Generations of the imagination piled

In the manner of its stitchings, of its thread,

In the weaving round the wonder of its need,

And the first flowers upon it, an alphabet

By which to spell out holy doom and end,

A bee for the remembering of happiness.

Peace stood with our last blood adorned, last mind,

Damasked in the originals of green,

A thousand begettings of the broken bold.

This is that figure stationed at our end,

Always, in brilliance, fatal, final, formed

Out of our lives to keep us in our death,

To watch us in the summer of Cyclops

Underground, a king as candle by our beds

In a robe that is our glory as he guards.

V

But she that says good-by losing in self

The sense of self, rosed out of prestiges

Of rose, stood tall in self not symbol, quick

And potent, an influence felt instead of seen.

She spoke with backward gestures of her hand.

She held men closely with discovery,

Almost as speed discovers, in the way

Invisible change discovers what is changed,

In the way what was has ceased to be what is.

It was not her look but a knowledge that she had.

She was a self that knew, an inner thing,

Subtler than look’s declaiming, although she moved

With a sad splendor, beyond artifice,

Impassioned by the knowledge that she had,

There on the edges of oblivion.

O exhalation, O fling without a sleeve

And motion outward, reddened and resolved

From sight, in the silence that follows her last word—

VI

This is the mythology of modern death

And these, in their mufflings, monsters of elegy,

Of their own marvel made, of pity made,

Compounded and compounded, life by life,

These are death’s own supremest images,

The pure perfections of parental space,

The children of a desire that is the will,

Even of death, the beings of the mind

In the light-bound space of the mind, the floreate flare…

It is a child that sings itself to sleep,

The mind, among the creatures that it makes,

The people, those by which it lives and dies.

The Back-Ache

    The mind is the terriblest force in the world, father,

    Because, in chief, it, only, can defend

    Against itself. At its mercy, we depend

               Upon it.

Saint John

                         The world is presence and not force.

               Presence is not mind.

The Back-Ache

                                        Presence is
Kinder-Scenen
.

Saint John

    It fills the being before the mind can think.

    The effect of the object is beyond the mind’s

    
Extremest pinch and, easily, as in

    A sudden color on the sea. But it is not

    That big-brushed green. Or in a tragic mode,

    As at the moment of the year when, tick,

    Autumn howls upon half-naked summer. But

    It is not the unravelling of her yellow shift.

    Presence is not the woman, come upon,

    Not yet accustomed, yet, at sight, humane

    To most incredible depths. I speak below

    The tension of the lyre. My point is that

    These illustrations are neither angels, no,

    Nor brilliant blows thereof, ti-rill-a-roo,

    Nor all one’s luck at once in a play of strings.

    They help us face the dumbfoundering abyss

    Between us and the object, external cause,

    The little ignorance that is everything,

    The possible nest in the invisible tree,

    Which in a composite season, now unknown,

    Denied, dismissed, may hold a serpent, loud

    In our captious hymns, erect and sinuous,

    Whose venom and whose wisdom will be one.

    Then the stale turtle will grow limp from age.

    We shall be heavy with the knowledge of that day.

The Back-Ache

    It may be, may be. It is possible.

    Presence lies far too deep, for me to know

    Its irrational reaction, as from pain.

Out of the first warmth of spring,

And out of the shine of the hemlocks,

Among the bare and crooked trees,

She found a helping from the cold,

Like a meaning in nothingness,

Like the snow before it softened

And dwindled into patches,

Like a shelter not in an arc

But in a circle, not in the arc

Of winter, in the unbroken circle

Of summer, at the windy edge,

Sharp in the ice shadow of the sky,

Blue for all that and white and hard,

And yet with water running in the sun,

Entinselled and gilderlinged and gone,

Another American vulgarity.

Into that native shield she slid,

Mistress of an idea, child

Of a mother with vague severed arms

And of a father bearded in his fire.

Who can pick up the weight of Britain,

Who can move the German load

Or say to the French here is France again?

Imago. Imago. Imago.

It is nothing, no great thing, nor man

Of ten brilliancies of battered gold

And fortunate stone. It moves its parade

Of motions in the mind and heart,

A gorgeous fortitude. Medium man

In February hears the imagination’s hymns

And sees its images, its motions

And multitude of motions

And feels the imagination’s mercies,

In a season more than sun and south wind,

Something returning from a deeper quarter,

A glacier running through delirium,

Making this heavy rock a place,

Which is not of our lives composed…

Lightly and lightly, O my land
,

Move lightly through the air again
.

I

The essential poem at the centre of things,

The arias that spiritual fiddlings make,

Have gorged the cast-iron of our lives with good

And the cast-iron of our works. But it is, dear sirs,

A difficult apperception, this gorging good,

Fetched by such slick-eyed nymphs, this essential gold,

This fortune’s finding, disposed and re-disposed

By such slight genii in such pale air.

II

We do not prove the existence of the poem.

It is something seen and known in lesser poems.

It is the huge, high harmony that sounds

A little and a little, suddenly,

By means of a separate sense. It is and it

Is not and, therefore, is. In the instant of speech,

The breadth of an accelerando moves,

Captives the being, widens—and was there.

III

What milk there is in such captivity,

What wheaten bread and oaten cake and kind,

Green guests and table in the woods and songs

At heart, within an instant’s motion, within

A space grown wide, the inevitable blue

Of secluded thunder, an illusion, as it was,

Oh as, always too heavy for the sense

To seize, the obscurest as, the distant was…

IV

One poem proves another and the whole,

For the clairvoyant men that need no proof:

The lover, the believer and the poet.

Their words are chosen out of their desire,

The joy of language, when it is themselves.

With these they celebrate the central poem,

The fulfillment of fulfillments, in opulent,

Last terms, the largest, bulging still with more,

V

Until the used-to earth and sky, and the tree

And cloud, the used-to tree and used-to cloud,

Lose the old uses that they made of them,

And they: these men, and earth and sky, inform

Each other by sharp informations, sharp,

Free knowledges, secreted until then,

Breaches of that which held them fast. It is

As if the central poem became the world,