The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (37 page)

What good is it that the earth is justified,

That it is complete, that it is an end,

That in itself it is enough?

It is the earth itself that is humanity…

He is the inhuman son and she,

She is the fateful mother, whom he does not know.

She is the day, the walk of the moon

Among the breathless spices and, sometimes,

He, too, is human and difference disappears

And the poverty of dirt, the thing upon his breast,

The hating woman, the meaningless place,

Become a single being, sure and true.

I

Tom McGreevy, in America
,
   Thinks of Himself as a Boy

Out of him that I loved,

Mal Bay I made,

I made Mal Bay

And him in that water.

Over the top of the Bank of Ireland,

The wind blows quaintly

Its thin-stringed music,

As he heard it in Tarbert.

These things were made of him

And out of myself.

He stayed in Kerry, died there.

I live in Pennsylvania.

Out of him I made Mal Bay

And not a bald and tasselled saint.

What would the water have been,

Without that that he makes of it?

The stars are washing up from Ireland

And through and over the puddles of Swatara

And Schuylkill. The sound of him

Comes from a great distance and is heard.

II

The Westwardness of Everything

These are the ashes of fiery weather,

Of nights full of the green stars from Ireland,

Wet out of the sea, and luminously wet,

Like beautiful and abandoned refugees.

The whole habit of the mind is changed by them,

These Gaeled and fitful-fangled darknesses

Made suddenly luminous, themselves a change,

An east in their compelling westwardness,

Themselves an issue as at an end, as if

There was an end at which in a final change,

When the whole habit of the mind was changed,

The ocean breathed out morning in one breath.

Every thread of summer is at last unwoven.

By one caterpillar is great Africa devoured

And Gibraltar is dissolved like spit in the wind.

But over the wind, over the legends of its roaring,

The elephant on the roof and its elephantine blaring,

The bloody lion in the yard at night or ready to spring

From the clouds in the midst of trembling trees

Making a great gnashing, over the water wallows

Of a vacant sea declaiming with wide throat,

Over all these the mighty imagination triumphs

Like a trumpet and says, in this season of memory,

When the leaves fall like things mournful of the past,

Keep quiet in the heart, O wild bitch. O mind

Gone wild, be what he tells you to be:
Puella
.

Write
pax
across the window pane. And then

Be still. The
summarium in excelsis
begins…

Flame, sound, fury composed … Hear what he says,

The dauntless master, as he starts the human tale.

The crows are flying above the foyer of summer.

The winds batter it. The water curls. The leaves

Return to their original illusion.

The sun stands like a Spaniard as he departs,

Stepping from the foyer of summer into that

Of the past, the rodomontadean emptiness.

Mother was afraid I should freeze in the Parisian hotels
.

She had heard of the fate of an Argentine writer. At night
,

He would go to bed, cover himself with blankets—

Protruding from the pile of wool, a hand
,

In a black glove, holds a novel by Camus. She begged

That I stay away. These are the words of José…

He is sitting by the fidgets of a fire,

The first red of red winter, winter-red,

The late, least foyer in a qualm of cold.

How tranquil it was at vividest Varadero,

While the water kept running through the mouth of the speaker,

Saying:
Olalla blanca en el blanco
,

Lol-lolling the endlessness of poetry.

But here tranquillity is what one thinks.

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

The mirror melts and moulds itself and moves

And catches from nowhere brightly-burning breath.

It blows a glassy brightness on the fire

And makes flame flame and makes it bite the wood

And bite the hard-bite, barking as it bites.

The arrangement of the chairs is so and so,

Not as one would have arranged them for oneself,

But in the style of the novel, its tracing

Of an unfamiliar in the familiar room,

A
retrato
that is strong because it is like,

A second that grows first, a black unreal

In which a real lies hidden and alive.

Day’s arches are crumbling into the autumn night.

The fire falls a little and the book is done.

The stillness is the stillness of the mind.

Slowly the room grows dark. It is odd about

That Argentine. Only the real can be

Unreal today, be hidden and alive.

It is odd, too, how that Argentine is oneself,

Feeling the fear that creeps beneath the wool,

Lies on the breast and pierces into the heart,

Straight from the Arcadian imagination,

Its being beating heavily in the veins,

Its knowledge cold within one as one’s own;

And one trembles to be so understood and, at last,

To understand, as if to know became

The fatality of seeing things too well.

At twelve, the disintegration of afternoon

Began, the return to phantomerei, if not

To phantoms. Till then, it had been the other way:

One imagined the violet trees but the trees stood green,

At twelve, as green as ever they would be.

The sky was blue beyond the vaultiest phrase.

Twelve meant as much as: the end of normal time,

Straight up, an élan without harrowing,

The imprescriptible zenith, free of harangue,

Twelve and the first gray second after, a kind

Of violet gray, a green violet, a thread

To weave a shadow’s leg or sleeve, a scrawl

On the pedestal, an ambitious page dog-eared

At the upper right, a pyramid with one side

Like a spectral cut in its perception, a tilt

And its tawny caricature and tawny life,

Another thought, the paramount ado…

Since what we think is never what we see.

