The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (16 page)

IV

In the way they are modelled

There are bits of blue.

A hard dry leaf hangs

From the stem.

V

The yellow glistens.

It glistens with various yellows,

Citrons, oranges and greens

Flowering over the skin.

VI

The shadows of the pears

Are blobs on the green cloth.

The pears are not seen

As the observer wills.

That the glass would melt in heat,

That the water would freeze in cold,

Shows that this object is merely a state,

One of many, between two poles. So,

In the metaphysical, there are these poles.

Here in the centre stands the glass. Light

Is the lion that comes down to drink. There

And in that state, the glass is a pool.

Ruddy are his eyes and ruddy are his claws

When light comes down to wet his frothy jaws

And in the water winding weeds move round.

And there and in another state—the refractions,

The
metaphysica
, the plastic parts of poems

Crash in the mind—But, fat Jocundus, worrying

About what stands here in the centre, not the glass,

But in the centre of our lives, this time, this day,

It is a state, this spring among the politicians

Playing cards. In a village of the indigenes,

One would have still to discover. Among the dogs and dung,

One would continue to contend with one’s ideas.

It is posed and it is posed.

But in nature it merely grows.

Stones pose in the falling night;

And beggars dropping to sleep,

They pose themselves and their rags.

Shucks … lavender moonlight falls.

The buildings pose in the sky

And, as you paint, the clouds,

Grisaille, impearled, profound,

Pftt.… In the way you speak

You arrange, the thing is posed,

What in nature merely grows.

To-morrow when the sun,

For all your images,

Comes up as the sun, bull fire,

Your images will have left

No shadow of themselves.

The poses of speech, of paint,

Of music—Her body lies

Worn out, her arm falls down,

Her fingers touch the ground.

Above her, to the left,

A brush of white, the obscure,

The moon without a shape,

A fringed eye in a crypt.

The sense creates the pose.

In this it moves and speaks.

This is the figure and not

An evading metaphor.

Add this. It is to add.

It is equal to living in a tragic land

To live in a tragic time.

Regard now the sloping, mountainous rocks

And the river that batters its way over stones,

Regard the hovels of those that live in this land.

That was what I painted behind the loaf,

The rocks not even touched by snow,

The pines along the river and the dry men blown

Brown as the bread, thinking of birds

Flying from burning countries and brown sand shores,

Birds that came like dirty water in waves

Flowing above the rocks, flowing over the sky,

As if the sky was a current that bore them along,

Spreading them as waves spread flat on the shore,

One after another washing the mountains bare.

It was the battering of drums I heard

It was hunger, it was the hungry that cried

And the waves, the waves were soldiers moving,

Marching and marching in a tragic time

Below me, on the asphalt, under the trees.

It was soldiers went marching over the rocks

And still the birds came, came in watery flocks,

Because it was spring and the birds had to come.

No doubt that soldiers had to be marching

And that drums had to be rolling, rolling, rolling.

I heard two workers say, “This chaos

Will soon be ended.”

This chaos will not be ended,

The red and the blue house blended,

Not ended, never and never ended,

The weak man mended,

The man that is poor at night

Attended

Like the man that is rich and right.

The great men will not be blended…

I am the poorest of all.

I know that I cannot be mended,

Out of the clouds, pomp of the air,

By which at least I am befriended.

Day creeps down. The moon is creeping up.

The sun is a corbeil of flowers the moon Blanche

Places there, a bouquet. Ho-ho … The dump is full

Of images. Days pass like papers from a press.

The bouquets come here in the papers. So the sun,

And so the moon, both come, and the janitor’s poems

Of every day, the wrapper on the can of pears,

The cat in the paper-bag, the corset, the box

From Esthonia: the tiger chest, for tea.

The freshness of night has been fresh a long time.

The freshness of morning, the blowing of day, one says

That it puffs as Cornelius Nepos reads, it puffs

More than, less than or it puffs like this or that.

The green smacks in the eye, the dew in the green

Smacks like fresh water in a can, like the sea

On a cocoanut—how many men have copied dew

For buttons, how many women have covered themselves

With dew, dew dresses, stones and chains of dew, heads

Of the floweriest flowers dewed with the dewiest dew.

One grows to hate these things except on the dump.

Now, in the time of spring (azaleas, trilliums,

Myrtle, viburnums, daffodils, blue phlox),

Between that disgust and this, between the things

That are on the dump (azaleas and so on)

And those that will be (azaleas and so on),

One feels the purifying change. One rejects

The trash.

               That’s the moment when the moon creeps up

To the bubbling of bassoons. That’s the time

One looks at the elephant-colorings of tires.

Everything is shed; and the moon comes up as the moon

(All its images are in the dump) and you see

As a man (not like an image of a man),

You see the moon rise in the empty sky.

One sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail.

One beats and beats for that which one believes.

