The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (19 page)

One boy swims under a tub, one sits

On top. Hurroo, the man-boat comes,

In a man-makenesse, neater than Naples.

XX

You could almost see the brass on her gleaming,

Not quite. The mist was to light what red

Is to fire. And her mainmast tapered to nothing,

Without teetering a millimeter’s measure.

The beads on her rails seemed to grasp at transparence.

It was not yet the hour to be dauntlessly leaping.

It was in the earth only

That he was at the bottom of things

And of himself. There he could say

Of this I am, this is the patriarch,

This it is that answers when I ask,

This is the mute, the final sculpture

Around which silence lies on silence.

This reposes alike in springtime

And, arbored and bronzed, in autumn.

He said I had this that I could love,

As one loves visible and responsive peace,

As one loves one’s own being,

As one loves that which is the end

And must be loved, as one loves that

Of which one is a part as in a unity,

A unity that is the life one loves,

So that one lives all the lives that comprise it

As the life of the fatal unity of war.

Everything comes to him

From the middle of his field. The odor

Of earth penetrates more deeply than any word.

There he touches his being. There as he is

He is. The thought that he had found all this

Among men, in a woman—she caught his breath—

But he came back as one comes back from the sun

To lie on one’s bed in the dark, close to a face

Without eyes or mouth, that looks at one and speaks.

I

Only this evening I saw again low in the sky

The evening star, at the beginning of winter, the star

That in spring will crown every western horizon,

Again … as if it came back, as if life came back,

Not in a later son, a different daughter, another place,

But as if evening found us young, still young,

Still walking in a present of our own.

II

It was like sudden time in a world without time,

This world, this place, the street in which I was,

Without time: as that which is not has no time,

Is not, or is of what there was, is full

Of the silence before the armies, armies without

Either trumpets or drums, the commanders mute, the arms

On the ground, fixed fast in a profound defeat.

III

What had this star to do with the world it lit,

With the blank skies over England, over France

And above the German camps? It looked apart.

Yet it is this that shall maintain—Itself

Is time, apart from any past, apart

From any future, the ever-living and being,

The ever-breathing and moving, the constant fire,

IV

The present close, the present realized,

Not the symbol but that for which the symbol stands,

The vivid thing in the air that never changes,

Though the air change. Only this evening I saw it again,

At the beginning of winter, and I walked and talked

Again, and lived and was again, and breathed again

And moved again and flashed again, time flashed again.

The mind is the great poem of winter, the man,

Who, to find what will suffice,

Destroys romantic tenements

Of rose and ice

In the land of war. More than the man, it is

A man with the fury of a race of men,

A light at the centre of many lights,

A man at the centre of men.

It has to content the reason concerning war,

It has to persuade that war is part of itself,

A manner of thinking, a mode

Of destroying, as the mind destroys,

An aversion, as the world is averted

From an old delusion, an old affair with the sun,

An impossible aberration with the moon,

A grossness of peace.

It is not the snow that is the quill, the page.

The poem lashes more fiercely than the wind,

As the mind, to find what will suffice, destroys

Romantic tenements of rose and ice.

The poem of the mind in the act of finding

What will suffice. It has not always had

To find: the scene was set; it repeated what

Was in the script.

                         Then the theatre was changed

To something else. Its past was a souvenir.

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.

It has to face the men of the time and to meet

The women of the time. It has to think about war

And it has to find what will suffice. It has

To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage

And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and

With meditation, speak words that in the ear,

In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,

Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound

Of which, an invisible audience listens,

Not to the play, but to itself, expressed

In an emotion as of two people, as of two

Emotions becoming one. The actor is

A metaphysician in the dark, twanging

An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives

Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly

Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,

Beyond which it has no will to rise.

                                        It must

Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may

Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman

Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.

Home from Guatemala, back at the Waldorf.

This arrival in the wild country of the soul,

All approaches gone, being completely there,

Where the wild poem is a substitute

For the woman one loves or ought to love,

One wild rhapsody a fake for another.

You touch the hotel the way you touch moonlight

Or sunlight and you hum and the orchestra

Hums and you say “The world in a verse,

A generation sealed, men remoter than mountains,

Women invisible in music and motion and color,”

After that alien, point-blank, green and actual Guatemala.

An anti-master-man, floribund ascetic.

He brushed away the thunder, then the clouds,

Then the colossal illusion of heaven. Yet still

The sky was blue. He wanted imperceptible air.

He wanted to see. He wanted the eye to see

And not be touched by blue. He wanted to know,

A naked man who regarded himself in the glass

Of air, who looked for the world beneath the blue,

Without blue, without any turquoise tint or phase,

Any azure under-side or after-color. Nabob

Of bones, he rejected, he denied, to arrive

At the neutral centre, the ominous element,

The single-colored, colorless, primitive.