Suppose this was the root of everything.

Suppose it turned out to be or that it touched

An image that was mistress of the world.

For example: Au Château. Un Salon. A glass

The sun steps into, regards and finds itself;

Or: Gawks of hay … Augusta Moon, before

An attic glass, hums of the old Lutheran bells

At home; or: In the woods, belle Belle alone

Rattles with fear in unreflecting leaves.

Abba, dark death is the breaking of a glass.

The dazzled flakes and splinters disappear.

The seal is as relaxed as dirt, perdu.

But the images, disembodied, are not broken.

They have, or they may have, their glittering crown,

Sound-soothing pearl and omni-diamond,

Of the most beautiful, the most beautiful maid

And mother. How long have you lived and looked,

Ababba, expecting this king’s queen to appear?

These are the voices of the pastors calling

In the names of St. Paul and of the halo-John

And of other holy and learned men, among them

Great choristers, propounders of hymns, trumpeters,

Jerome and the scrupulous Francis and Sunday women,

The nurses of the spirit’s innocence.

These are the voices of the pastors calling

Much rough-end being to smooth Paradise,

Spreading out fortress walls like fortress wings.

Deep in their sound the stentor Martin sings.

Dark Juan looks outward through his mystic brow…

Each sexton has his sect. The bells have none.

These are the voices of the pastors calling

And calling like the long echoes in long sleep,

Generations of shepherds to generations of sheep.

Each truth is a sect though no bells ring for it.

And the bells belong to the sextons, after all,

As they jangle and dangle and kick their feet.

In the weed of summer comes this green sprout why.

The sun aches and ails and then returns halloo

Upon the horizon amid adult enfantillages.

Its fire fails to pierce the vision that beholds it,

Fails to destroy the antique acceptances,

Except that the grandson sees it as it is,

Peter the voyant, who says “Mother, what is that”—

The object that rises with so much rhetoric,

But not for him. His question is complete.

It is the question of what he is capable.

It is the extreme, the expert aetat. 2.

He will never ride the red horse she describes.

His question is complete because it contains

His utmost statement. It is his own array,

His own pageant and procession and display,

As far as nothingness permits … Hear him.

He does not say, “Mother, my mother, who are you,”

The way the drowsy, infant, old men do.

It does no good to speak of the big, blue bush

Of day. If the study of his images

Is the study of man, this image of Saturday,

This Italian symbol, this Southern landscape, is like

A waking, as in images we awake,

Within the very object that we seek,

Participants of its being. It is, we are.

He is, we are. Ah, bella! He is, we are,

Within the big, blue bush and its vast shade

At evening and at night. It does no good.

Stop at the terraces of mandolins,

False, faded and yet inextricably there,

The pulse of the object, the heat of the body grown cold

Or cooling in late leaves, not false except

When the image itself is false, a mere desire,

Not faded, if images are all we have.

They can be no more faded than ourselves.

The blood refreshes with its stale demands.

The frequency of images of the moon

Is more or less. The pearly women that drop

From heaven and float in air, like animals

Of ether, exceed the excelling witches, whence

They came. But, brown, the ice-bear sleeping in ice-month

In his cave, remains dismissed without a dream,

As if the centre of images had its

Congenial mannequins, alert to please,

Beings of other beings manifold—

The shadowless moon wholly composed of shade,

Women with other lives in their live hair,

Rose—women as half-fishes of salt shine,

As if, as if, as if the disparate halves

Of things were waiting in a bethrothal known

To none, awaiting espousal to the sound

Of right joining, a music of ideas, the burning

And breeding and bearing birth of harmony,

The final relation, the marriage of the rest.

I

The eye’s plain version is a thing apart,

The vulgate of experience. Of this,

A few words, an and yet, and yet, and yet—

As part of the never-ending meditation,

Part of the question that is a giant himself:

Of what is this house composed if not of the sun,

These houses, these difficult objects, dilapidate

Appearances of what appearances,

Words, lines, not meanings, not communications,

Dark things without a double, after all,

Unless a second giant kills the first—

A recent imagining of reality,

Much like a new resemblance of the sun,

Down-pouring, up-springing and inevitable,

A larger poem for a larger audience,

As if the crude collops came together as one,

A mythological form, a festival sphere,

A great bosom, beard and being, alive with age.

II

Suppose these houses are composed of ourselves,

So that they become an impalpable town, full of

Impalpable bells, transparencies of sound,

Sounding in transparent dwellings of the self,

Impalpable habitations that seem to move

In the movement of the colors of the mind,

The far-fire flowing and the dim-coned bells

Coming together in a sense in which we are poised,

Without regard to time or where we are,