# Reading > Poems, Poets, and Poetry >  Wallace Stevens

## Virgil

Someone asked me to recommend some peoms by Wallace Stevens. I find him to be one of the fiest American poets of the 20th century. You can read a little about him in Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Stevens.

The poems I've selected are some of my favorites from years of returning to his poetry. If anyone wants to discuss any of them, please feel free to post.

----------


## Virgil

from *Sunday Morning*
1
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passion of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

2
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in the comforts of sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.

3
Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

...

----------


## Virgil

from *The Snow Man*

One must have a mind of winter 
To regard the frost and the boughs 
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; 

And have been cold a long time 
To behold the junipers shagged with ice, 
The spruces rough in the distant glitter 

Of the January sun; and not to think 
Of any misery in the sound of the wind, 
In the sound of a few leaves, 

...

----------


## Virgil

from *The Emperor of Ice-Cream*

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

....

----------


## Virgil

from *The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man*

One's grand flights, one's Sunday baths,
One's tootings at the weddings of the soul
Occur as they occur. So bluish clouds
Occurred above the empty house and the leaves
Of the rhododendrons rattled their gold,
As if someone lived there. Such floods of white
Came bursting from the clouds. So the wind
Threw its contorted strength around the sky.

....

----------


## Virgil

from *Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird*

1
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

2
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
 In which there are three blackbirds.

3
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

4
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

5
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

6
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

7
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
....

----------


## Virgil

from *The Idea of Order at Key West*

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.
For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.

....

----------


## Virgil

from *Peter Quince at the Clavier*


I 

Just as my fingers on these keys 
Make music, so the self-same sounds 
On my spirit make a music, too. 
Music is feeling, then, not sound; 
And thus it is that what I feel, 
Here in this room, desiring you, 

Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk, 
Is music. It is like the strain 
Waked in the elders by Susanna; 

Of a green evening, clear and warm, 
She bathed in her still garden, while 
The red-eyed elders, watching, felt 

The basses of their beings throb 
In witching chords, and their thin blood 
Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna. 

II 

In the green water, clear and warm, 
Susanna lay. 

....

----------


## Virgil

from *Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour*


Light the first light of evening
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good. 

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing: 

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence. 

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.


....

----------


## Virgil

from *The Plain Sense of Things*

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to the end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective 
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.



....

----------


## quasimodo1

All his life Stevens collected art from abroad and saw that packages of various gourmet foods were mailed to him regularly. Although he regularly traveled in the South, most notably to Florida and the Florida Keys and Cuba, he never ventured abroad. But his cosmopolitan yearnings were amply satisfied by regular jaunts to New York City. Trains leaving Hartford on a better-than-hourly basis guaranteed that any Saturday he could be on the streets of New York City by 10 a.m. In the 1930s and 1940s, he was welcomed as a member of the exclusive set centered around the artistic and literary devotees Barbara and Henry Church. 

{snip}

Source: http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets...vens/biography

----------


## Virgil

Thank you Quasi. He did lead an interesting life. He wrote poetry as a young man but then got a job in the business world and wrote poems on the side when not busy, sort of like me at my job.  :Biggrin:  He ultimately became vice-president of his company and like you said finally made it big in the poetry world after he had retired at an old age. He did like going to Florida and many of his poems contrast the wintery north with the summery south. In one famous incident I think in the Florida Keys he got into a fist fight with Ernest Hemmingway. Unfortunate for Stevens, who was not normally a fighting man, was punched out and I think knocked out by Hemmingway. His poetry strikes me as a gentle soul. 

If anyone gets a chance to read "The Auroras of Autumn," (the poem, not the enite book of the same name) please do. It is a wonderful poem. I couldn't find it on the internet and it was a little long to type out.

----------


## Il Penseroso

Rather long, but one of my all time favorites (what got me into Stevens) :


from The Man With the Blue Guitar
I 
The man bent over his guitar, 
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green. 

They said, "You have a blue guitar, 
You do not play things as they are." 

The man replied, "Things as they are 
Are changed upon the blue guitar." 

And they said then, "But play, you must, 
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves, 

A tune upon the blue guitar 
Of things exactly as they are." 

II 

I cannot bring a world quite round, 
Although I patch it as I can. 

I sing a hero's head, large eye 
And bearded bronze, but not a man, 

Although I patch him as I can 
And reach through him almost to man. 

If to serenade almost to man 
Is to miss, by that, things as they are, 

Say that it is the serenade 
Of a man that plays a blue guitar. 

III 

Ah, but to play man number one, 
To drive the dagger in his heart, 

To lay his brain upon the board 
And pick the acrid colors out, 

To nail his thought across the door, 
Its wings spread wide to rain and snow, 

To strike his living hi and ho, 
To tick it, tock it, turn it true, 

To bang it from a savage blue, 
Jangling the metal of the strings... 

....

----------


## Logos

_General Mod Note to All: 

Please bear this in mind when posting poems:_
http://www.online-literature.com/for...ad.php?t=17769
.
.

----------


## Virgil

Logos, so I'm supposed to provide a link from where I got the poems? If that's correct, and please reply to tell me so, I will gladly do that.

Il Pen - Yes that's a favorite of mine too, but I thought it too long to post. Glad you did.

----------


## MaryLupin

Have you read _The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination_ by Stevens?

----------


## Virgil

> Have you read _The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination_ by Stevens?


No, I'm afraid I haven't. I have heard of it, and if I had reason to while I was in school I would have. I ought to someday.

----------


## Il Penseroso

I'm actually confused as to what we did wrong, or differently, in this thread as opposed to others, the ee cummings one in particular.

----------


## Logos

Logos
_General Mod Note to All: 

Please bear this in mind when posting poems:_
http://www.online-literature.com/for...ad.php?t=17769

Il Penseroso
I'm actually confused as to what we did wrong, or differently, in this thread as opposed to others, the ee cummings one in particular.

--

It is happening more and more lately, little discussion, and lots of copyrighted stuff being posted. I don't know how much more clear I can be in the above link I posted, but I'm just asking people to please think about what they're posting before they do so  :Smile:

----------


## Il Penseroso

Logos,
I apologize. I've been one to run with the crowd and figure if others are doing it it must be ok. Are we allowed to post the poems if there is discussion? I think we've got plenty to discuss here already.



back to the subject of the thread...
I always find Stevens' poems to be very helpful in the writing process. I'm one who sort of likes to be confused, and often after reading one of his poems it's helpful to sit and try to write something that may clarify a point to myself. He's also a very auditory poet, whose words ring like bells and clanging metal molded to his thoughts, which also often inspires me to write.

----------


## Virgil

> Logos
> _General Mod Note to All: 
> 
> Please bear this in mind when posting poems:_
> http://www.online-literature.com/for...ad.php?t=17769
> 
> Il Penseroso
> I'm actually confused as to what we did wrong, or differently, in this thread as opposed to others, the ee cummings one in particular.
> 
> ...


Thank you Logos, for this and the PM explaining this. But what should I now do? Delete the poems, snip them and post a link, or just tag a link to the bottom of each? Actually I believe a few of those may have been written prior to 1923. I can check. Just give me some guidence on how I should correct what I've done.

----------


## Logos

For poems published _pre_-1923 and in public domain, you can post them in entirety. For poems published _post_ 1923, ideally you would post just a stanza or two (fair use, so yes, 'snip' what is already there.) If you have typed it out yourself you could mention the publication you got it from, or, post a link to the site that _does_ have permission to post the authors' works in entirety.

[Like "The Official Web Site of Mark Twain", "The Walt Whitman Archive", or "The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford " that has holdings of author's manuscripts etc.]

Please don't get me wrong or think I'm trying to shut this down  :Blush:  This forum is dedicated to the discussion of "*Poems, Poets, and Poetry*: Discuss those who paint with words and the works that they create." and I'm very happy it is so busy lately and interest in poets not discussed before is arising  :Smile:

----------


## firefangled

> Have you read _The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination_ by Stevens?


It is one of those things that come in small packages, like, mmm, ah yes, Diamonds!

Have you seen Harold Bloom's The Poems of Our Culture?

The Man With the Blue Guitar and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird are two of my favorites. Along with, of course, Of Mere Being.

----------


## MaryLupin

> Have you seen Harold Bloom's The Poems of Our...


I haven't read _Poems of Our Climate_ for years yet I still distinctly remember the thud it made as it hit the wall against which I had thrown it. Now that is not to say I didn't relish some of what it had to say about Mr. Stevens but Bloom! Stars that man has an ego.

What I find amazing about Bloom is his never-ending desire to fight and his unstoppable (apparent) anxiety about how he will be misinterpreted by those who will write against him from the future. I think about how Bloom approaches Stevens in parallel with thinking about Stevens' ideas about the nature of reality and resemblance. What I always come up with is the most astonishing sense of irony as if Bloom had tried to climb into Stevens' trousers and found, much to his vexation, that they fit.

Well...enough of ire.

One thing I do remember clearly, that I also liked unreservedly, was the notion that Stevens was an undeclared Emersonian transcendentalist. What do you think about the veracity of this? And its conceptual reach?

----------


## MaryLupin

I don't know that I have a favorite Stevens poem. It depends so much on how I am feeling and upon what I am thinking. I do keep coming back to _Thirteen Ways_ though.

----------


## symphony

Here's one of my favorites:


*The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm*


The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
... ... ...


http://www.repeatafterus.com/title.php?i=4700


Edit: Uhm... i copied it from that link, but now as i read it... wouldnt that be "much _most_ to be" in line 7?  :Confused:

----------


## Virgil

That is a good one Symph. Thanks. I haven't read any Stevens lately. Time to start again.  :Smile:

----------


## lakeside_girl

wally stevens is probably my favorite poet of all time. i was hooked after reading 13 ways of looking at a blackbird...."inflections or innuendos..." he had a beautiful mind.

----------


## Kafka's Crow

_The Emperor of Ice-cream-Cream_ is my favorite Stevens poem:http://www.everypoet.com/archive/poe..._ice_cream.htm

To me Stevens belongs in the second tier of the great American poets along with Robert Frost (although I prefer Frost), the first tier is ruled by the greatest of the greats, i-e Mr TS Eliot (American???) and Ezra Pound.

----------


## symphony

> The Emperor of Ice-cream-Cream is my favorite Stevens poem


Funny you should mention that. I was just thinking about that poem, i wrote a tiny poem _on_ that one very recently, and i was just pondering about how bad mine was.  :FRlol: 




> Mr TS Eliot (American???)


 Eliot is a british poet born in america i believe.

----------


## TheFifthElement

Good choice Symphony *The House was Quiet and the World Was Calm* is one of my favourites.