That’s what one wants to get near. Could it after all

Be merely oneself, as superior as the ear

To a crow’s voice? Did the nightingale torture the ear,

Pack the heart and scratch the mind? And does the ear

Solace itself in peevish birds? Is it peace,

Is it a philosopher’s honeymoon, one finds

On the dump? Is it to sit among mattresses of the dead,

Bottles, pots, shoes and grass and murmur
aptest eve:

Is it to hear the blatter of grackles and say

Invisible priest;
is it to eject, to pull

The day to pieces and cry
stanza my stone?

Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.

It was when I said,

“There is no such thing as the truth,”

That the grapes seemed fatter.

The fox ran out of his hole.

You … You said,

“There are many truths,

But they are not parts of a truth.”

Then the tree, at night, began to change,

Smoking through green and smoking blue.

We were two figures in a wood.

We said we stood alone.

It was when I said,

“Words are not forms of a single word.

In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts.

The world must be measured by eye”;

It was when you said,

“The idols have seen lots of poverty,

Snakes and gold and lice,

But not the truth”;

It was at that time, that the silence was largest

And longest, the night was roundest,

The fragrance of the autumn warmest,

Closest and strongest.

Tired of the old descriptions of the world,

The latest freed man rose at six and sat

On the edge of his bed. He said,

                                        “I suppose there is

A doctrine to this landscape. Yet, having just

Escaped from the truth, the morning is color and mist,

Which is enough: the moment’s rain and sea,

The moment’s sun (the strong man vaguely seen),

Overtaking the doctrine of this landscape. Of him

And of his works, I am sure. He bathes in the mist

Like a man without a doctrine. The light he gives—

It is how he gives his light. It is how he shines,

Rising upon the doctors in their beds

And on their beds.…”

                                        And so the freed man said.

It was how the sun came shining into his room:

To be without a description of to be,

For a moment on rising, at the edge of the bed, to be,

To have the ant of the self changed to an ox

With its organic boomings, to be changed

From a doctor into an ox, before standing up,

To know that the change and that the ox-like struggle

Come from the strength that is the strength of the sun,

Whether it comes directly or from the sun.

It was how he was free. It was how his freedom came.

It was being without description, being an ox.

It was the importance of the trees outdoors,

The freshness of the oak-leaves, not so much

That they were oak-leaves, as the way they looked.

It was everything being more real, himself

At the centre of reality, seeing it.

It was everything bulging and blazing and big in itself,

The blue of the rug, the portrait of Vidal,

Qui fait fi des joliesses banales
, the chairs.

Je tâche, en restant exact, d’être poète
.

JULES RENARD

There are not leaves enough to cover the face

It wears. This is the way the orator spoke:

“The mass is nothing. The number of men in a mass

Of men is nothing. The mass is no greater than

The singular man of the mass. Masses produce

Each one its paradigm.” There are not leaves

Enough to hide away the face of the man

Of this dead mass and that. The wind might fill

With faces as with leaves, be gusty with mouths,

And with mouths crying and crying day by day.

Could all these be ourselves, sounding ourselves,

Our faces circling round a central face

And then nowhere again, away and away?

Yet one face keeps returning (never the one),

The face of the man of the mass, never the face

That hermit on reef sable would have seen,

Never the naked politician taught

By the wise. There are not leaves enough to crown,

To cover, to crown, to cover—let it go—

The actor that will at last declaim our end.

I sang a canto in a canton,

Cunning-coo, O, cuckoo cock,

In a canton of Belshazzar

To Belshazzar, putrid rock,

Pillar of a putrid people,

Underneath a willow there

I stood and sang and filled the air.

It was an old rebellious song,

An edge of song that never clears;

But if it did … If the cloud that hangs

Upon the heart and round the mind

Cleared from the north and in that height

The sun appeared and reddened great

Belshazzar’s brow, O, ruler, rude

With rubies then, attend me now.

What is it that my feeling seeks?

I know from all the things it touched

And left beside and left behind.

It wants the diamond pivot bright.

It wants Belshazzar reading right

The luminous pages on his knee,

Of being, more than birth or death.

It wants words virile with his breath.

Now it is September and the web is woven.

The web is woven and you have to wear it.

The winter is made and you have to bear it,

The winter web, the winter woven, wind and wind,

For all the thoughts of summer that go with it

In the mind, pupa of straw, moppet of rags.

It is the mind that is woven, the mind that was jerked

And tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun.

It is all that you are, the final dwarf of you,

That is woven and woven and waiting to be worn,

Neither as mask nor as garment but as a being,

Torn from insipid summer, for the mirror of cold,

Sitting beside your lamp, there citron to nibble

And coffee dribble … Frost is in the stubble.

The difficulty to think at the end of day,

When the shapeless shadow covers the sun

And nothing is left except light on your fur—

There was the cat slopping its milk all day,

Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk

And August the most peaceful month.

To be, in the grass, in the peacefulest time,

Without that monument of cat,

The cat forgotten in the moon;