The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (5 page)

Upon these premises propounding, he

Projected a colony that should extend

To the dusk of a whistling south below the south,

A comprehensive island hemisphere.

The man in Georgia waking among pines

Should be pine-spokesman. The responsive man,

Planting his pristine cores in Florida,

Should prick thereof, not on the psaltery,

But on the banjo’s categorical gut,

Tuck, tuck, while the flamingoes flapped his bays.

Sepulchral señors, bibbling pale mescal,

Oblivious to the Aztec almanacs,

Should make the intricate Sierra scan.

And dark Brazilians in their cafés,

Musing immaculate, pampean dits,

Should scrawl a vigilant anthology,

To be their latest, lucent paramour.

These are the broadest instances. Crispin,

Progenitor of such extensive scope,

Was not indifferent to smart detail.

The melon should have apposite ritual,

Performed in verd apparel, and the peach,

When its black branches came to bud, belle day,

Should have an incantation. And again,

When piled on salvers its aroma steeped

The summer, it should have a sacrament

And celebration. Shrewd novitiates

Should be the clerks of our experience.

These bland excursions into time to come,

Related in romance to backward flights,

However prodigal, however proud,

Contained in their afflatus the reproach

That first drove Crispin to his wandering.

He could not be content with counterfeit,

With masquerade of thought, with hapless words

That must belie the racking masquerade,

With fictive flourishes that preordained

His passion’s permit, hang of coat, degree

Of buttons, measure of his salt. Such trash

Might help the blind, not him, serenely sly.

It irked beyond his patience. Hence it was,

Preferring text to gloss, he humbly served

Grotesque apprenticeship to chance event,

A clown, perhaps, but an aspiring clown.

There is a monotonous babbling in our dreams

That makes them our dependent heirs, the heirs

Of dreamers buried in our sleep, and not

The oncoming fantasies of better birth.

The apprentice knew these dreamers. If he dreamed

Their dreams, he did it in a gingerly way.

All dreams are vexing. Let them be expunged.

But let the rabbit run, the cock declaim.

Trinket pasticcio, flaunting skyey sheets,

With Crispin as the tiptoe cozener?

No, no: veracious page on page, exact.

v

A Nice Shady Home

Crispin as hermit, pure and capable,

Dwelt in the land. Perhaps if discontent

Had kept him still the prickling realist,

Choosing his element from droll confect

Of was and is and shall or ought to be,

Beyond Bordeaux, beyond Havana, far

Beyond carked Yucatan, he might have come

To colonize his polar planterdom

And jig his chits upon a cloudy knee.

But his emprize to that idea soon sped.

Crispin dwelt in the land and dwelling there

Slid from his continent by slow recess

To things within his actual eye, alert

To the difficulty of rebellious thought

When the sky is blue. The blue infected will.

It may be that the yarrow in his fields

Sealed pensive purple under its concern.

But day by day, now this thing and now that

Confined him, while it cosseted, condoned,

Little by little, as if the suzerain soil

Abashed him by carouse to humble yet

Attach. It seemed haphazard denouement.

He first, as realist, admitted that

Whoever hunts a matinal continent

May, after all, stop short before a plum

And be content and still be realist.

The words of things entangle and confuse.

The plum survives its poems. It may hang

In the sunshine placidly, colored by ground

Obliquities of those who pass beneath,

Harlequined and mazily dewed and mauved

In bloom. Yet it survives in its own form,

Beyond these changes, good, fat, guzzly fruit.

So Crispin hasped on the surviving form,

For him, of shall or ought to be in is.

Was he to bray this in profoundest brass

Arointing his dreams with fugal requiems?

Was he to company vastest things defunct

With a blubber of tom-toms harrowing the sky?

Scrawl a tragedian’s testament? Prolong

His active force in an inactive dirge,

Which, let the tall musicians call and call,

Should merely call him dead? Pronounce amen

Through choirs infolded to the outmost clouds?

Because he built a cabin who once planned

Loquacious columns by the ructive sea?

Because he turned to salad-beds again?

Jovial Crispin, in calamitous crape?

Should he lay by the personal and make

Of his own fate an instance of all fate?

What is one man among so many men?

What are so many men in such a world?

Can one man think one thing and think it long?

Can one man be one thing and be it long?

The very man despising honest quilts

Lies quilted to his poll in his despite.

For realist, what is is what should be.

And so it came, his cabin shuffled up,

His trees were planted, his duenna brought

Her prismy blonde and clapped her in his hands,

The curtains flittered and the door was closed.

Crispin, magister of a single room,

Latched up the night. So deep a sound fell down

It was as if the solitude concealed

And covered him and his congenial sleep.

So deep a sound fell down it grew to be

A long soothsaying silence down and down.

The crickets beat their tambours in the wind,

Marching a motionless march, custodians.

In the presto of the morning, Crispin trod,

Each day, still curious, but in a round

Less prickly and much more condign than that

He once thought necessary. Like Candide,

Yeoman and grub, but with a fig in sight,

And cream for the fig and silver for the cream,

A blonde to tip the silver and to taste

The rapey gouts. Good star, how that to be

Annealed them in their cabin ribaldries!

Yet the quotidian saps philosophers

And men like Crispin like them in intent,

If not in will, to track the knaves of thought.