Two personal faves of mine:




> *Domination of Black*
> 
> At night, by the fire,
> The colors of the bushes
> And of the fallen leaves,
> Repeating themselves,
> Turned in the room,
> Like the leaves themselves
> Turning in the wind.
> ...



And, *Six Significant Landscapes*, these are my two favourites:




> II
> The night is of the color
> Of a woman's arm:
> Night, the female,
> Obscure,
> Fragrant and supple,
> Conceals herself.
> A pool shines,
> Like a bracelet
> ...



But there are so many. Stevens was a most excellent poet.

----------


## quasimodo1

The Planet On The Table


.....His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of his self,
Were no less makings of the sun.

It was not important that they survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,

Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part. 
{excerpt}

----------


## quasimodo1

Contrary Theses (II) 



One chemical afternoon in mid-autumn, 
When the grand mechanics of earth and sky were 

near; 
Even the leaves of the locust were yellow then, 


He walked with his year-old boy on his shoulder. 
The sun shone and the dog barked and the baby 

slept. 
The leaves, even of the locust, the green locust. 


He wanted and looked for a final refuge, 
From the bombastic intimations of winter 
And the martyrs a la mode. He walked toward 


An abstract, of which the sun, the dog, the boy 
Were contours. Cold was chilling the wide-moving 

swans. 
The leaves were falling like notes from a piano. ... {excerpt}

----------


## Virgil

> Contrary Theses (II) 
> 
> 
> 
> One chemical afternoon in mid-autumn, 
> When the grand mechanics of earth and sky were 
> 
> near; 
> Even the leaves of the locust were yellow then, 
> ...


Good one Quasi. I've never read that one before. I'll have to search it out in my Stevens.

----------


## quasimodo1

A Postcard from the Volcano 



Children picking up our bones 
Will never know that these were once 
As quick as foxes on the hill; 


And that in autumn, when the grapes 
Made sharp air sharper by their smell 
These had a being, breathing frost; 


And least will guess that with our bones 
We left much more, left what still is 
The look of things, left what we felt 


At what we saw. The spring clouds blow 
Above the shuttered mansion house, 
Beyond our gate and the windy sky 


Cries out a literate despair. 
We knew for long the mansion's look 
And what we said of it became 


A part of what it is ... {...excerpt}

----------


## kgremore

hey... thanks for the comment. Yea, I wrote it about a summer ago. I was goign to private message you butI couldn't find a link.
What do you honestly think of it?

----------


## stlukesguild

Posted before... but never hurts to read it again:

...Light the first light of evening as in a room
In which we rest, and for small reason, think
The world imagined the ultimate good...

We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

Wallace Stevens- from-Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

----------


## quasimodo1

"...The wheel survives the myths. 
The fire eye in the clouds survives the gods. 
To think of a dove with an eye of grenadine 
And pines that are comets, so it occurs, 
And a little island full of geese and stars: 
It may be that the ignorant man, alone, 
Has any chance to mate his life with life 
That is the sensual, pearly spouse, the life 
That is fluent in even the wintriest bronze." from The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man 
by Wallace Stevens

----------


## Virgil

God I love Stevens. The last two are among my favorites. I can almost quote them by heart.  :Smile:   :Smile:

----------


## quasimodo1

You know Virgil, Stevens is one of those extremely rare poets whose work, when you return to it, still shocks you its so good. Here's another gem... "...If it was only the dark voice of the sea 
That rose, or even colored by many waves; 
If it was only the outer voice of sky 
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled, 
However clear, it would have been deep air, 
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound 
Repeated in a summer without end 
And sound alone. But it was more than that, 
More even than her voice, and ours, among 
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind, 
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped 
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres 
Of sky and sea. 
It was her voice that made 
The sky acutest at its vanishing. 
She measured to the hour its solitude. 
She was the single artificer of the world 
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea, 
Whatever self it had, became the self 
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we, 
As we beheld her striding there alone, 
Knew that there never was a world for her 
Except the one she sang and, singing, made." from The Idea of Order at Key West 
by Wallace Stevens

----------


## Virgil

> You know Virgil, Stevens is one of those extremely rare poets whose work, when you return to it, still shocks you its so good.


I agree.  :Smile:

----------


## Guinivere

Gray Room

Although you sit in a room that is gray, 
Except for the silver 
Of the straw-paper, 
And pick 
At your pale white gown; 
Or lift one of the green beads 
Of your necklace, 
To let it fall; 
Or gaze at your green fan 
Printed with the red branches of a red willow; 
Or, with one finger, 
Move the leaf in the bowl-- 
The leaf that has fallen from the branches of the forsythia 
Beside you... 
What is all this? 
I know how furiously your heart is beating. 

 :Smile:

----------


## firefangled

> I haven't read _Poems of Our Climate_ for years yet I still distinctly remember the thud it made as it hit the wall against which I had thrown it. Now that is not to say I didn't relish some of what it had to say about Mr. Stevens but Bloom! Stars that man has an ego.
> 
> What I find amazing about Bloom is his never-ending desire to fight and his unstoppable (apparent) anxiety about how he will be misinterpreted by those who will write against him from the future. I think about how Bloom approaches Stevens in parallel with thinking about Stevens' ideas about the nature of reality and resemblance. What I always come up with is the most astonishing sense of irony as if Bloom had tried to climb into Stevens' trousers and found, much to his vexation, that they fit.
> 
> Well...enough of ire.
> 
> One thing I do remember clearly, that I also liked unreservedly, was the notion that Stevens was an undeclared Emersonian transcendentalist. What do you think about the veracity of this? And its conceptual reach?


Well, there's nothing like waiting a year to respond.  :Smile:  

I have obviously missed scrolling down in this thread, even though Stevens is possibly my favorite poet.

I'm not sure how I would classify Stevens, or even try. I do picture the place that his poetry occupies as the small space between the fingers of Adam and God in Michelangelo's Creation. The _imag(e)_ination for Stevens was the key to our knowing. Whether that makes him a transcendentalist or not is up to those who like to classify things.

----------


## firefangled

*Reality Is an Activity of the Most August Imagination*


Last Friday, in the big light of last Friday night,
We drove home from Cornwall to Hartford, late.

It was not a night blown at a glassworks in Vienna
Or Venice, motionless, gathering time and dust.

There was a crush of strength in a grinding going round,
Under the front of the westward evening star, 

The vigor of glory, a glittering in the veins,
As things emerged and moved and were dissolved,

Either in distance, change or nothingness,
The visible transformation of summer night,

An argentine abstraction, approaching form
and suddenly denying itself away. {excerpt}

_- Wallace Stevens_

----------


## firefangled

*The Dove in the Belly*

The whole of appearance is a toy. For this,
The dove in the belly builds his nest and coos,

Selah, tempestuous bird. How is it that
The rivers shine and hold their mirrors up,

Like excellence collecting excellence?
How is it that the wooden trees stand up

And live and heap their panniers of green
And hold them round the sultry day? Why should

These mountains being high be, also, bright,
Fetched up with snow that never falls to earth?

And this great esplanade of corn, miles wide,
Is something wished for made effectual... {excerpt}

-_Wallace Stevens_

----------


## quasimodo1

"I'm not sure how I would classify Stevens, or even try. I do picture the place that his poetry occupies as the small space between the fingers of Adam and God in Michelangelo's Creation. The imag(e)ination for Stevens was the key to our knowing. Whether that makes him a transcendentalist or not is up to those who like to classify things." Firefangled

----------


## quasimodo1

".....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." from The Man on the Dump 
by Wallace Stevens

----------


## quasimodo1

Six Significant Landscapes 

I
An old man sits
In the shadow of a pine tree
In China.
He sees larkspur,
Blue and white,
At the edge of the shadow,
Move in the wind.
His beard moves in the wind.
The pine tree moves in the wind.
Thus water flows
Over weeds.

II
The night is of the colour
Of a woman's arm:
Night, the female,
Obscure,
Fragrant and supple,
Conceals herself.
A pool shines,
Like a bracelet
Shaken in a dance.

.......

V
Not all the knives of the lamp-posts,
Nor the chisels of the long streets,
Nor the mallets of the domes
And high towers,
Can carve
What one star can carve,
Shining through the grape-leaves.

VI
Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses --
As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon --
Rationalists would wear sombreros.

-- Wallace Stevens {excerpt}

----------


## quasimodo1

Supple and turbulent, a ring of men 
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn 
Their boisterous devotion to the sun, 
Not as a god, but as a god might be, 
Naked among them, like a savage source. 
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise, 
Out of their blood, returning to the sky; 
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice, 
The windy lake wherein their lord delights, 
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills, 
That choir among themselves long afterward. 
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship 
Of men that perish and of summer morn. 
And whence they came and whither they shall go 
The dew upon their feet shall manifest. {passage from Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens}

----------


## Virgil

> Supple and turbulent, a ring of men 
> Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn 
> Their boisterous devotion to the sun, 
> Not as a god, but as a god might be, 
> Naked among them, like a savage source. 
> Their chant shall be a chant of paradise, 
> Out of their blood, returning to the sky; 
> And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice, 
> The windy lake wherein their lord delights, 
> ...


I thought I knew "Sunday Morning" intimately, Quasi, but I had completely forgotten that seventh stanza. I had to look it up to verify it was part of the poem. Thanks for that.  :Wink:

----------


## quasimodo1

Hey Virgil, Just been revisiting Stevens and it seems I wasn't paying enough attention the first time. "The sky will be much friendlier then than now, 
A part of labor and a part of pain, 
And next in glory to enduring love, 
Not this dividing and indifferent blue." from Sunday Morning

----------


## Virgil

That is a great line. My favorite stanza from Sunday Morning I think might be the fifth:




> V 
> 
> She says, "But in contentment I still feel 
> The need of some imperishable bliss." 
> Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, 
> Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams 
> And our desires. Although she strews the leaves 
> Of sure obliteration on our paths, 
> The path sick sorrow took, the many paths 
> ...

----------


## quasimodo1

"Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones." ... {quote from A High-Toned Old Christian Woman by Wallace Stevens}

----------


## quasimodo1

He is not paradise of parakeets,
Of his gold ether, golden alguazil,
Except because he broods there and is still. 

Panache upon panache, his tails deploy
Upward and outward, in green-vented forms,
His tip a drop of water full of storms. 

from The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws
by Wallace Stevens

----------


## stlukesguild

I

In the far South the sun of autumn is passing
Like Walt Whitman walking along a ruddy shore.
He is singing and chanting the things that are part of him,
The worlds that were and will be, death and day.
Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end.
His beard is of fire and his staff is a leaping flame.


