The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (39 page)

Silently it heaves its youthful sleep from the sea—

The Oklahoman—the Italian blue

Beyond the horizon with its masculine,

Their eyes closed, in a young palaver of lips.

And yet the wind whimpers oldly of old age

In the western night. The venerable mask,

In this perfection, occasionally speaks

And something of death’s poverty is heard.

This should be tragedy’s most moving face.

It is a bough in the electric light

And exhalations in the eaves, so little

To indicate the total leaflessness.

XVII

The color is almost the color of comedy,

Not quite. It comes to the point and at the point,

It fails. The strength at the centre is serious.

Perhaps instead of failing it rejects

As a serious strength rejects pin-idleness.

A blank underlies the trials of device,

The dominant blank, the unapproachable.

This is the mirror of the high serious:

Blue verdured into a damask’s lofty symbol,

Gold easings and ouncings and fluctuations of thread

And beetling of belts and lights of general stones,

Like blessed beams from out a blessed bush

Or the wasted figurations of the wastes

Of night, time and the imagination,

Saved and beholden, in a robe of rays.

These fitful sayings are, also, of tragedy:

The serious reflection is composed

Neither of comic nor tragic but of commonplace.

XVIII

It is the window that makes it difficult

To say good-by to the past and to live and to be

In the present state of things as, say, to paint

In the present state of painting and not the state

Of thirty years ago. It is looking out

Of the window and walking in the street and seeing,

As if the eyes were the present or part of it,

As if the ears heard any shocking sound,

As if life and death were ever physical.

The life and death of this carpenter depend

On a fuchsia in a can—and iridescences

Of petals that will never be realized,

Things not yet true which he perceives through truth,

Or thinks he does, as he perceives the present,

Or thinks he does, a carpenter’s iridescences,

Wooden, the model for astral apprentices,

A city slapped up like a chest of tools,

The eccentric exterior of which the clocks talk.

XIX

The moon rose in the mind and each thing there

Picked up its radial aspect in the night,

Prostrate below the singleness of its will.

That which was public green turned private gray.

At another time, the radial aspect came

From a different source. But there was always one:

A century in which everything was part

Of that century and of its aspect, a personage,

A man who was the axis of his time,

An image that begot its infantines,

Imaginary poles whose intelligence

Streamed over chaos their civilities.

What is the radial aspect of this place,

This present colony of a colony

Of colonies, a sense in the changing sense

Of things? A figure like Ecclesiast,

Rugged and luminous, chants in the dark

A text that is an answer, although obscure.

XX

The imaginative transcripts were like clouds,

Today; and the transcripts of feeling, impossible

To distinguish. The town was a residuum,

A neuter shedding shapes in an absolute.

Yet the transcripts of it when it was blue remain;

And the shapes that it took in feeling, the persons that

It became, the nameless, flitting characters—

These actors still walk in a twilight muttering lines.

It may be that they mingle, clouds and men, in the air

Or street or about the corners of a man,

Who sits thinking in the corners of a room.

In this chamber the pure sphere escapes the impure.

Because the thinker himself escapes. And yet

To have evaded clouds and men leaves him

A naked being with a naked will

And everything to make. He may evade

Even his own will and in his nakedness

Inhabit the hypnosis of that sphere.

XXI

But he may not. He may not evade his will,

Nor the wills of other men; and he cannot evade

The will of necessity, the will of wills—

Romanza out of the black shepherd’s isle,

Like the constant sound of the water of the sea

In the hearing of the shepherd and his black forms;

Out of the isle, but not of any isle.

Close to the senses there lies another isle

And there the senses give and nothing take,

The opposite of Cythère, an isolation

At the centre, the object of the will, this place,

The things around—the alternate romanza

Out of the surfaces, the windows, the walls,

The bricks grown brittle in time’s poverty,

The clear. A celestial mode is paramount,

If only in the branches sweeping in the rain:

The two romanzas, the distant and the near,

Are a single voice in the boo-ha of the wind.

XXII

Professor Eucalyptus said, “The search

For reality is as momentous as

The search for god.” It is the philosopher’s search

For an interior made exterior

And the poet’s search for the same exterior made

Interior: breathless things broodingly abreath

With the inhalations of original cold

And of original earliness. Yet the sense

Of cold and earliness is a daily sense,

Not the predicate of bright origin.

Creation is not renewed by images

Of lone wanderers. To re-create, to use

The cold and earliness and bright origin

Is to search. Likewise to say of the evening star,

The most ancient light in the most ancient sky,

That it is wholly an inner light, that it shines

From the sleepy bosom of the real, re-creates,

Searches a possible for its possibleness.

XXIII

The sun is half the world, half everything,

The bodiless half. There is always this bodiless half,

This illumination, this elevation, this future

Or, say, the late going colors of that past,

Effete green, the woman in black cassimere.