It was not as if the truth lay where he thought,

Like a phantom, in an uncreated night.

It was easier to think it lay there. If

It was nowhere else, it was there and because

It was nowhere else, its place had to be supposed,

Itself had to be supposed, a thing supposed

In a place supposed, a thing that he reached

In a place that he reached, by rejecting what he saw

And denying what he heard. He would arrive.

He had only not to live, to walk in the dark,

To be projected by one void into

Another.

               It was his nature to suppose,

To receive what others had supposed, without

Accepting. He received what he denied.

But as truth to be accepted, he supposed

A truth beyond all truths.

That he might be truth, himself, or part of it,

That the things that he rejected might be part

And the irregular turquoise, part, the perceptible blue

Grown denser, part, the eye so touched, so played

Upon by clouds, the ear so magnified

By thunder, parts, and all these things together,

Parts, and more things, parts. He never supposed divine

Things might not look divine, nor that if nothing

Was divine then all things were, the world itself,

And that if nothing was the truth, then all

Things were the truth, the world itself was the truth.

Had he been better able to suppose:

He might sit on a sofa on a balcony

Above the Mediterranean, emerald

Becoming emeralds. He might watch the palms

Flap green ears in the heat. He might observe

A yellow wine and follow a steamer’s track

And say, “The thing I hum appears to be

The rhythm of this celestial pantomime.”

The little owl flew through the night,

As if the people in the air

Were frightened and he frightened them,

By being there,

The people that turned off and came

To avoid the bright, discursive wings,

To avoid the hap-hallow hallow-ho

Of central things,

Nor in their empty hearts to feel

The blood-red redness of the sun,

To shrink to an insensible,

Small oblivion,

Beyond the keenest diamond day

Of people sensible to pain,

When cocks wake, clawing at their beds

To be again,

And who, for that, turn toward the cocks

And toward the start of day and trees

And light behind the body of night

And sun, as if these

Were what they are, the sharpest sun:

The sharpest self, the sensible range,

The extent of what they are, the strength

That they exchange,

So that he that suffers most desires

The red bird most and the strongest sky—

Not the people in the air that hear

The little owl fly.

The milkman came in the moonlight and the moonlight

Was less than moonlight. Nothing exists by itself.

The moonlight seemed to.

                                        
Two people, three horses, an ox

And the sun, the waves together in the sea.

The moonlight and Aquinas seemed to. He spoke,

Kept speaking, of God. I changed the word to man.

The automaton, in logic self-contained,

Existed by itself. Or did the saint survive?

Did several spirits assume a single shape?

Theology after breakfast sticks to the eye.

The hand between the candle and the wall

Grows large on the wall.

The mind between this light or that and space,

(This man in a room with an image of the world,

That woman waiting for the man she loves,)

Grows large against space:

There the man sees the image clearly at last
.

There the woman receives her lover into her heart

And weeps on his breast, though he never comes
.

It must be that the hand

Has a will to grow larger on the wall,

To grow larger and heavier and stronger than

The wall; and that the mind

Turns to its own figurations and declares,

“This image, this love, I compose myself

Of these. In these, I come forth outwardly
.

In these, I wear a vital cleanliness
,

Not as in air, bright-blue-resembling air
,

But as in the powerful mirror of my wish and will.”

It was as if thunder took form upon

The piano, that time: the time when the crude

And jealous grandeurs of sun and sky

Scattered themselves in the garden, like

The wind dissolving into birds,

The clouds becoming braided girls.

It was like the sea poured out again

In east wind beating the shutters at night.

Hoot, little owl within her, how

High blue became particular

In the leaf and bud and how the red,

Flicked into pieces, points of air,

Became—how the central, essential red

Escaped its large abstraction, became,

First, summer, then a lesser time,

Then the sides of peaches, of dusky pears.

Hoot how the inhuman colors fell

Into place beside her, where she was,

Like human conciliations, more like

A profounder reconciling, an act,

An affirmation free from doubt.

The crude and jealous formlessness

Became the form and the fragrance of things

Without clairvoyance, close to her.

After the final no there comes a yes

And on that yes the future world depends.

No was the night. Yes is this present sun.

If the rejected things, the things denied,

Slid over the western cataract, yet one,

One only, one thing that was firm, even

No greater than a cricket’s horn, no more

Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech

Of the self that must sustain itself on speech,

One thing remaining, infallible, would be

Enough. Ah! douce campagna of that thing!

Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart,

Green in the body, out of a petty phrase,

Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:

The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,

The aureole above the humming house…