The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (36 page)

VI

And the world the central poem, each one the mate

Of the other, as if summer was a spouse,

Espoused each morning, each long afternoon,

And the mate of summer: her mirror and her look,

Her only place and person, a self of her

That speaks, denouncing separate selves, both one.

The essential poem begets the others. The light

Of it is not a light apart, up-hill.

VII

The central poem is the poem of the whole,

The poem of the composition of the whole,

The composition of blue sea and of green,

Of blue light and of green, as lesser poems,

And the miraculous multiplex of lesser poems,

Not merely into a whole, but a poem of

The whole, the essential compact of the parts,

The roundness that pulls tight the final ring

VIII

And that which in an altitude would soar,

A vis, a principle or, it may be,

The meditation of a principle,

Or else an inherent order active to be

Itself, a nature to its natives all

Beneficence, a repose, utmost repose,

The muscles of a magnet aptly felt,

A giant, on the horizon, glistening,

IX

And in bright excellence adorned, crested

With every prodigal, familiar fire,

And unfamiliar escapades: whirroos

And scintillant sizzlings such as children like,

Vested in the serious folds of majesty,

Moving around and behind, a following,

A source of trumpeting seraphs in the eye,

A source of pleasant outbursts on the ear.

X

It is a giant, always, that is evolved,

To be in scale, unless virtue cuts him, snips

Both size and solitude or thinks it does,

As in a signed photograph on a mantelpiece.

But the virtuoso never leaves his shape,

Still on the horizon elongates his cuts,

And still angelic and still plenteous,

Imposes power by the power of his form.

XI

Here, then, is an abstraction given head,

A giant on the horizon, given arms,

A massive body and long legs, stretched out,

A definition with an illustration, not

Too exactly labelled, a large among the smalls

Of it, a close, parental magnitude,

At the centre on the horizon, concentrum, grave

And prodigious person, patron of origins.

XII

That’s it. The lover writes, the believer hears,

The poet mumbles and the painter sees,

Each one, his fated eccentricity,

As a part, but part, but tenacious particle,

Of the skeleton of the ether, the total

Of letters, prophecies, perceptions, clods

Of color, the giant of nothingness, each one

And the giant ever changing, living in change.

If there is a man white as marble

Sits in a wood, in the greenest part,

Brooding sounds of the images of death,

So there is a man in black space

Sits in nothing that we know,

Brooding sounds of river noises;

And these images, these reverberations,

And others, make certain how being

Includes death and the imagination.

The marble man remains himself in space.

The man in the black wood descends unchanged.

It is certain that the river

Is not Swatara. The swarthy water

That flows round the earth and through the skies,

Twisting among the universal spaces,

Is not Swatara. It is being.

That is the flock-flecked river, the water,

The blown sheen—or is it air?

How, then, is metaphor degeneration,

When Swatara becomes this undulant river

And the river becomes the landless, waterless ocean?

Here the black violets grow down to its banks

And the memorial mosses hang their green

Upon it, as it flows ahead.

It is only that this warmth and movement are like

The warmth and movement of a woman.

It is not that there is any image in the air

Nor the beginning nor end of a form:

It is empty. But a woman in threadless gold

Burns us with brushings of her dress

And a dissociated abundance of being,

More definite for what she is—

Because she is disembodied,

Bearing the odors of the summer fields,

Confessing the taciturn and yet indifferent,

Invisibly clear, the only love.

In all the solemn moments of human history … poets rose to sing the hymn of victory or the psalm of supplication.… Cease, then, from being the astute calligraphers of congealed daydreams, the hunters of cerebral phosphorescences
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LETTER OF CELESTIN VI, POPE, TO THE POETS P.C.C. GIOVANNI PAPINI

I

Poor procurator, why do you ask someone else

To say what Celestin should say for himself?

He has an ever-living subject. The poet

Has only the formulations of midnight.

Is Celestin dislodged? The way through the world

Is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.

You know that the nucleus of a time is not

The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind

Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed

As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins

Nor stand there making orotund consolations.

He shares the confusions of intelligence.

Giovanni Papini, by your faith, know how

He wishes that all hard poetry were true.

This pastoral of endurance and of death

Is of a nature that must be perceived

And not imagined. The removes must give,

Including the removes toward poetry.

II

Celestin, the generous, the civilized,

Will understand what it is to understand.

The world is still profound and in its depths

Man sits and studies silence and himself,

Abiding the reverberations in the vaults.

Now, once, he accumulates himself and time

For humane triumphals. But a politics

Of property is not an area

For triumphals. These are hymns appropriate to

The complexities of the world, when apprehended,

The intricacies of appearance, when perceived.

They become our gradual possession. The poet

Increases the aspects of experience,

As in an enchantment, analyzed and fixed

And final. This is the centre. The poet is

The angry day-son clanging at its make:

The satisfaction underneath the sense,

The conception sparkling in still obstinate thought.

