The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (15 page)

Hanging his shawl upon the wind,

Like something on the stage, puffed out,

His strutting studied through centuries.

At last, in spite of his manner, his eye

A-cock at the cross-piece on a pole

Supporting heavy cables, slung

Through Oxidia, banal suburb,

One-half of all its installments paid.

Dew-dapper clapper-traps, blazing

From crusty stacks above machines.

Ecce, Oxidia is the seed

Dropped out of this amber-ember pod,

Oxidia is the soot of fire,

Oxidia is Olympia.

XXXI

How long and late the pheasant sleeps…

The employer and employee contend,

Combat, compose their droll affair.

The bubbling sun will bubble up,

Spring sparkle and the cock-bird shriek.

The employer and employee will hear

And continue their affair. The shriek

Will rack the thickets. There is no place,

Here, for the lark fixed in the mind,

In the museum of the sky. The cock

Will claw sleep. Morning is not sun,

It is this posture of the nerves,

As if a blunted player clutched

The nuances of the blue guitar.

It must be this rhapsody or none,

The rhapsody of things as they aré.

XXXII

Throw away the lights, the definitions,

And say of what you see in the dark

That it is this or that it is that,

But do not use the rotted names.

How should you walk in that space and know

Nothing of the madness of space,

Nothing of its jocular procreations?

Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand

Between you and the shapes you take

When the crust of shape has been destroyed.

You as you are? You are yourself.

The blue guitar surprises you.

XXXIII

That generation’s dream, aviled

In the mud, in Monday’s dirty light,

That’s it, the only dream they knew,

Time in its final block, not time

To come, a wrangling of two dreams.

Here is the bread of time to come,

Here is its actual stone. The bread

Will be our bread, the stone will be

Our bed and we shall sleep by night.

We shall forget by day, except

The moments when we choose to play

The imagined pine, the imagined jay.

I

The Mechanical Optimist

A lady dying of diabetes

Listened to the radio,

Catching the lesser dithyrambs.

So heaven collects its bleating lambs.

Her useless bracelets fondly fluttered,

Paddling the melodic swirls,

The idea of god no longer sputtered

At the roots of her indifferent curls.

The idea of the Alps grew large,

Not yet, however, a thing to die in.

It seemed serener just to die,

To float off in the floweriest barge,

Accompanied by the exegesis

Of familiar things in a cheerful voice,

Like the night before Christmas and all the carols.

Dying lady, rejoice, rejoice!

II

Mystic Garden & Middling Beast

The poet striding among the cigar stores,

Ryan’s lunch, hatters, insurance and medicines,

Denies that abstraction is a vice except

To the fatuous. These are his infernal walls,

A space of stone, of inexplicable base

And peaks outsoaring possible adjectives.

One man, the idea of man, that is the space,

The true abstract in which he promenades.

The era of the idea of man, the cloak

And speech of Virgil dropped, that’s where he walks,

That’s where his hymns come crowding, hero-hymns,

Chorals for mountain voices and the moral chant,

Happy rather than holy but happy-high,

Day hymns instead of constellated rhymes,

Hymns of the struggle of the idea of god

And the idea of man, the mystic garden and

The middling beast, the garden of paradise

And he that created the garden and peopled it.

III

Romanesque Affabulation

He sought an earthly leader who could stand

Without panache, without cockade,

Son only of man and sun of men,

The outer captain, the inner saint,

The pine, the pillar and the priest,

The voice, the book, the hidden well,

The faster’s feast and heavy-fruited star,

The father, the beater of the rigid drums,

He that at midnight touches the guitar,

The solitude, the barrier, the Pole

In Paris, celui qui chante et pleure,

Winter devising summer in its breast,

Summer assaulted, thundering, illumed,

Shelter yet thrower of the summer spear,

With all his attributes no god but man

Of men whose heaven is in themselves,

Or else whose hell, foamed with their blood

And the long echo of their dying cry,

A fate intoned, a death before they die,

The race that sings and weeps and knows not why.

IV

The Leader

Behold the moralist hidalgo

Whose whore is Morning Star

Dressed in metal, silk and stone,

Syringa, cicada, his flea.

In how severe a book he read,

Until his nose grew thin and taut

And knowledge dropped upon his heart

Its pitting poison, half the night.

He liked the nobler works of man,

The gold façade round early squares,

The bronzes liquid through gay light.

He hummed to himself at such a plan.

He sat among beggars wet with dew,

Heard the dogs howl at barren bone,

Sat alone, his great toe like a horn,

The central flaw in the solar morn.

God and all angels sing the world to sleep,

Now that the moon is rising in the heat

And crickets are loud again in the grass. The moon

Burns in the mind on lost remembrances.

He lies down and the night wind blows upon him here.

