The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (3 page)

V

In the high west there burns a furious star.

It is for fiery boys that star was set

And for sweet-smelling virgins close to them.

The measure of the intensity of love

Is measure, also, of the verve of earth.

For me, the firefly’s quick, electric stroke

Ticks tediously the time of one more year.

And you? Remember how the crickets came

Out of their mother grass, like little kin,

In the pale nights, when your first imagery

Found inklings of your bond to all that dust.

VI

If men at forty will be painting lakes

The ephemeral blues must merge for them in one,

The basic slate, the universal hue.

There is a substance in us that prevails.

But in our amours amorists discern

Such fluctuations that their scrivening

Is breathless to attend each quirky turn.

When amorists grow bald, then amours shrink

Into the compass and curriculum

Of introspective exiles, lecturing.

It is a theme for Hyacinth alone.

VII

The mules that angels ride come slowly down

The blazing passes, from beyond the sun.

Descensions of their tinkling bells arrive.

These muleteers are dainty of their way.

Meantime, centurions guffaw and beat

Their shrilling tankards on the table-boards.

This parable, in sense, amounts to this:

The honey of heaven may or may not come,

But that of earth both comes and goes at once.

Suppose these couriers brought amid their train

A damsel heightened by eternal bloom.

VIII

Like a dull scholar, I behold, in love,

An ancient aspect touching a new mind.

It comes, it blooms, it bears its fruit and dies.

This trivial trope reveals a way of truth.

Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.

Two golden gourds distended on our vines,

Into the autumn weather, splashed with frost,

Distorted by hale fatness, turned grotesque.

We hang like warty squashes, streaked and rayed,

The laughing sky will see the two of us

Washed into rinds by rotting winter rains.

IX

In verses wild with motion, full of din,

Loudened by cries, by clashes, quick and sure

As the deadly thought of men accomplishing

Their curious fates in war, come, celebrate

The faith of forty, ward of Cupido.

Most venerable heart, the lustiest conceit

Is not too lusty for your broadening.

I quiz all sounds, all thoughts, all everything

For the music and manner of the paladins

To make oblation fit. Where shall I find

Bravura adequate to this great hymn?

X

The fops of fancy in their poems leave

Memorabilia of the mystic spouts,

Spontaneously watering their gritty soils.

I am a yeoman, as such fellows go.

I know no magic trees, no balmy boughs,

No silver-ruddy, gold-vermilion fruits.

But, after all, I know a tree that bears

A semblance to the thing I have in mind.

It stands gigantic, with a certain tip

To which all birds come sometime in their time.

But when they go that tip still tips the tree.

XI

If sex were all, then every trembling hand

Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.

But note the unconscionable treachery of fate,

That makes us weep, laugh, grunt and groan, and shout

Doleful heroics, pinching gestures forth

From madness or delight, without regard

To that first, foremost law. Anguishing hour!

Last night, we sat beside a pool of pink,

Clippered with lilies scudding the bright chromes,

Keen to the point of starlight, while a frog

Boomed from his very belly odious chords.

XII

A blue pigeon it is, that circles the blue sky,

On sidelong wing, around and round and round.

A white pigeon it is, that flutters to the ground,

Grown tired of flight. Like a dark rabbi, I

Observed, when young, the nature of mankind,

In lordly study. Every day, I found

Man proved a gobbet in my mincing world.

Like a rose rabbi, later, I pursued,

And still pursue, the origin and course

Of love, but until now I never knew

That fluttering things have so distinct a shade.

It’s a strange courage

you give me, ancient star:

Shine alone in the sunrise

toward which you lend no part!

I

Shine alone, shine nakedly, shine like bronze,

that reflects neither my face nor any inner part

of my being, shine like fire, that mirrors nothing.

II

Lend no part to any humanity that suffuses

you in its own light.

Be not chimera of morning,

Half-man, half-star.

Be not an intelligence,

Like a widow’s bird

Or an old horse.

Twenty men crossing a bridge,

Into a village,

Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,

Into twenty villages,

Or one man

Crossing a single bridge into a village.

This is old song

That will not declare itself…

Twenty men crossing a bridge,

Into a village,

Are

Twenty men crossing a bridge

Into a village.

That will not declare itself

Yet is certain as meaning…

The boots of the men clump

On the boards of the bridge.

The first white wall of the village

Rises through fruit-trees.

Of what was it I was thinking?

So the meaning escapes.

The first white wall of the village…

The fruit-trees.…

The white cock’s tail

Tosses in the wind.

The turkey-cock’s tail

Glitters in the sun.

Water in the fields.

The wind pours down.

The feathers flare

And bluster in the wind.

Remus, blow your horn!

I’m ploughing on Sunday,

Ploughing North America.

Blow your horn!

Tum-ti-tum,

Ti-tum-tum-tum!

The turkey-cock’s tail

Spreads to the sun.

The white cock’s tail

Streams to the moon.

Water in the fields.

The wind pours down.

Ursula, in a garden, found

A bed of radishes.

