The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (43 page)

By day, night and that which night illumines,

Night and its midnight-minting fragrances,

Night’s hymn of the rock, as in a vivid sleep.

St. Armorer’s was once an immense success.

It rose loftily and stood massively; and to lie

In its church-yard, in the province of St. Armorer’s,

Fixed one for good in geranium-colored day.

What is left has the foreign smell of plaster,

The closed-in smell of hay. A sumac grows

On the altar, growing toward the lights, inside.

Reverberations leak and lack among holes…

Its chapel rises from Terre Ensevelie,

An ember yes among its cindery noes,

His own: a chapel of breath, an appearance made

For a sign of meaning in the meaningless,

No radiance of dead blaze, but something seen

In a mystic eye, no sign of life but life,

Itself, the presence of the intelligible

In that which is created as its symbol.

It is like a new account of everything old,

Matisse at Vence and a great deal more than that,

A new-colored sun, say, that will soon change forms

And spread hallucinations on every leaf.

The chapel rises, his own, his period,

A civilization formed from the outward blank,

A sacred syllable rising from sacked speech,

The first car out of a tunnel en voyage

Into lands of ruddy-ruby fruits, achieved

Not merely desired, for sale, and market things

That press, strong peasants in a peasant world,

Their purports to a final seriousness—

Final for him, the acceptance of such prose,

Time’s given perfections made to seem like less

Than the need of each generation to be itself,

The need to be actual and as it is.

St. Armorer’s has nothing of this present,

This
vif
, this dizzle-dazzle of being new

And of becoming, for which the chapel spreads out

Its arches in its vivid element,

In the air of newness of that element,

In an air of freshness, clearness, greenness, blueness,

That which is always beginning because it is part

Of that which is always beginning, over and over.

The chapel underneath St. Armorer’s walls,

Stands in a light, its natural light and day,

The origin and keep of its health and his own.

And there he walks and does as he lives and likes.

The one moonlight, in the simple-colored night,

Like a plain poet revolving in his mind

The sameness of his various universe,

Shines on the mere objectiveness of things.

It is as if being was to be observed,

As if, among the possible purposes

Of what one sees, the purpose that comes first,

The surface, is the purpose to be seen,

The property of the moon, what it evokes.

It is to disclose the essential presence, say,

Of a mountain, expanded and elevated almost

Into a sense, an object the less; or else

To disclose in the figure waiting on the road

An object the more, an undetermined form

Between the slouchings of a gunman and a lover,

A gesture in the dark, a fear one feels

In the great vistas of night air, that takes this form,

In the arbors that are as if of Saturn-star.

So, then, this warm, wide, weatherless quietude

Is active with a power, an inherent life,

In spite of the mere objectiveness of things,

Like a cloud-cap in the corner of a looking-glass,

A change of color in the plain poet’s mind,

Night and silence disturbed by an interior sound,

The one moonlight, the various universe, intended

So much just to be seen—a purpose, empty

Perhaps, absurd perhaps, but at least a purpose,

Certain and ever more fresh. Ah! Certain, for sure…

Ariel was glad he had written his poems.

They were of a remembered time

Or of something seen that he liked.

Other makings of the sun

Were waste and welter

And the ripe shrub writhed.

His self and the sun were one

And his poems, although makings of his self,

Were no less makings of the sun.

It was not important that they survive.

What mattered was that they should bear

Some lineament or character,

Some affluence, if only half-perceived,

In the poverty of their words,

Of the planet of which they were part.

There is a great river this side of Stygia,

Before one comes to the first black cataracts

And trees that lack the intelligence of trees.

In that river, far this side of Stygia,

The mere flowing of the water is a gayety,

Flashing and flashing in the sun. On its banks,

No shadow walks. The river is fateful,

Like the last one. But there is no ferryman.

He could not bend against its propelling force.

It is not to be seen beneath the appearances

That tell of it. The steeple at Farmington

Stands glistening and Haddam shines and sways.

It is the third commonness with light and air,

A curriculum, a vigor, a local abstraction…

Call it, once more, a river, an unnamed flowing,

Space-filled, reflecting the seasons, the folk-lore

Of each of the senses; call it, again and again,

The river that flows nowhere, like a sea.

At the earliest ending of winter,

In March, a scrawny cry from outside

Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,

A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,

In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,

No longer a battered panache above snow…

It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism

Of sleep’s faded papier-mâché…

The sun was coming from outside.

That scrawny cry—it was

A chorister whose c preceded the choir.

It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,

Still far away. It was like

A new knowledge of reality.