If, then, New Haven is half sun, what remains,

At evening, after dark, is the other half,

Lighted by space, big over those that sleep,

Of the single future of night, the single sleep,

As of a long, inevitable sound,

A kind of cozening and coaxing sound,

And the goodness of lying in a maternal sound,

Unfretted by day’s separate, several selves,

Being part of everything come together as one.

In this identity, disembodiments

Still keep occurring. What is, uncertainly,

Desire prolongs its adventure to create

Forms of farewell, furtive among green ferns.

XXIV

The consolations of space are nameless things.

It was after the neurosis of winter. It was

In the genius of summer that they blew up

The statue of Jove among the boomy clouds.

It took all day to quieten the sky

And then to refill its emptiness again,

So that at the edge of afternoon, not over,

Before the thought of evening had occurred

Or the sound of Incomincia had been set,

There was a clearing, a readiness for first bells,

An opening for outpouring, the hand was raised:

There was a willingness not yet composed,

A knowing that something certain had been proposed,

Which, without the statue, would be new,

An escape from repetition, a happening

In space and the self, that touched them both at once

And alike, a point of the sky or of the earth

Or of a town poised at the horizon’s dip.

XXV

Life fixed him, wandering on the stair of glass,

With its attentive eyes. And, as he stood,

On his balcony, outsensing distances,

There were looks that caught him out of empty air.

C’est toujours la vie qui me regarde
…This was

Who watched him, always, for unfaithful thought.

This sat beside his bed, with its guitar,

To keep him from forgetting, without a word,

A note or two disclosing who it was.

Nothing about him ever stayed the same,

Except this hidalgo and his eye and tune,

The shawl across one shoulder and the hat.

The commonplace became a rumpling of blazons.

What was real turned into something most unreal,

Bare beggar-tree, hung low for fruited red

In isolated moments—isolations

Were false. The hidalgo was permanent, abstract,

A hatching that stared and demanded an answering look.

XXVI

How facilely the purple blotches fell

On the walk, purple and blue, and red and gold,

Blooming and beaming and voluming colors out.

Away from them, capes, along the afternoon Sound,

Shook off their dark marine in lapis light.

The sea shivered in transcendent change, rose up

As rain and booming, gleaming, blowing, swept

The wateriness of green wet in the sky.

Mountains appeared with greater eloquence

Than that of their clouds. These lineaments were the earth,

Seen as inamorata, of loving fame

Added and added out of a fame-full heart…

But, here, the inamorata, without distance

And thereby lost, and naked or in rags,

Shrunk in the poverty of being close,

Touches, as one hand touches another hand,

Or as a voice that, speaking without form,

Gritting the ear, whispers humane repose.

XXVII

A scholar, in his Segmenta, left a note,

As follows, “The Ruler of Reality,

If more unreal than New Haven, is not

A real ruler, but rules what is unreal.”

In addition, there were draftings of him, thus:

“He is the consort of the Queen of Fact.

Sunrise is his garment’s hem, sunset is hers.

He is the theorist of life, not death,

The total excellence of its total book.”

Again, “The sibilance of phrases is his

Or partly his. His voice is audible,

As the fore-meaning in music is.” Again,

“This man abolishes by being himself

That which is not ourselves: the regalia,

The attributions, the plume and helmet-ho.”

Again, “He has thought it out, he thinks it out,

As he has been and is and, with the Queen

Of Fact, lies at his ease beside the sea.”

XXVIII

If it should be true that reality exists

In the mind: the tin plate, the loaf of bread on it,

The long-bladed knife, the little to drink and her

Misericordia, it follows that

Real and unreal are two in one: New Haven

Before and after one arrives or, say,

Bergamo on a postcard, Rome after dark,

Sweden described, Salzburg with shaded eyes

Or Paris in conversation at a café.

This endlessly elaborating poem

Displays the theory of poetry,

As the life of poetry. A more severe,

More harassing master would extemporize

Subtler, more urgent proof that the theory

Of poetry is the theory of life,

As it is, in the intricate evasions of as,

In things seen and unseen, created from nothingness,

The heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed-for lands.

XXIX

In the land of the lemon trees, yellow and yellow were

Yellow-blue, yellow-green, pungent with citron-sap,

Dangling and spangling, the mic-mac of mocking birds.

In the land of the elm trees, wandering mariners

Looked on big women, whose ruddy-ripe images

Wreathed round and round the round wreath of autumn.

They rolled their r’s, there, in the land of the citrons.

In the land of big mariners, the words they spoke

Were mere brown clods, mere catching weeds of talk.

When the mariners came to the land of the lemon trees,

At last, in that blond atmosphere, bronzed hard,

They said, “We are back once more in the land of the elm trees,

But folded over, turned round.” It was the same,

Except for the adjectives, an alteration

Of words that was a change of nature, more

Than the difference that clouds make over a town.

The countrymen were changed and each constant thing.

Their dark-colored words had redescribed the citrons.

XXX