II

Sigh for me, night-wind, in the noisy leaves of the oak.
I am tired. Sleep for me, heaven over the hill.
Shout for me, loudly and loudly, joyful sun, when you rise.


III

It was when the trees were leafless first in November
And their blackness became apparent, that one first
Knew the eccentric to be the base of design...


X

Between farewell and the absence of farewell,
The final mercy and the final loss,
The wind and the sudden falling of the wind...


XVIII

Shall I grapple with my destroyers
In the muscular poses of the museums?
But my destroyers avoid the museums...


L

Union of the weakest develops strength
Not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge
One of the leaves that have fallen in autumn?
But the wise man avenges by building his city in snow.

From _Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery_

----------


## quasimodo1

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. {from Le Monocle de Mon Oncle by Wallace Stevens}

----------


## quasimodo1

To Hi Simons

Hartford, Conn. 12 January 1940

 A few months ago, the universal fear (I use the word fear, because I have no sympathy with communism, instead of expectation) was that the world would go communistic, if in fact it had not already done so without realizing it, except in the matter of putting it into effect. Communism is just a new romanticism. I am going to include in this comment a comment on your statement that I am on the right. Of course, I believe in any number of things that so-called social revolutionists believe in, but I dont believe in calling myself a revolutionist simply because I believe in doing everything practically possible you improve the condition of the workers, and because I believe in education as the source of freedom and power, and because I regret that we have not experimented a little bit more extensively in public ownership of public utilities. What really divides men into political classes in respect to these things is not the degree to which they believe in them but the ways and means of putting their beliefs into effect. There are a lot of things that the workers are doing that I do not believe in, even though, at the same time, I want certainly as ardently as they do to see them able to live decently and in security and to educate their children and to have pleasant homes, etc. I believe that they could procure these things within the present frame-work.

 I suppose that, from the point of view of common usage, I am against the CIO and with the AF of L. But this is all most incidental with me and rather a ridiculous thing for me to be talking about. My direct interests are with something quite different; my direct interest is in telling the Archbishop of Canterbury to go jump off the end of the dock.  

from Letters of Wallace Stevens, selected and edited by Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1966), 351.

----------


## lavendar1

Let us make signals in the air and cry aloud.
We must leave a wide noise tolling
in the night;
and, in the deep of time,
set the wide wind rolling.

"Moment of Light" -- Final Stanza
_Opus Posthumous_

----------


## Virgil

> To Hi Simons
> 
> Hartford, Conn. 12 January 1940
> 
>  A few months ago, the universal fear (I use the word fear, because I have no sympathy with communism, instead of expectation) was that the world would go communistic, if in fact it had not already done so without realizing it, except in the matter of putting it into effect. Communism is just a new romanticism. I am going to include in this comment a comment on your statement that I am on the right. Of course, I believe in any number of things that so-called social revolutionists believe in, but I dont believe in calling myself a revolutionist simply because I believe in doing everything practically possible you improve the condition of the workers, and because I believe in education as the source of freedom and power, and because I regret that we have not experimented a little bit more extensively in public ownership of public utilities. What really divides men into political classes in respect to these things is not the degree to which they believe in them but the ways and means of putting their beliefs into effect. There are a lot of things that the workers are doing that I do not believe in, even though, at the same time, I want certainly as ardently as they do to see them able to live decently and in security and to educate their children and to have pleasant homes, etc. I believe that they could procure these things within the present frame-work.
> 
>  I suppose that, from the point of view of common usage, I am against the CIO and with the AF of L. But this is all most incidental with me and rather a ridiculous thing for me to be talking about. My direct interests are with something quite different; my direct interest is in telling the Archbishop of Canterbury to go jump off the end of the dock.  
> 
> from Letters of Wallace Stevens, selected and edited by Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1966), 351.


Ah Quasi. That warms my ideological heart.  :Smile:  As a young man I believe Stevens was intrigued with socialism. It's good to see the old Churchill adage in play: If you're not a liberal at 20, you've got no heart; if you're still a liberal at 30, you've got no brain.  :Biggrin:

----------


## quasimodo1

.....He did not quail. A man who 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. ...

{from The Doctor of Geneva}

----------


## quasimodo1

FROM THE MISERY OF DON JOOST 
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, bleeding and death,
The old animal,
The senses and feeling, the very sound
And sight, and all there was of the storm,
Knows nothing more. {from HARMONIUM, 1923}

----------


## Virgil

> FROM THE MISERY OF DON JOOST 
> 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, bleeding and death,
> ...


 :FRlol: Love it. You know Quasi, if the poem is from Harmonium published in 1923, I think you can post the entire poem. If it's before the copywrite date of 1926 (I think it is) it can be freely distributed. I guess you can check with Logos.

----------


## quasimodo1

Virgil: According to my text, that is the entire poem. I realize that Stevens brackets the public domain vs copyright period so some of these great poems will have to be excerpted. Having a little trouble with format as I'm sure you noticed...no stanza break. q1

----------


## quasimodo1

A THOUGHT REVOLVED
Mystic Garden & Middling Beast (II)


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. -- {part 2 of 4}

----------


## quasimodo1

Wallace Stevens

Friday, August 15, 2008
12:29 PM

CONNOISSEUR OF CHAOS

A. A violent order is disorder; and
B. A great disorder is an order. These
Two things are one. (Pages of illustrations.)

II. If all the green of spring was blue, and it is;
If the flowers of South Africa were bright
On the tables of Connecticut, and they are;
If Englishmen lived without tea in Ceylon, and they do;
And if it all went on in an orderly way,
And it does; a law of inherent opposites,
Of essential unity, is as pleasant as port,
As pleasant as the brush-strokes of a bough,
An Upper, particular bough in, say, Marchand.

III. After all the pretty contrast of life and death
Proves that these opposite things partake at one,
At least that was the theory, when bishops' books
Resolved the world. We cannot go back to that.
The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,
If one may say so. And yet relation appears,
A small relation expanding like the shade
Of a cloud on sand, a shape on the side of a hill. {3 of 5 parts}

----------


## quasimodo1

Wallace Stevens



THE PURE GOOD OF THEORY
I. All the Preludes to Felicity
It is time that beats in the breast and it is time
That batters against the mind, silent and proud,
The mind that knows it is destroyed by time.

Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse
Without a rider on a road at night.
The mind sits listening and hears it pass.

It is someone walking rapidly in the street.
The reader by the window has finished his book
And tells the hour by the lateness of the sounds.

Even breathing is the beating of time, in kind:
A retardation of its battering,
A horse grotesquely taut, a walker like

A shadow in mid-earthIf we propose
A large-sculptured, platonic person, free from time,
And imagine for him the speech he cannot speak,

A form, then, protected from the battering, may
Mature: A capable being may replace
Dark horse and walker walking rapidly.

Felicity, ah! Time is the hooded enemy,
The inimical music, the enchantered space
In which the enchanted preludes have their place.

II. Description of a Platonic Person
Then came Brazil to nourish the emaciated
Romantic with dreams of her avoirdupois, green glade
Of serpents like z rivers simmering,

Green glade and holiday hotel and world
Of the future, in which the memory had gone
From everything, flying the flag of the nude,

The flag of the nude above the holiday hotel.
But there was one invalid in that green glade
And beneath that handkerchief drapeau, severe,

Signal, a character out of solitude,
Who was what people had been and still were,
Who lay in bed on the west wall of the sea,

Ill of a question like a malady,
Ill of a constant question in his thought,
Unhappy about the sense of happiness.

Was it that--a sense and beyond intelligence?
Could the future rest on a sense and be beyond
Intelligence? On what does the present rest?

This platonic person discovered a soul in the world
And studied it in his holiday hotel.
{excerpt from four part poem}

----------


## quasimodo1

"Wallace Stevens is considered as an unapologetically Romantic poet of imagination. His search for meaning in a universe without religion in "Sunday Morning" is likened to Crane's energetic quest for meaning and symbol. In "The Poems of Our Climate," Stevens's desire to reduce poetry to essential terms, and then his countering resistance to this impulse, are explored. Finally, "The Man on the Dump" is considered as a typically Stevensian search for truth in specifically linguistic terms." from a Yale overview, poetry class.

----------


## quasimodo1

Wallace Stevens



Reply to Papini
"In all the solemn moments of human history……poets rose to sing 
the hymn of victory, or the psalm of supplication…..Cease, then, 
from being the astute calligraphers of congealed daydreams, 
the hunters of cerebral phosphorescences."
Letter of Celestin VI, Pope, to the poets
P.C.C. Giovanni Papini

I. Poor procurator, why do you ask someone else
To say what Celestin should say for himself

He has an ever-living subject. The poet
Has only the formulations of midnight.

Is Celestin dislodged? The way through the world
Is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.

You know that the nucleus of time is not
The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind

Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed
As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins

Nor stand there making orotund consolations.
He shares the confusions of intelligence.

Giovanni Papini, by your faith, know how
He wishes that all hard poetry were true.

This pastoral of endurance and  of death
Is of a nature that must be perceived

And not imagined. The removes must give,
Including the removes toward poetry.

II. Celestinn, the generous, the civilized,
Will understand what it is to understand.

The world is still profound and in its depths
Man sits and studies silence and himself,

Abiding the reverberations in the vaults.
Now, once, he accumulates himself and time

For humane triumphals. But a politics
Of property is not an area

For triumphals. These are hymns appropriate to
The complexities of the world, when apprehended,

The intricacies of appearance, when perceived.
They become our gradual possession. ... {excerpt}

----------


## quasimodo1

Wallace Stevens



To an Old Philosopher in Rome

On the threshold of heaven, the figures in the street
Become the figures of heaven, the majestic movement
Of men growing small in the distances of space,
Singing, with smaller and still smaller sound,
Unintelligible absolution and an end--

The threshold, Rome, and that more merciful Rome
Beyond, the two alike in the make of the mind.
It is as if in a human dignity
Two parallels become one, a perspective, of which
Men are part both in the inch and in the mile.

How easily the blown banners change to wings...
Things dark on the horizons of perception,
Become accompaniments of fortune, but
Of the fortune of the spirit, beyond the eye,
Not of its sphere, and yet not far beyond,

The human end in the spirit's greatest reach,
The extreme of the known in the presence of the extreme
Of the unknown. The newsboys' muttering
Becomes another murmuring; the smell
Of medicine, a fragrantness not to be spoiled...