I

Of medium nature, this farouche extreme

Is a drop of lightning in an inner world,

Suspended in temporary jauntiness.

The bouquet stands in a jar, as metaphor,

As lightning itself is, likewise, metaphor

Crowded with apparitions suddenly gone

And no less suddenly here again, a growth

Of the reality of the eye, an artifice,

Nothing much, a flitter that reflects itself.

II

One approaches, simply, the reality

Of the other eye. One enters, entering home,

The place of meta-men and para-things,

And yet still men though meta-men, still things

Though para-things; the meta-men for whom

The world has turned to the several speeds of glass,

For whom no blue in the sky prevents them, as

They understand, and take on potency,

By growing clear, transparent magistrates,

Bearded with chains of blue-green glitterings

And wearing hats of angular flick and fleck,

Cold with an under impotency that they know,

Now that they know, because they know. One comes

To the things of medium nature, as meta-men

Behold them, not choses of Provence, growing

In glue, but things transfixed, transpierced and well

Perceived: the white seen smoothly argentine

And plated up, dense silver shine, in a land

Without a god, O silver sheen and shape,

And movement of emotion through the air,

True nothing, yet accosted self to self.

Through the door one sees on the lake that the white duck swims

Away—and tells and tells the water tells

Of the image spreading behind it in idea.

The meta-men behold the idea as part

Of the image, behold it with exactness through beads

And dewy bearings of their light-locked beards.

The green bouquet comes from the place of the duck.

It is centi-colored and mille-flored and ripe,

Of dulce atmosphere, the fore of lofty scenes

But not of romance, the bitterest vulgar do

And die. It stands on a table at a window

Of the land, on a checkered cover, red and white.

The checkered squares, the skeleton of repose,

Breathe slightly, slightly move or seem to move

Toward a consciousness of red and white as one,

A vibrancy of petals, fallen, that still cling

By trivial filaments to the thing intact:

The recognizable, medium, central whole—

So near detachment, the cover’s cornered squares,

And, when detached, so unimportantly gone,

So severed and so much forlorn debris.

Here the eye fastens intently to these lines

And crawls on them, as if feathers of the duck

Fell openly from the air to reappear

In other shapes, as if duck and tablecloth

And the eccentric twistings of the rapt bouquet

Exacted attention with attentive force.

A pack of cards is falling toward the floor.

The sun is secretly shining on a wall.

One remembers a woman standing in such a dress.

III

The rose, the delphinium, the red, the blue,

Are questions of the looks they get. The bouquet,

Regarded by the meta-men, is quirked

And queered by lavishings of their will to see.

It stands a sovereign of souvenirs

Neither remembered nor forgotten, nor old,

Nor new, nor in the sense of memory.

It is a symbol, a sovereign of symbols

In its interpretations voluble,

Embellished by the quicknesses of sight,

When in a way of seeing seen, an extreme,

A sovereign, a souvenir, a sign,

Of today, of this morning, of this afternoon,

Not yesterday, nor tomorrow, an appanage

Of indolent summer not quite physical

And yet of summer, the petty tones

Its colors make, the migratory daze,

The doubling second things, not mystical,

The infinite of the actual perceived,

A freedom revealed, a realization touched,

The real made more acute by an unreal.

IV

Perhaps, these colors, seen in insight, assume

In the eye a special hue of origin.

But if they do, they cast it widely round.

They cast deeply round a crystal crystal-white

And pallid bits, that tend to comply with blue,

A right red with its composites glutted full,

Like a monster that has everything and rests,

And yet is there, a presence in the way.

They cast closely round the facture of the thing

Turned para-thing, the rudiments in the jar,

The stalk, the weed, the grassy flourishes,

The violent disclosure trimly leafed,

Lean larkspur and jagged fern and rusting rue

In a stubborn literacy, an intelligence,

The prismatic sombreness of a torrent’s wave.

The rudiments in the jar, farced, finikin,

Are flatly there, unversed except to be,

Made difficult by salt fragrance, intricate.

They are not splashings in a penumbra. They stand.

They are. The bouquet is a part of a dithering:

Cloud’s gold, of a whole appearance that stands and is.

V

A car drives up. A soldier, an officer,

Steps out. He rings and knocks. The door is not locked.

He enters the room and calls. No one is there.

He bumps the table. The bouquet falls on its side.

He walks through the house, looks round him and then leaves.

The bouquet has slopped over the edge and lies on the floor.

The day is great and strong—

But his father was strong, that lies now

In the poverty of dirt.

Nothing could be more hushed than the way

The moon moves toward the night.

But what his mother was returns and cries on his breast.

The red ripeness of round leaves is thick

With the spices of red summer.

But she that he loved turns cold at his light touch.