She kneeled upon the ground

And gathered them,

With flowers around,

Blue, gold, pink, and green.

She dressed in red and gold brocade

And in the grass an offering made

Of radishes and flowers.

She said, “My dear,

Upon your altars,

I have placed

The marguerite and coquelicot,

And roses

Frail as April snow;

But here,” she said,

“Where none can see,

I make an offering, in the grass,

Of radishes and flowers.”

And then she wept

For fear the Lord would not accept.

The good Lord in His garden sought

New leaf and shadowy tinct,

And they were all His thought.

He heard her low accord,

Half prayer and half ditty,

And He felt a subtle quiver,

That was not heavenly love,

Or pity.

This is not writ

In any book.

I say now, Fernando, that on that day

The mind roamed as a moth roams,

Among the blooms beyond the open sand;

And that whatever noise the motion of the waves

Made on the sea-weeds and the covered stones

Disturbed not even the most idle ear.

Then it was that that monstered moth

Which had lain folded against the blue

And the colored purple of the lazy sea,

And which had drowsed along the bony shores,

Shut to the blather that the water made,

Rose up besprent and sought the flaming red

Dabbled with yellow pollen—red as red

As the flag above the old café—

And roamed there all the stupid afternoon.

Barque of phosphor

On the palmy beach,

Move outward into heaven,

Into the alabasters

And night blues.

Foam and cloud are one.

Sultry moon-monsters

Are dissolving.

Fill your black hull

With white moonlight.

There will never be an end

To this droning of the surf.

The doctor of Geneva stamped the sand

That lay impounding the Pacific swell,

Patted his stove-pipe hat and tugged his shawl.

Lacustrine man had never been assailed

By such long-rolling opulent cataracts,

Unless Racine or Bossuet held the like.

He did not quail. A man so used to plumb

The multifarious heavens felt no awe

Before these visible, voluble delugings,

Which yet found means to set his simmering mind

Spinning and hissing with oracular

Notations of the wild, the ruinous waste,

Until the steeples of his city clanked and sprang

In an unburgherly apocalypse.

The doctor used his handkerchief and sighed.

Pour the unhappiness out

From your too bitter heart,

Which grieving will not sweeten.

Poison grows in this dark.

It is in the water of tears

Its black blooms rise.

The magnificent cause of being,

The imagination, the one reality

In this imagined world

Leaves you

With him for whom no phantasy moves,

And you are pierced by a death.

In the sea, Biscayne, there prinks

The young emerald, evening star,

Good light for drunkards, poets, widows,

And ladies soon to be married.

By this light the salty fishes

Arch in the sea like tree-branches,

Going in many directions

Up and down.

This light conducts

The thoughts of drunkards, the feelings

Of widows and trembling ladies,

The movements of fishes.

How pleasant an existence it is

That this emerald charms philosophers,

Until they become thoughtlessly willing

To bathe their hearts in later moonlight,

Knowing that they can bring back thought

In the night that is still to be silent,

Reflecting this thing and that,

Before they sleep!

It is better that, as scholars,

They should think hard in the dark cuffs

Of voluminous cloaks,

And shave their heads and bodies.

It might well be that their mistress

Is no gaunt fugitive phantom.

She might, after all, be a wanton,

Abundantly beautiful, eager,

Fecund,

From whose being by starlight, on sea-coast,

The innermost good of their seeking

Might come in the simplest of speech.

It is a good light, then, for those

That know the ultimate Plato,

Tranquillizing with this jewel

The torments of confusion.

I

The World without Imagination

Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil,

The sovereign ghost. As such, the Socrates

Of snails, musician of pears, principium

And lex. Sed quaeritur: is this same wig

Of things, this nincompated pedagogue,

Preceptor to the sea? Crispin at sea

Created, in his day, a touch of doubt.

An eye most apt in gelatines and jupes,

Berries of villages, a barber’s eye,

An eye of land, of simple salad-beds,

Of honest quilts, the eye of Crispin, hung

On porpoises, instead of apricots,

And on silentious porpoises, whose snouts

Dibbled in waves that were mustachios,

Inscrutable hair in an inscrutable world.

One eats one paté, even of salt, quotha.

It was not so much the lost terrestrial,

The snug hibernal from that sea and salt,

That century of wind in a single puff.

What counted was mythology of self,

Blotched out beyond unblotching. Crispin,

The lutanist of fleas, the knave, the thane,

The ribboned stick, the bellowing breeches, cloak

Of China, cap of Spain, imperative haw

Of hum, inquisitorial botanist,

And general lexicographer of mute

And maidenly greenhorns, now beheld himself,

A skinny sailor peering in the sea-glass.

What word split up in clickering syllables

And storming under multitudinous tones

Was name for this short-shanks in all that brunt?

Crispin was washed away by magnitude.

The whole of life that still remained in him

Dwindled to one sound strumming in his ear,

Ubiquitous concussion, slap and sigh,

Polyphony beyond his baton’s thrust.