The bed, the books, the chair, the moving nuns,
The candle as it evades the sight, these are
The sources of happiness in the shape of Rome,
A shape within the ancient circles of shapes,
And these beneath the shadow of a shape

In a confusion on bed and books, a portent
On the chair, a moving transparence on the nuns,
A light of the candle tearing against the wick
To join a hovering excellence, to escape
From fire and be part only of that of which

Fire is the symbol: the celestial possible.
Speak to your pillow as if it was yourself.
Be orator but with an accurate tongue
And without eloquence, O, half-asleep,
Of the pity that is the memorial of this room,

So that we feel, in this illumined large,
The veritable small, so that each of us
Beholds himself in you, and hears his voice
In yours, master and commiserable man,
Intent on your particles of nether-do,

Your dozing in the depths of wakefulness,
In the warmth of your bed, at the edge of your chair, alive
Yet living in two worlds, impenitent
As to one, and, as to one, most penitent,
Impatient for the grandeur that you need

In so much misery; and yet finding it
Only in misery, the afflatus of ruin,
Profound poetry of the poor and of the dead,
As in the last drop of the deepest blood,
As it falls from the heart and lies there to be seen,

Even as the blood of an empire, it might be,
For a citizen of heaven though still of Rome.
It is poverty's speech that seeks us out the most.
It is older than the oldest speech of Rome.
This is the tragic accent of the scene.

And you-- it is you that speak it, without speech,
The loftiest syllables among loftiest things,
The one invulnerable man among
Crude captains, the naked majesty, if you like,
Of bird-nest arches and of rain-stained-vaults.

{excerpt}

----------


## quasimodo1

The Auroras of Autumn



I. This is where the serpent lives, the bodiless.
His head is air. Beneath his tip at night
Eyes open and fix on us in every sky.

Or is this another wriggling out of the egg,
Another image at the end of the cave,
Another bodiless for the body's slough?

This is where the serpent lives. This is his nest,
These fields, these hills, these tinted distances,
And the pines above and along and beside the sea.

This is form gulping after formlessness,
Skin flashing to wished-for disappearances
And the serpent body flashing without the skin.

This is the height emerging and its base
These lights may finally attain a pole
In the midmost midnight and find the serpent there,

In another nest, the master of the maze
Of body and air and forms and images,
Relentlessly in possession of happiness.

This is his poison: that we should disbelieve
Even that. His meditations in the ferns,
When he moved so slightly to make sure of sun,

Made us no less as sure. We saw in his head,
Black beaded on the rock, the flecked animal,
The moving grass, the Indian in his glade.

II. Farewell to an ideaA cabin stands,
Deserted, on a beach. It is white,
As by a custom or according to

An ancestral theme or as a consequence
Of an infinite course. The flowers against the wall
Are white, a little dried, a kind of mark

Reminding, trying to remind, of a white
That was different, something else, last year
Or before, not the white of an aging afternoon,

Whether fresher or duller, whether of winter cloud
Or of winter sky, from horizon to horizon.
The wind is blowing the sand across the floor.

Here, being visible is being white,
Is being of the solid of white, the accomplishment
Of an extremist in an exercise...

The season changes. A cold wind chills the beach.
The long lines of it grow longer, emptier,
A darkness gathers though it does not fall

And the whiteness grows less vivid on the wall.
The man who is walking turns blankly on the sand.
He observes how the north is always enlarging the change,

With its frigid brilliances, its blue-red sweeps
And gusts of great enkindlings, its polar green,
The color of ice and fire and solitude.

II. Farewell to an ideaThe mother's face,
The purpose of the poem, fills the room.
They are together, here, and it is warm,

With none of the prescience of oncoming dreams.
It is evening. The house is evening, half dissolved.
Only the half they can never possess remains,

Still-starred. It is the mother they possess,
Who gives transparence to their present peace.
She makes that gentler that can gentle be.

And yet she too is dissolved, she is destroyed.
She gives transparence. But she has grown old.
The necklace is a carving not a kiss.

The soft hands are a motion not a touch.
The house will crumble and the books will burn.
They are at ease in a shelter of the mind

And the house is of the mind and they and time,
Together, all together. Boreal night
Will look like frost as it approaches them

And to the mother as she falls asleep
And as they say good-night, good-night. Upstairs
The windows will be lighted, not the rooms.

A wind will spread its windy grandeurs round
And knock like a rifle-butt against the door.
The wind will command them with invincible sound.

IV. Farewell to an ideaThe cancellings,
The negations are never final. The father sits
In space, wherever he sits, of bleak regard,

As one that is strong in the bushes of his eyes.
He says no to no and yes to yes. He says yes
To no; and in saying yes he says farewell.

He measures the velocities of change.
He leaps from heaven to heaven more rapidly
Than bad angels leap from heaven to hell in flames.

But now he sits in quiet and green-a-day.
He assumes the great speeds of space and flutters them
From cloud to cloudless, cloudless to keen clear

In flights of eye and ear, the highest eye
And the lowest ear, the deep ear that discerns,
At evening, things that attend it until it hears

The supernatural preludes of its own,
At the moment when the angelic eye defines
Its actors approaching, in company, in their masks.

Master O master seated by the fire
And yet in space and motionless and yet
Of motion the ever-brightening origin,

Profound, and yet the king and yet the crown,
Look at this present throne. What company,
In masks, can choir it with the naked wind?

V. The mother invites humanity to her house
And table. The father fetches tellers of tales
And musicians who mute much, muse much, on the tales,

The father fetches negresses to dance,
Among the children, like curious ripenesses
Of pattern in the dance's ripening.

For these the musicians make insidious tones,
Clawing the sing-song of their instruments.
The children laugh and jangle a tinny time.

The father fetches pageants out of air,
Scenes of the theatre, vistas and blocks of woods
And curtains like a naïve pretence of sleep.

Among these the musicians strike the instinctive poem.
The father fetches his unherded herds,
Of barbarous tongue, slavered and panting halves

Of breath, obedient to his trumpet's touch.
This then is Chatillon or as you please.
We stand in the tumult of a festival.

What festival? This loud, disordered mooch?
These hospitaliers? These brute-like guests?
These musicians dubbing at a tragedy,

A-dub, a-dub, whichh is made up of this:
That there are no lines to speak? There is no play.
Or, the persons act one merely by being here.

{5 of 10 parts}

----------


## quasimodo1

The Sail of Ulysses

"Under the shape of his sail, Ulysses,
Symbol of the seeker, crossing by night
The giant sea, read his own mind.
He said, 'As I know, I am and have
The right to be'. Guiding his boat
Under the middle stars, he said:"

"If knowledge and the thing known are one
So that to know a man is to be
That man, to know a place is to be
That place, and it seems to come to that;
And if to know one man is to know all
And if one's sense of a single spot
Is what one knows of the universe,
Then knowledge is the only life,
The only sun of the only day,
The only access to true ease,
The deep comfort of the world and fate.

II. There is a human loneliness;
A part of space and solitude,
In which knowledge cannot be denied,
In which nothing of knowledge fails,
The luminous companion, the hand,
The fortifying arm, the profound
Response, the completely answering voice,
That which is more than anything else
The right within us and about us,
Joined, the triumphant vigor, felt,
The inner direction on which we depend,
That which keeps us the little that we are,
The aid of greatness to be and the force."

{excerpt, 2 of 8 parts}

----------


## quasimodo1

ARCADES OF PHILADELPHIA THE PAST

Only the rich remember the past,
The strawberries once in the Apennines,
Philadelphia that the spiders ate.

There they sit, holding their eyes in their hands.
Queer, in this Vallombrosa of ears,
That they never hear the past. To see,
To hear, to touch, to taste, to smell, that's now,
That's this. Do they touch the thing they see,
Feel the wind of it, smell the dust of it?
They do not touch it. Sounds never rise
Out of what they see. They polish their eyes
In their hands. The lilacs came long after.
But the town and the fragrance were never one,
Though the blue bushes bloomed-- and bloom,
Still bloom in the agate eyes, red blue,
Red purple, never quite red itself.
The tongue, the fingers, and the nose
Are comic trash, the cars are dirt,
But the eyes are men in the palm of the hand. .....



{excerpt, collection 1942}

----------


## quasimodo1

From Uncollected Poems

RED LOVES KIT

Your yes her no, your no her yes. The words
Make little difference, for being wrong
And wronging her, if only as she thinks,
You never can be right. You are the man.
You brought the incredible calm of ecstasy,
Which, like a virgin visionary spent
In this spent world, she must possess. The gift
Came not from you. Shall the world be spent again,
Wasted in what would be an ultimate waste,
A deprivation muffled in eclipse,
The final theft? That you are innocent
And love her still, still leaves you in the wrong.
Where is that calm and where that ecstasy?
Her words accuse you of adulteries
That sack the sun, though metaphysical.

II
A beautiful thing, milord, is beautiful
Not only in itself but in the things
Around it. Thus it has a large expanse,
As the moon has in its moonlight, worlds away,
As the sea has in its coastal clamorings.
So she, when in her mystic aureole
She walks, triumphing humbly, should express
Her beauty in your love. She should reflect
Her glory in your passion and be proud.
Her music should repeat itself in you,
Impelled by a compulsive harmony.
Milord, I ask you, though you will to sing,
Does she will to be proud? True, you may love
And she have beauty of a kind, but such
Unhappy love reveals vast blemishes.

III
Rest, crows, upon the edges of the moon,
Cover the golden altar deepest black,
Fly upward thick in numbers, fly across
The blueness of the half-night, fill the air
And darken it, make an unbroken mat
Out of the whirl and denseness of your wings,
Spread over heaven shutting out the light.
Then turn your heads and let your spiral eyes
And move the night by their intelligent motes.
Make a sidereal splendor as you fly.
And you, good galliard, to enchant black thoughts
Beseech them for an overwhelming gloom.
It will be fecund in rapt curios.

{entire poem, RED LOVES KIT, 1924}

----------


## quasimodo1

From Parts Of A World

ASIDES ON THE OBOE

The prologues are over. It is a question now,
Of final belief. So, say that final belief
Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.

I
That obsolete fiction of the wide river in
An empty land; the gods that Boucher killed;
And the metal heroes that time granulates--
The philosopher's man alone still walks in dew,
Still by the sea-side mutters milky lines
Concerning an immaculate imagery.
If you say on the hautboy man is not enough,
Can never sand as god, is ever wrong
In the end, however naked, tall, there is still
The impossible possible philosophers' man,
The man who has had the time to think enough,
The central man, the human globe, responsive
As a mirror with a voice, the man of glass,
Who in a million diamonds sums us up.

II
He is the transparence of the place in which
He is and in his poems we find peace.
He sets this peddler's pie and cries in summer,
The glass man, cold and numbered, dewily cries,
"Thou art not August unless I make thee so."
Clandestine steps upon imagined stairs
Climb through the night, because his cuckoos call.