But the quotidian composed as his,

Of breakfast ribands, fruits laid in their leaves,

The tomtit and the cassia and the rose,

Although the rose was not the noble thorn

Of crinoline spread, but of a pining sweet,

Composed of evenings like cracked shutters flung

Upon the rumpling bottomness, and nights

In which those frail custodians watched,

Indifferent to the tepid summer cold,

While he poured out upon the lips of her

That lay beside him, the quotidian

Like this, saps like the sun, true fortuner.

For all it takes it gives a humped return

Exchequering from piebald fiscs unkeyed.

VI

And Daughters with Curls

Portentous enunciation, syllable

To blessed syllable affined, and sound

Bubbling felicity in cantilene,

Prolific and tormenting tenderness

Of music, as it comes to unison,

Forgather and bell boldly Crispin’s last

Deduction. Thrum with a proud douceur

His grand pronunciamento and devise.

The chits came for his jigging, bluet-eyed,

Hands without touch yet touching poignantly,

Leaving no room upon his cloudy knee,

Prophetic joint, for its diviner young.

The return to social nature, once begun,

Anabasis or slump, ascent or chute,

Involved him in midwifery so dense

His cabin counted as phylactery,

Then place of vexing palankeens, then haunt

Of children nibbling at the sugared void,

Infants yet eminently old, then dome

And halidom for the unbraided femes,

Green crammers of the green fruits of the world,

Bidders and biders for its ecstasies,

True daughters both of Crispin and his clay.

All this with many mulctings of the man,

Effective colonizer sharply stopped

In the door-yard by his own capacious bloom.

But that this bloom grown riper, showing nibs

Of its eventual roundness, puerile tints

Of spiced and weathery rouges, should complex

The stopper to indulgent fatalist

Was unforeseen. First Crispin smiled upon

His goldenest demoiselle, inhabitant,

She seemed, of a country of the capuchins,

So delicately blushed, so humbly eyed,

Attentive to a coronal of things

Secret and singular. Second, upon

A second similar counterpart, a maid

Most sisterly to the first, not yet awake

Excepting to the motherly footstep, but

Marvelling sometimes at the shaken sleep.

Then third, a thing still flaxen in the light,

A creeper under jaunty leaves. And fourth,

Mere blusteriness that gewgaws jollified,

All din and gobble, blasphemously pink.

A few years more and the vermeil capuchin

Gave to the cabin, lordlier than it was,

The dulcet omen fit for such a house.

The second sister dallying was shy

To fetch the one full-pinioned one himself

Out of her botches, hot embosomer.

The third one gaping at the orioles

Lettered herself demurely as became

A pearly poetess, peaked for rhapsody.

The fourth, pent now, a digit curious.

Four daughters in a world too intricate

In the beginning, four blithe instruments

Of differing struts, four voices several

In couch, four more personae, intimate

As buffo, yet divers, four mirrors blue

That should be silver, four accustomed seeds

Hinting incredible hues, four selfsame lights

That spread chromatics in hilarious dark,

Four questioners and four sure answerers.

Crispin concocted doctrine from the rout.

The world, a turnip once so readily plucked,

Sacked up and carried overseas, daubed out

Of its ancient purple, pruned to the fertile main,

And sown again by the stiffest realist,

Came reproduced in purple, family font,

The same insoluble lump. The fatalist

Stepped in and dropped the chuckling down his craw,

Without grace or grumble. Score this anecdote

Invented for its pith, not doctrinal

In form though in design, as Crispin willed,

Disguised pronunciamento, summary,

Autumn’s compendium, strident in itself

But muted, mused, and perfectly revolved

In those portentous accents, syllables,

And sounds of music coming to accord

Upon his lap, like their inherent sphere,

Seraphic proclamations of the pure

Delivered with a deluging onwardness.

Or if the music sticks, if the anecdote

Is false, if Crispin is a profitless

Philosopher, beginning with green brag,

Concluding fadedly, if as a man

Prone to distemper he abates in taste,

Fickle and fumbling, variable, obscure,

Glozing his life with after-shining flicks,

Illuminating, from a fancy gorged

By apparition, plain and common things,

Sequestering the fluster from the year,

Making gulped potions from obstreperous drops,

And so distorting, proving what he proves

Is nothing, what can all this matter since

The relation comes, benignly, to its end?

So may the relation of each man be clipped.

I have finished my combat with the sun;

And my body, the old animal,

Knows nothing more.

The powerful seasons bred and killed,

And were themselves the genii

Of their own ends.

Oh, but the very self of the storm

Of sun and slaves, breeding and death,

The old animal,

The senses and feeling, the very sound

And sight, and all there was of the storm,

Knows nothing more.

A few things for themselves,

Convolvulus and coral,

Buzzards and live-moss,

Tiestas from the keys,

A few things for themselves,

Florida, venereal soil,

Disclose to the lover.

The dreadful sundry of this world,

The Cuban, Polodowsky,

The Mexican women,

The negro undertaker

Killing the time between corpses

Fishing for crayfish…

Virgin of boorish births,

Swiftly in the nights,

In the porches of Key West,

Behind the bougainvilleas,

After the guitar is asleep,

Lasciviously as the wind,

You come tormenting,

Insatiable,

When you might sit,

A scholar of darkness,

Sequestered over the sea,

Wearing a clear tiara

Of red and blue and red,

Sparkling, solitary, still,

In the high sea-shadow.

Donna, donna, dark,

Stooping in indigo gown

And cloudy constellations,

Conceal yourself or disclose

Fewest things to the lover—

A hand that bears a thick-leaved fruit,

A pungent bloom against your shade.