The bells grow longer. This is not sleep. This is desire.

Ah! Yes, desire … this leaning on his bed,

This leaning on his elbows on his bed,

Staring, at midnight, at the pillow that is black

In the catastrophic room … beyond despair,

Like an intenser instinct. What is it he desires?

But this he cannot know, the man that thinks,

Yet life itself, the fulfilment of desire

In the grinding ric-rac, staring steadily

At a head upon the pillow in the dark,

More than sudarium, speaking the speech

Of absolutes, bodiless, a head

Thick-lipped from riot and rebellious cries,

The head of one of the men that are falling, placed

Upon the pillow to repose and speak,

Speak and say the immaculate syllables

That he spoke only by doing what he did.

God and all angels, this was his desire,

Whose head lies blurring here, for this he died.

Taste of the blood upon his martyred lips,

O pensioners, O demagogues and pay-men!

This death was his belief though death is a stone.

This man loved earth, not heaven, enough to die.

The night wind blows upon the dreamer, bent

Over words that are life’s voluble utterance.

Long-tailed ponies go nosing the pine-lands,

Ponies of Parisians shooting on the hill.

The wind blows. In the wind, the voices

Have shapes that are not yet fully themselves,

Are sounds blown by a blower into shapes,

The blower squeezed to the thinnest
mi
of falsetto.

The hunters run to and fro. The heavy trees,

The grunting, shuffling branches, the robust,

The nocturnal, the antique, the blue-green pines

Deepen the feelings to inhuman depths.

These are the forest. This health is holy,

This halloo, halloo, halloo heard over the cries

Of those for whom a square room is a fire,

Of those whom the statues torture and keep down.

This health is holy, this descant of a self,

This barbarous chanting of what is strong, this blare.

But salvation here? What about the rattle of sticks

On tins and boxes? What about horses eaten by wind?

When spring comes and the skeletons of the hunters

Stretch themselves to rest in their first summer’s sun,

The spring will have a health of its own, with none

Of autumn’s halloo in its hair. So that closely, then,

Health follows after health. Salvation there:

There’s no such thing as life; or if there is,

It is faster than the weather, faster than

Any character. It is more than any scene:

Of the guillotine or of any glamorous hanging.

Piece the world together, boys, but not with your hands.

That’s what misery is,

Nothing to have at heart.

It is to have or nothing.

It is a thing to have,

A lion, an ox in his breast.

To feel it breathing there.

Corazon, stout dog,

Young ox, bow-legged bear,

He tastes its blood, not spit.

He is like a man

In the body of a violent beast.

Its muscles are his own…

The lion sleeps in the sun.

Its nose is on its paws.

It can kill a man.

I

Clear water in a brilliant bowl,

Pink and white carnations. The light

In the room more like a snowy air,

Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow

At the end of winter when afternoons return.

Pink and white carnations—one desires

So much more than that. The day itself

Is simplified: a bowl of white,

Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,

With nothing more than the carnations there.

II

Say even that this complete simplicity

Stripped one of all one’s torments, concealed

The evilly compounded, vital I

And made it fresh in a world of white,

A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,

Still one would want more, one would need more,

More than a world of white and snowy scents.

III

There would still remain the never-resting mind,

So that one would want to escape, come back

To what had been so long composed.

The imperfect is our paradise.

Note that, in this bitterness, delight,

Since the imperfect is so hot in us,

Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

I

If he will be heaven after death,

If, while he lives, he hears himself

Sounded in music, if the sun,

Stormier, is the color of a self

As certainly as night is the color

Of a self, if, without sentiment,

He is what he hears and sees and if,

Without pathos, he feels what he hears

And sees, being nothing otherwise,

Having nothing otherwise, he has not

To go to the Louvre to behold himself.

Granted each picture is a glass,

That the walls are mirrors multiplied,

That the marbles are gluey pastiches, the stairs

The sweep of an impossible elegance,

And the notorious views from the windows

Wax wasted, monarchies beyond

The S.S.
Normandie
, granted

One is always seeing and feeling oneself,

That’s not by chance. It comes to this:

That the guerilla I should be booked

And bound. Its nigger mystics should change

Foolscap for wigs. Academies

As of a tragic science should rise.

II

Poet, patting more nonsense foamed

From the sea, conceive for the courts

Of these academies, the diviner health

Disclosed in common forms. Set up

The rugged black, the image. Design

The touch. Fix quiet. Take the place

Of parents, lewdest of ancestors.

We are conceived in your conceits.

I

Opusculum paedagogum.

The pears are not viols,

Nudes or bottles.

They resemble nothing else.

II

They are yellow forms

Composed of curves

Bulging toward the base.

They are touched red.

III

They are not flat surfaces

Having curved outlines.

They are round

Tapering toward the top.