III
One year, death and war prevented the jasmine scent
And the jasmine islands were bloody martyrdoms.
How was it then with the central man? Did we
Find peace? We found the sum of men. We found,
If we found the central evil, the central good. {2 of 3 parts}


{excerpt, Wallace Stevens}

----------


## quasimodo1

THE WOMAN WHO BLAMED LIFE ON A SPANIARD

I. You do not understand her evil mood.
You think that like the moon she is obscured
But clears and clears until an open night
Reveals her, rounded in beneficence,
Pellucid love; and for that image, like
Some merciful divination, you forgive.
And you forgive dark broachings growing great
Night after night because, the hemisphere
And still the impassioned place of it remain.
If she is like the moon, she never clears
But spreads an evil lustre whose increase
Is evil, crisply bright, disclosing you
Stooped in a night of vast inquietude.
Observe her shinning in the deadly trees.

II. That tragic prattle of the fates, astute
To bring destruction, often seems high-pitched
The babble of generations magnifies
A mot into a dictum, communal,
Of inescapable force, itself a fate.
How, then, if nothing more than vanity
Is at the bottom of her as pique-pain
And picador? Be briny-blooded bull.
Flatter her lance with your tempestuous dust,
Make melic groans and tooter at her strokes,
Rage in the ring and shake the corridors.
Perhaps at so much mastery, the bliss
She needs will come consolingly. Alas,
It is a most spectacular role, and yet
Less than contending with fictitious doom.


{two of three parts, 1952}

----------


## quasimodo1

From Harmonium

THE PALTRY NUDE STARTS ON A SPRING VOYAGE

But not on a shell, she starts,
Archaic, for the sea.
But on the first-found weed
She scuds the glitters,
Noiselessly, like one more wave.

She too is discontent
And would have purple stuff upon her arms,
Tired of the salty harbors,
Eager for the brine and bellowing
Of the high interiors of the sea.

The wind speeds her,
Blowing upon her hands
And watery back.
She touches the clouds, where she goes
In the circle of her traverse of the sea.

Yet this is meagre play
In the scurry and water-shine,
As her heels foam--
Not as when the goldener nude
Of a later day

Will go, like the centre of sea-green pomp,
In an intenser calm
Scullion of fate,
Across the spick torrent, ceaselessly,
Upon her irretrievable way.

----------


## quasimodo1

From Harmonium

TO THE ONE OF FICTIVE MUSIC

Sister and mother and diviner love,
And of the sisterhood of the living dead
Most near, most clear, and of the clearest bloom,
And of the fragrant mothers the most dear
And queen, and of diviner love the day
And flame and summer and sweet fire, no thread
Of cloudy silver sprinkles in your gown
Its venom of renown, and on your head
No crown is simpler than the simple hair.

Now, of the music summoned by the birth
That separates us from the wind and sea,
Yet leaves us in them, until earth becomes,
By being so much of the things we are,
Gross effigy and simulacrum , none
Gives motion to perfection more serene
Than yours, out of our imperfections, wrought,
Most rare, or ever of more kindred air
In the laborious weaving that you wear.

For so retentive of themselves are men
That music is intensest which proclaims
The near, the clear, and vaunts the clearest bloom,
And of all vigils musing the obscure,
That apprehends the most which sees and names,
As in your name, an image that is sure,
Among the arrant spices of the sun,
O bough and bush and scented vine, in whom
We give ourselves our likest issuance.

Yet not too like, yet not so like to be
Too near, to clear, saving a little to endow
Our feigning with the the strange unlike, whence springs
The difference that heavenly pity brings.
For this, musician, in your girdle fixed
Bear other perfumes. On your pale head wear
A band entwining, set with fatal stones.
Unreal, give back to us what once you gave:
The imagination that we spurned and crave.

----------


## Virgil

Oh Quasi, I love that poem. That first stanza knocks me off my feet every time I read it.  :Smile:

----------


## quasimodo1

From Poems Added to Harmonium

LUNAR PARAPHRASE

The moon is the mother of pathos and pity.

When, at the wearier end of November,
Her old light moves along the branches,
Feebly, slowly, depending upon them;
When the body of Jesus hangs in a pallor,
Humanly near, and the figure of Mary,
Touched on by hoar-frost, shrinks in a shelter
Made by the leaves, that have rotted and fallen;
When over the houses, a golden illusion
Brings back an earlier season of quiet
And quieting dreams in the sleepers in darkness--

The moon is the mother of pathos and pity.

----------


## quasimodo1

From Harmonium

TEA

When the elephant's-ear in the park
Shrivelled in frost,
And the leaves on the paths
Ran like rats,
Your lamp-light fell
On shining pillows,
Of sea-shades and sky-shades,
Like umbrellas in Java

----------


## quasimodo1

From Collected Poetry and Prose

From the collection, Poems added to Harmonium

ANATOMY OF MONOTONY

I. If from the earth we came, it was an earth
That bore us as a part of all the things
It breeds and that was lewder than it is.
Our nature is her nature. Hence it comes,
Since by our nature we grow old, earth grows
The same. We parallel the mother's death.
She walks an autumn ampler than the wind
Cries up for us and colder than the frost
Pricks in our spirits at the summer's end,
And over the bare spaces of our skies
She sees a barer sky that does not bend.

II. The body walks forth naked in the sun
And, out of tenderness or grief, the sun
Gives comfort, so that other bodies come,
Twinning our phantasy and our device,
And apt in versatile motion, touch and sound
To make the body covetous in desire
Of the still finer, more implacable chords.
So be it. Yet the spaciousness and light
In which the body walks and is deceived,
Falls from that fatal and that barer sky,
Ad this the spirit sees and is aggrieved.

----------


## quasimodo1

From Harmonium

IN THE CAROLINAS

The lilacs wither in the Carolinas.
Already the butterflies flutter above the cabins.
Already the new-born children interpret love
In the voices of mothers.

Timeless mother,
How is it that your aspic nipples
For once vent honey?

THE PINE-TREE SWEETENS MY BODY
THE WHITE IRIS BEAUTIFIES ME.

{ENTIRE POEM}

----------


## quasimodo1

From Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poetry and Prose

From Mr. Stevens' letters:
December 28, 1954

TO ROBERT PACK

Dear Mr. Pack:
At the top of page 16 of your paper you say: "Mr. Stevens'
work does not really lead anywhere." This is not quite the 
same thing as get anywhere and I realize that you say this in
connection with a differentiation between a work without a
plot and a work with a plot. Still, without regard to any other
consideration, if it meant to me what it meant to me, it might
very well mean the same thing to anybody else. That a man's
work should remain indefinite is often intentional. For instance,
in projecting a supreme fiction, I cannot imagine anything
more fatal than to state it definitely and incautiously.
_____For a long time, I have thought of adding other sections
to the NOTES and one in particular: IT MUST BE HUMAN. But
I think that it would be wrong not to leave well enough alone.
I don't mean to try to exercise the slightest restraint on what
you say. Say what you will. But we are dealing with poetry,
not with philosophy. The last thing in the world that I should
want to do would be to formulate a system.
Sincerely yours,

----------


## quasimodo1

From Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose

From Mr. Stevens' letters
November 9, 1945

TO CHARLES NORMAN

Dear Mr. Norman:
_____I prefer not to take part in your symposium on Pound and
although I am going to say a word or two about the thing, I don't
want to be quoted or referred to in any way.
_____It seems to me that since Pound's liberty, not to say even 
his life, may be at stake, he ought to be consulted about this 
sort of thing. After all, he might shrink from the idea of your
doing what you propose to do. Then again, he may be guilty
and he may admit it. He is an eccentric person. I don't suppose
there is the slightest doubt that he did what he is said to have done.
While he may have many excuses, I must say that I don't consider
the fact that he is a ma of genius as an excuse. Surely, such men
are subject to the common disciplines.
_____There are a number of things that could well be said in his
defense. But each one of these things is so very debatable, that
one would not care to say them, without having thought them
out most carefully. One such possibility is that the acts
of propagandists should not entail the same consequences as
the acts of a spy or informer because no one attaches really
serious importance to propaganda. I still don't smoke Camels,
don't eat Wheaties and don't use Sweetheart soap. I don't believe
that the law of treason should apply to chatter on the radio when
it is recognizably chatter.
_____At the same time, that remark illustrates what I said a moment
ago, that the things that might be said in Pound's defense are 
things that ought to be carefully thought out. His motives might
be significant. Yet, it is entirely possible that Pound deliberately 
and maliciously undertook to injure this country. Don't you think
it worthwhile waiting until you know why he did what he did before 
rallying to his defense?
_____I repeat that the question of his distinction seems to me to
be completely irrelevant. If his poetry is in point, then so are
Tokyo Rose's singing and wise-cracking. If when he comes over, 
he wants help and shows that he is entitled to it, then I, for one,
should be very glad to help him and I mean that in a practical way
and do anything possible for him.
_____I write this way because I think it highly likely that Pound
has very good personal friends who will rally around him.
They might well resent just this sort of thing that you propose
to do, but I know nothing about it. I merely want to keep 
out of it.
This letter is not to be quoted or used in any way.
Yours very truly,

----------


## quasimodo1

From Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose
From Poems Added to Harmonium

NEGATION

Hi! The creator too is blind,
Struggling toward his harmonious whole,
Rejecting intermediate parts,
Horrors and falsities and wrongs;
Incapable master of all force,
Too vague idealist, overwhelmed
By an afflatus that persists.
For this, then, we endure brief lives,
The evanescent symmetries
From that meticulous potter's thumb.

----------


## quasimodo1

From Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose

From Harmonium

HOMUNCULUS ET LA BELLE ETOILE

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.

----------


## quasimodo1

From Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose

From Transport to Summer

LATE HYMN FROM THE MYRRH-MOUNTAIN

Unsnack your snood, madanna, for the stars
Are shining on all brows of Neversink

Already the green bird of summer has flown
Away. The night-flies acknowledge these planets,

Predestined to this night, this noise and the place
Of summer. Tomorrow will look like today,

Will appear like it. But it will be an appearance,
A shape left behind, with like wings spreading out,

Brightly empowered with like colors, swarmingly,
But not quite molten, not quite the fluid thing,

A little changed by tips of artifice, changed
By the glints of sound from the grass. These are not

The early constellations, from which came the first
Illustrious intimations-- uncertain love,

The knowledge of being, sense without sense of time.
{excerpt}

----------


## quasimodo1

From Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose

From Uncollected Poems

THIS VAST INELEGANCE

This vast inelegance may seem the blankest desolation,
Beginning of a green Cockaigne to be, disliked, abandoned,

In which the bliss of clouds is mark of an intended meeting
Between the matin air and color, goldenest generating,

Soother and lustier than this vexed, autumnal exhalation,
So sullen with sighing and surrender to marauding ennui.

Which choir makes the most faultless medley in its
Celebration?
The choir that choirs the first fatigue in deep bell of
Canzoni?

Or this, whose music,  sweeping irradiation of a sea-night,
Piercing the tide by which it moves, is constantly within us?

Or this, whose jingling glorias, importunate of perfection,
Are the fulfilling rhapsodies that hymn it to creation?

Is any choir the whole voice of this fretful habitation,
This parlor of farcical dames, this clowns' colonnade, this 
Kites' pavilion?

See, now, the ways beleaguered by black, dropsical duennas,
Young weasels racing steep horizons in pursuit of
Planets...

{1921}

----------


## quasimodo1

From Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose

From The Rock (collection)

THE ROCK

I. Seventy Years Later

It is an illusion that we were ever alive,
Lived in the houses of mothers, arranged ourselves
By our own motions in a freedom of air.

Regard the freedom of seventy years ago.
It is no longer air. The houses still stand,
Though they are rigid in rigid emptiness.

Even our shadows, their shadows, no longer remain.
The lives these lived in the mind are at an end.
They never were..The sounds of the guitar

Were not and are not. Absurd. The words spoken
Were not and are not. It is not to be believed.
The meeting at noon at the edge of the field seems like

An invention, an embrace between one desperate clod
And another in fantastic consciousness,
In a queer assertion of humanity:

A theorem proposed between the two--
Two figures in a nature of the sun,
In the sun's design of its own happiness,

As if nothingness contained a metier,
A vital assumption, an impermanence
In its permanent cold, an illusion so desired

That the green leaves came and covered the high rock,
That the lilacs came and bloomed, like a blindness cleaned,
Exclaiming bright sight, as it was satisfied,

In a birth of sight. The blooming and the musk
Were being alive, an incessant being alive,
A particular of being, that gross universe.

II. The Poem as Icon

It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves.
We must be cured of it by a cure of the ground
Or a cure of ourselves, that is equal to a cure

Of the ground, a cure beyond forgetfulness.
And yet the leaves, if they broke into bud,
If they broke into bloom, if they bore fruit,

And if we ate the incipient colorings
Of their fresh culls might be a cure of the ground.
The fiction of the leaves is the icon

Of the poem, the figuration of blessedness,
And the icon is the man. The pearled chaplet of spring,
The magnum wreath of summer, time's autumn snood,

Its copy of the sun, these cover the rock.
These leaves are the poem, the icon and the man.
These are a cure of the ground and of ourselves,

In the predicate that there is nothing else.
They bud and bloom and bear their fruit without change.
They are more than leaves that cover the barren rock.

They bud the whitest eye, the pallidest sprout,
New senses in the engenderings of sense,
The desire to be at the end of distances,

The body quickened and the mind in root.
They bloom as a man loves, as he lives in love.
They bear their fruit so that the year is known,

As if its understanding was brown skin,
The honey in its pulp, the final found,
The plenty of the year and of the world.

In this plenty, the poem makes meanings of the rock,
Of such mixed motion and such imagery
That its barrenness becomes a thousand things

And so exists no more. This is the cure
Of leaves and of the ground and of ourselves.
His words are both the icon and the man.
{two of three parts}

----------


## quasimodo1

From Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose

From Uncollected Poems

SONNET FROM THE BOOK OF REGRETS
By Joachim du Bellay

Happy the man who, like Ulysses, goodly ways
Hath been, or like to him that gained the fleece; and then
Is come, full of the manners and the minds of men,
To live among his kinsmen his remaining days!

When shall I see once more, alas, the smokey haze
Rise from the chimneys of my little town; and when:
What time o' the year, look on the cottage-close again,
That is a province to me, that no boundary stays?

The little house my fathers built of old, doth please
More than the emboldened front of Roman palaces:
More than substantial marble, thin slate wearing through,
More than the Latin Tiber, Loire of Angevine,
More, more, my little Lyre than the Palatine,
And more than briny air the sweetness of Anjou.

{translated 1909}

----------


## quasimodo1

From Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose

From Ideas of Order (1936

ACADEMIC DISCOURSE AT HAVANA

I. Canaries in the morning, orchestras
In the afternoon, balloons at night. That is
A difference, at least, from nightingales,
Jehovah and the great sea-worm. The air
Is not so elemental nor the earth
So near.
But the sustenance of the wilderness
Does not sustain us in the metropoles.

II. Life is an old casino in a park.
The bills of the swans are flat upon the ground.
A most desolate wind has chilled Rouge-Fatima
And a grand decadence settles down like cold.

III. The swans..Before the bills of the swans fell flat
Upon the ground, and before the chronicle
Of affected homage foxed so many books,
They warded the blank waters of the lakes
And island canopies which were entailed
To that casino. Long before the rain
Swept through its boarded windows and the leaves
Filled its encrusted fountains, they arrayed
The twilights of the mythy goober khan.
The centuries of excellence to be
Rose out of promise and became the sooth
Of trombones floating in the trees.
The toil
Of thought evoked a peace eccentric to
The eye and tinkling to the ear. Gruff drums
Could beat, yet not alarm the populace.
The indolent progressions of the swans
Made earth come right; a peanut parody
For peanut people.
And serener myth
Conceiving from its perfect plentitude,
Lusty as June, more fruitful than the weeks
Of ripest summer, always lingering
To touch again the hottest bloom, to strike
Once more the longest resonance, to cap
The clearest woman with apt weed, to mount
The thickest man on thickest stallion-back,
This urgent, competent, serener myth
Passed like a circus.

Politic man ordained
Imagination as the fateful sin.
Grandmother and her basketful of pears
Must be the crux for our compendia.
That's world enough, and more, if one includes
Her daughters to the peached and ivory wench
For whom the towers are built. The burgher's breast,
And not a delicate ether star-impaled,
Must be the place for prodigy, unless
Prodigious things are tricks. The world is not
The bauble of the sleepless nor a word
That should import a universal pith
To Cuba. Jot these milky matters down.
They nourish Jupiters. Their casual pap
Will drop like sweetness in the empty nights
When too great rhapsody is left annulled
And liquorish prayer provokes new sweats: so, so:
Life is an old casino in a wood.
{excerpt}

----------


## quasimodo1

From Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose

From Late Poems

A DISCOVERY OF THOUGHT

..................... The gold beards of waterfalls
Are dissolved as in an infancy of blue snow.
It is an arbor against the wind, a pit in the mist,

A tinkling in the parentage of the north,
The cricket of summer forming itself out of ice.
And always at this antipodes, of leaden loaves

Held in the hands of blue men that are lead within,
One thinks that it could be that the first word spoken,
The desire of speech and meaning gallantly fulfilled,

The gathering of the imbecile against his motes
And the wry antipodes whirled round the world away--
One thinks, when the houses of New England catch the first sun,

The first word would be of the susceptible being arrived,
The immaculate disclosure of the secret, no more obscured.
The sprawling of winter night suddenly stand erect,

Pronouncing its new life and ours, not autumn's prodigal returned,
But an antipodal, far-fetched creature, worthy of birth,
The true tone of the metal of winter in what it says:

The accent of deviation in the living thing
That is its life preserved, the effort to be born
Surviving being born, the event of life.
{excerpt}

----------


## quasimodo1

From Stevens' Collected Poetry and Prose

From Harmonium

BANAL SOJOURN

Two wooden tubs of blue hydrangeas stand at the foot of
the stone steps.
The sky is a blue gum streaked with rose. The trees are
black.
The grackles crack their throats of bone in the smooth air.
Moisture and heat have swollen the garden into a slum of
bloom.
Pardie! Summer is like a fat beast, sleepy in the mildew,
Our old bane, green and bloated, serene, who cries,
"That bliss of stars, that princox of evening heaven!"
reminding of seasons,
When radiance came running down, slim through the 
bareness.
And so it is one damns that green shade at the bottom of
the land.
For who can care at the wigs despoiling the Satan ear?
And who does not seek the sky unfuzzed, soaring to the 
princox?
One has a malady, here, a malady. One feels a malady.

----------


## quasimodo1

From Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose

From Parts of a World

LIFE ON A BATTLESHIP

I. The rape of the bourgeoisie accomplished, the men
Returned on board the "Masculine". That night,
The captain said,
"The war between classes is
A preliminary, provincial phase,
Of the war between individuals. In time,
When earth has become a paradise, it will be
A paradise full of assassins. Suppose I seize
The ship, make it my own and, bit by bit,
Seize yards and docks, machinery and men,
As others have, and then, unlike the others,
Instead of building ships, in numbers, build
A single ship, a cloud on the sea, the largest
Possible machine, a divinity of steel,
Of which I am captain. Given what I intend,
The ship would become the centre of the world.
My cabin as the centre of the ship and I
As the centre of the cabin, the centre of 
The divinity, the divinity's mind, the mind
Of the world would have only to ring and ft!
It would be done. If, only to please myself,
I said that men should wear stone masks and, to make
The word respected, fired ten thousand guns
In mid-Atlantic, bellowing, to command,
It would be done. And once the thing was done,
Once the assassins wore stone masks and did
As I wished, once they fell backward when my breath
Blew against them or bowed from the hips, when I turned
My head, the sorrow of the world, except
As man is natural, would be at an end."

II. So posed, the captain crafted rules of the world,
Regulae mundi, as apprentice of
Descartes:
First. The grand simplifications reduce
Themselves to one.
Of this the captain said,
"It is a lesser law than the one itself,
Unless it is the one itself, or unless
'the Masculine', much magnified, that cloud
On the sea, is both law and evidence in one,
As the final simplification is meant to be.
It is clear that it is not a moral law.
It appears to be what there is of life compressed
Into its own illustration, a divinity
Like any other, rex by right of the crown,
The jewels in his beard, the mystic wand,
And imperator because of death to oppose
The illustrious arms, the symbolic horns, the red
For battle, the purple for victory: But if
It is the absolute why must it be
This immemorial grandiose, why not
A cockle-shell, a trivial emblem great
With its final force, a thing invincible
In more than phrase? There's the true masculine,
The spirit's ring and seal, the naked heart.
It was a rabbi's question. Let the rabbis reply.
It implies a flaw in the battleship, a defeat
As of a make-believe.

III. Second. The part
Is the equal of the whole.
The captain said,
"The ephebi say that there is only the whole,
The race, the nation, the state. But society
Is a phase. We approach a society
Without a society, the politicians
Gone, as in Calypso's isle or in Citare,
Where I or one or the part is the equal of
The whole. The sound of a dozen orchestras
May rush to extinguish the theme, the basses thump
And the fiddles smack, the horns yahoo, the flutes
Strike fire, but the part is the equal of the whole,
Unless society is a mystical mass.
This is a thing to twang a philosopher's sleep,
A vacuum for the dozen orchestras
To fill, the grindstone of antiquest time,
Breakfast in Paris, music and madness and mud,
The perspective squirming as it tries to take
A shape, the vista twisted and burning, a thing
Kicked through the roof, caressed by the river-side.
On "the Masculine" one asserts and fires the guns.
But one lives to think of this growing, the pushing life,
The vine, at the roots, this vine of Key West, splurging,
Covered one morning with blue, one morning with white,
Coming from the East, forcing itself to the West,
The jungle of tropical part and tropical whole."
{three of four parts}

----------


## quasimodo1

From Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose

From Harmonium

JASMINE'S BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS
UNDERNEATH THE WILLOW

My titillations have no foot-notes
And their memorials are the phrases
Of idiosyncratic music.

The love that will not be transported
In an old, frizzled, flambeaued manner,
But muses on its eccentricity,

Is like a vivid apprehension
Of bliss beyond the mutes of plaster,
Or paper souvenirs of rapture,

Of bliss submerged beneath appearance,
In an interior ocean's rocking
Of long, capricious fugues and chorals.

----------


## quasimodo1

From Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose

From Harmonium

LAST LOOKS AT THE LILACS

To what good, in the alleys of the lilacs,
O caliper, do you scratch your buttocks
And tell the divine ingenue, your companion,
That this bloom is the bloom of soap
And this fragrance the fragrance of vegetal?

Do you suppose that she cares a tick,
In this hymeneal air, what it is
That marries her innocence thus,
So that her nakedness is near,
Or that she will pause at scurrilous words?

Poor buffo! Look at the lavender
And look your last and look still steadily,
And say how it comes that you see
Nothing but trash and that you no longer feel
Her body quivering in the Floreal

Toward the cool night and its fantastic star,
Prime paramour and belted paragon,
Well-booted, rugged, arrogantly male,
Patron and imager of the gold Don John,
Who will embrace her before summer comes.

----------


## quasimodo1

From Stevens' Collected Poetry and Prose

From Harmonium

ANECDOTE OF MEN BY THE THOUSAND

The soul, he said, is composed
Of the external world.

There are men of the East, he said,
Who are the East.
There are men of a province
Who are that province.
There are men of a valley
Who are that valley.

There are men whose words
Are as natural sounds
Of their places
As the cackle of toucans
In the place of toucans.

The mandoline is the instrument
Of a place.

Are there mandolines of western mountains?
Are there mandolines of northern moonlight?

The dress of a woman of Lhassa,
In its place,
Is an invisible element of that place
Made visible.

----------


## quasimodo1

From Stevens' Collected Poetry and Prose

From Transport To Summer

FIRE-MONSTERS IN THE MILKY BRAIN

Man, that is not born of woman but of air,
That comes here in the solar chariot,
Like rhetoric in a narration of the eye--

We knew one parent must have been divine,
Adam of beau regard, from fat Elysia,
Whose mind malformed this morning metaphor,

While all the leaves leaked gold. His mind made morning,
As he slept. He woke in a metaphor: this was
A metamorphosis of paradise,

Malformed, the world was paradise malformed…...
Now, closely the ear attends the varying
Of this precarious music, the change of key

Not quite detected at the moment of change
And, now, it attends the difficult difference.
To say the solar chariot is junk

Is not a variation but an end.
{excerpt}

----------


## quasimodo1

From Stevens' Collected Poetry and Prose

From Ideas of Order

AUTUMN REFRAIN

The skeak and skritter of evening gone
And grackles gone and sorrows of the sun,
The sorrows of sun, too, gonethe moon and moon,
The yellow moon of words about the nightingale
In measureless measures, not a bird for me
But the name of a bird and the name of a nameless air
I have never-- shall never hear. And yet beneath
The stillness of everything gone, and being still,
Being and sitting still, something resides,
Some skreaking and skrittering residuum,
And grates these evasions of the nightingale
Though I have never-- shall never hear that bird.
And the stillness is in the key, all of it is,
The stillness is all in the key of that desolate sound.

----------


## quasimodo1

From Stevens' Collected Poetry and Prose

From Harmonium

PALACE OF THE BABIES

The disbeliever walked the moonlit place,
Outside of gates of hammered serafin,
Observing the moon-blotches on the walls.

The yellow rocked across the still facades,
Or else sat spinning on the pinnacles,
While he imagined humming sounds and sleep.

The walker in the moonlight walked alone,
And each blank window of the building balked
His loneliness and what was in his mind:

If in a shimmering room the babies came,
Drawn close by dreams of fledgling wing,
It was because night nursed them in its fold

Night nursed not him in whose dark mind
The clambering wings of birds of black revolved,
Making harsh torment of the solitude.

The walker in the moonlight walked alone,
And in his heart his disbelief lay cold.
His broad-brimmed hat came close upon his eyes.

----------


## quasimodo1

From Stevens' Collected Poetry and Prose

From Harmonium

OF HEAVEN CONSIDERED AS A TOMB

What word have you, interpreters, of men
Who in the tomb of heaven walk by night,
The darkened ghosts of our old comedy?
Do they believe they range the gusty cold,
With lanterns borne aloft to light the way,
Freemen of death, about and still about
To find whatever it is they seek? Or does
That burial, pillared up each day as porte
And spiritous passage into nothingness,
Foretell each night the one abysmal night,
When the host shall no more wander, nor the light
Of the steadfast lanterns creep across the dark?
Make hue among the dark comedians,
Halloo them in the topmost distances
For answer from their icy Elysee.

----------


## quasimodo1

From Stevens: Collected Poetry & Prose

From Poems Added To Harmonium

THE PUBLIC SQUARE

A slash of angular blacks
Like a fractured edifice
That was buttressed by blue slants
In a coma of the moon.

A slash and the edifice fell,
Pylon and pier fell down.
A mountain-blue cloud arose
Like a thing in which they fell,

Fell slowly as when at night
A languid janitor bears
His lantern through colonnades
And the architecture swoons.

It turned cold and silent. Then 
The square began to clear.
The bijou of Atlas, the moon,
Was last with its porcelain leer.

----------


## quasimodo1

From Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

From Poems Added To Harmonium

THE REVOLUTIONISTS STOP FOR ORANGEADE

Capitan profundo, capitan geloso
Ask us not to sing standing in the sun,
Hairy-backed and hump-armed
Flat-ribbed and big-bagged.
There is no pith in music
Except in something false.

Bellissimo, pomposo,
Sing a song of serpent-kin
Necks among the thousand leaves,
Tongues around the fruit.
Sing in clownish boots
Strapped and buckled bright.

Wear the breeches of a mask,
Coat half-flare and half galloon;
Wear a helmet without reason,
Tufted, tilted, twirled, and twisted.
Start the singing in a voice
Rougher than a grinding shale.

Hang a feather by your eye,
Nod and look a little sly.
This must be the vent of pity,
Deeper than a truer ditty
Of the real that wrenches,
Of the quick that's wry.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Poems Added To Harmonium

SEA SURFACE FULL OF CLOUDS

I. In that November off Tehuantepec,
The slopping of the sea grew still one night
And in the morning summer hued the deck

And made one think of rosy chocolate
And gilt umbrellas. Paradisal green
Gave suavity to the perplexed machine

Of ocean, which like limpid water lay.
Who, then, in that ambrosial latitude
Out of the light evolved the moving blooms,

Who, then, evolved the sea-blooms from the clouds
Diffusing balm in that Pacific calm?
C'etait mon enfant, mon bijou, mon ame.

The sea-clouds whitened far below the calm
And moved, as blooms move, in the swimming green
And in its watery radiance, while the hue

Of heaven in an antique reflection rolled
Round those flotillas. And sometimes the sea
Poured brilliant iris on the glistening blue.

II. In that November off Tehuantepec
The slopping of the sea grew still one night.
At breakfast jelly yellow streaked the deck

And made one think of chop-house chocolate
And sham umbrellas. And a sham-like green
Capped summer-seeming on the tense machine

Of ocean, which in sinister flatness lay.
Who, then, beheld the rising of the clouds
That strode submerged in that malevolent sheen,

Who saw the mortal massives of the blooms 
Of water moving on the water-floor?
C'etait mon frere du ciewl, ma vie, mon or.

The gongs rang loudly as the windy booms
Hoo-hood it in the darkened ocean-blooms
The gongs grew still. And then blue heaven spread

Its crystalline pendentives on the sea
And the macabre of the water-glooms
In an enormmous undulation fled.

III. In that November off Tehuantepec,
The slopping of the sea grew still one night
And a pale silver patterned on the deck

And made one think of porcelain chocolate
And pied umbrellas. An uncertain green,
Piano-polished, held the tranced machine

Of ocean, as a prelude holds and holds.
Who, seeing silver petels of white blooms
Unfolding in the water, feeling sure

Of the milk within the saltiest spurge heard, then,
The sea unfolding in the sunken clouds?
Oh! C'etait mon extase et mon amour.

So deeply sunken were they that the shrouds,
The shrouding shadows, made the petals black
Until the rolling heaven made them blue,

A blue beyond the rainy hyacinth,
And smitting the crevasses of the leaves
Deluged the ocean with a sapphire blue.

IV. In that November off Tehuantepec
The night-long slopping of the sea grew still.
A mallow morning dozed upon the deck

And made ne think of musky chocolae
And frail umbrellas. A too-fluent green
Suggested malice In the dry machine

Of ocean, pondering dank stratagem.
Who then beheld the figures of the clouds
Like blooms secluded in the thick marine?

Like blooms? Like demasks that were shaken off
From the loosed girdles in the spangling must.
C'etait ma foi, la nonchalance divine.

The nakedness would rise and suddenly turn
Salt masks of beard and mouths of bellowing,
Would-- But more suddenly the heaven rolled

Its bluest sea-clouds in the thinking green,
And the nakedness became the broadest blooms,
Mile-mallows that a mallow sun cajoled.

V. In that November off Tehuantepec
Night stilled the slopping of the sea. The day
Came, bowing and voluble, upon the deck,

Good clownOne thought of Chinese chocolate
And large umbrellas. And a motley green
Followed the drift of the obese machine

Of ocean, perfected in indolence.
What pistache one, ingenious and droll,
Beheld the sovereign clods as jugglery

And the sea as turquoise-turbaned Sambo, neat
At tossing saucers-- cloudy-conjuring sea?
C'etait mon espirit batard, I'ignominie.

The sovereign clouds came clustering. The conch
Of loyal conjuration trumped. The wind
Of green blooms turning crisped the motley hue

To clearing opalescence. Then the sea
And heaven rolled as one and from the two
Came fresh transfigurings of freshest blue.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Poems Added to Harmonium

IN THE CLEAR SEASON OF GRAPES

The mountains between our lands and the sea--
This conjunction of mountains and sea and our lands--
Have I stopped and thought of its point before?

When I think of our lands think of the house
And the table that holds a platter of pears,
Vermillion smeared over green, arranged for show.

But this gross blue under rolling bronzes
Belittles those carefully chosen daubs.
Flashier fruits! A flip for the sun and moon,

If they mean no more than that. But they do.
And mountains and the sea do. And our lands,
And the welter of frost and the fox cries do.

Much more than that. Autumnal passages
Are overhung by the shadows of the rocks
And his nostrils blow out salt around each man.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Harmonium

THE WIND SHIFTS

This is how the wind shifts:
Like the thoughts of an old human,
Who still thinks eagerly
And despairingly.
The wind shifts like this:
Like a human without illusions,
Who still feels irrational things within her.
The wind shifts like this:
Like humans approaching proudly,
Like humans approaching angrily.
This is how the wind shifts:
Like a human, heavy and heavy,
Who does not care.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Poems Added to Harmonium

TWO AT NORFOLK


Mow the grass in the cemetery, darkies,
Study the symbols and the requiescats,
But leave a bed beneath the myrtles.
This skeleton had a daughter and that, a son.

In his time, this one had little to speak of,
The softest word went gurrituck in his skull.
For him the moon was always in Scandinavia
And his daughter was a foreign thing.

And that one was never a man of heart.
The making of his son was one more duty.
When the music of the boy fell like a fountain,
He praised Johann Sebastian, as he should.

The dark shadows of the funereal magnolias
Are full of the songs of Jamanda and Carlotta;
The son and the daughter, who come to the darkness,
He for her burning breast and she for his arms.

And these two never meet in the air so full of summer
And touch each other, even touching closely,
Without an escape in the lapses of their kisses.
Make a bed and leave the iris in it.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Poems Added to Harmonium

INDIAN RIVER

The trade-wind jingles the rings in the nets around the racks
by the docks on Indian River.
It is the same jingle of the water among the roots under the
banks of the palmettoes,
It is the same jingle of the red-bird breasting the orange-
trees out of the cedars.
Yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu,
nor on the nunnery beaches.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Harmonium

THE WORMS AT HEAVEN'S GATE

Out of the tomb, we bring Badroulbadour,*
Within our bellies, we her chariot.
Here is an eye. And here are, one by one,
The lashes of that eye and its white lid.
Here is the cheek on which that lid declined,
And, finger after finger, here, the hand,
The genius of that cheek. Here are the lips,
The bundle of the body and the feet
. . . . . . . . . . .
Out of the tomb we bring Badroulbadour. 



*Badroulbadour (Arabic بدر البدور, badru l-budūr, "full moon of full moons") is an Asian princess from China whom Aladdin 

married in the story of Aladdin and the Magic Lamp. When Aladdin finds the magic lamp he discovers that it contains a 

djinni that is bound to do the bidding of the person holding the lamp. With the aid of the djinni, Aladdin becomes 

rich and powerful and marries princess Badroulbadour. In the animated version of Aladdin made by Disney, her name was 

changed to Jasmine and she was an Arabian princess instead, presumably for the convenience of Western voice actors 

and viewers. She is also mentioned in a poem by Wallace Stevens called 'The Worms at Heaven's Gate' in his book 

"Harmonium".
The name Badroulbadour also appears in the novel 'Come Dance with Me' by author Russell Hoban. Hoban also mentions 

Badoura as the name of an Arabian princess in The Arabian Nights.(dictionary.com)

{footnote not by Stevens}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Harmonium

ARCHITECTURE

I. What manner of building shall we build?
Let us design a chastel de chastete'.
De Pensee'...
Never cease to deploy the structure.
Keep the laborers shouldering plinths.
Pass the whole of life earing the clink of the
Chisels of the stone-cutters cutting the stones.

II. In this house, what manner of utterance shall there be?
What heavenly dithyramb
And cantilene?
What niggling forms of gargoyle patter?
Of what shall the speech be,
In that splay of marble
And of obedient pillars?

III. And how shall those come vested that come there?
In their ugly reminders?
Or gaudy as tulips?
As they climb the stairs
To the group of Flora Coddling Hecuba?
As they climb the flights
To the closes
Overlooking whole seasons?

IV. Let us build the building of light.
Push up the towers
To the ****-tops.
These are the pointings of our edifice,
Which, like a gorgeous palm,
Shall tuft the commonplace.
These are the window-sill
On which the quiet moonlight lies.

V. How shall we hew the sun,
Split it and make blocks,
To build a ruddy palace?
How carve the violet moon
To set in nicks?
Let us fix portals, east and west,
Abhorring green-blue north and blue-green south.
Our chiefest dome a demoiselle of gold.
Pierce the interior with pouring shafts,
In diverse chambers.
Pierce, too, with buttresses of coral air
And purple timbers,
Various argentines,
Embossings of the sky.

VI. And, finally, set guardians in the grounds,
Gray, gruesome grumblers.
For no one proud, nor stiff,
No solemn one, nor pale,
No chafferer, may come
To sully the begonias, nor vex
With holy or sublime ado
The kremlin of kermess.

VII. Only the lusty and the plenteous
Shall walk
The bronze-filled plazas
And the nut-shell esplanades.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Harmonium

COLLOQUY WITH A POLISH AUNT

Elle savait toutes les legendes du Paradis et tous les contes
de la Pologne. 
Revue des Deux Mondes 

She

How is it that my saints from Voragine,
In their embroidered slippers, touch your spleen?

He

Old pantaloons, duenna of the spring!

She

Imagination is the will of things..
Thus, on the basis of the common drudge,
You dream of women, swathed in indigo,
Holding their books toward the nearer stars,
To read, in secret, burning secrecies.. {Stevens' notes... Voragine (Jacobus de Voragine), author of the medieval ecclesiastical manual "Legenda aures", the golden legend, with lives of saints.}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Harmonium

GUBBINAL

That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

That tuft of jungle feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you say.

That savage of fire,
That seed,
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

----------


## Virgil

> from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
> 
> from Harmonium
> 
> GUBBINAL
> 
> That strange flower, the sun,
> Is just what you say.
> Have it your way.
> ...


Oh I don't like this one, and I think Stevens is deliberately writing a poem that is ugly: "The world is ugly." Aethetics fitting theme. But I don't care for it, even if I understand it.

----------


## quasimodo1

Don't like it either, Virgil; it's so unlike the rest. Perhaps the poem had a private use or meaning.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Harmonium

TEA AT THE PALAZ OF HOON

Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

----------


## Virgil

> from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
> 
> from Harmonium
> 
> TEA AT THE PALAZ OF HOON
> 
> Not less because in purple I descended
> The western day through what you called
> The loneliest air, not less was I myself.
> ...


Yeah, now that's a great one.  :Smile:

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens' Collected Poetry & Prose

from Harmonium

STARS AT TALLAPOOSA

The lines are straight and swift between the stars.
The night is not the cradle that they cry,
The criers, undulating the deep-oceaned phrase.
The lines are much too dark and much too sharp.

The mind herein attains simplicity,
There is no moon, no single, silvered leaf.
The body is no body to be seen
But is an eye that studies its black lid.

Let these be your delight, secretive hunter,
Wading the sea-lines, moist and ever-mingling,
Mounting the earth-lines, long and lax, lethargic.
These lines are swift and fall without diverging.

The melon-flower nor dew nor web of either
Is like to these. But in yourself is like:
A sheaf of brilliant arrows flying straight,
Flying and falling straightway for their pleasure,

Their pleasure that is all bright-edged and cold;
Or, if not arrows, then the nimblest motions,
Making recoveries of young nakedness
And the lost vehemence the midnights hold.

----------


## quasimodo1

From Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose

From Harmonium

LAST LOOKS AT THE LILACS

To what good, in the alleys of the lilacs,
O caliper, do you scratch your buttocks
And tell the divine ingenue, your companion,
That this bloom is the bloom of soap
And this fragrance the fragrance of vegetal?

Do you suppose that she cares a tick,
In this hymeneal air, what it is
That marries her innocence thus,
So that her nakedness is near,
Or that she will pause at scurrilous words?

Poor buffo! Look at the lavender
And look your last and look still steadily,
And say how it comes that you see
Nothing but trash and that you no longer feel
Her body quivering in the Floreal

Toward the cool night and its fantastic star,
Prime paramour and belted paragon,
Well-booted, rugged, arrogantly male,
Patron and imager of the gold Don John,
Who will embrace her before summer comes.

----------


## JBI

> Oh I don't like this one, and I think Stevens is deliberately writing a poem that is ugly: "The world is ugly." Aethetics fitting theme. But I don't care for it, even if I understand it.


Strange form though, seems to be a mix of various French forms.

----------


## quasimodo1

What French forms? I'm not challenging your appraisal, just rusty on those old forms. And Virgil's "aesthetics fitting theme" is an irony I'm not sure Stevens intended but maybe so. The poem jumps out of the backround of works and is almost alien.

----------


## JBI

The 3 line stanzas follow the structuring more or less of a villanelle, whereas the repetitive lines just sort of float around, echoing other French forms vaguely.

----------


## quasimodo1

Stevens amazes again. Thanks JBI for villanelle; on checking...Wilde, Arlington Robinson, Auden and even James Joyce were known to use this form.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Poems Added to Harmonium

SEA SURFACE FULL OF CLOUDS II

In that November off Tehuantepec
The slopping of the sea grew still one night.
At breakfast jelly yellow streaked the deck

And made one think of chop-house chocolate
And sham umbrellas. And a sham-like green 
Capped summer-seeming on the tense machine

Of ocean, which in sinister flatness lay.
Who, then, beheld the rising of the clouds
That strode submerged in that malevolent sheen,

Who saw the mortal massives of the blooms
Of water moving on the water-floor?
C'etait mon frere du ciel, ma vie, mon or.

The gongs rang loudly as the windy booms
Hoo-hooed it in the darkened ocean-blooms.
The gongs grew still. And then blue heaven spread

Its crystalline pendentives on the sea
And the macabre of the water-glooms
In an enormous undulation fled.
{poem has five parts}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Harmonium

O, FLORIDA, VENEREAL SOIL

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.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Harmonium

DOMINATION OF BLACK

At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry-- the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like he leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks.
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Harmonium

INFANTA MARINA

Her terrace was the sand
And the palms and the twilight.

She made of the motions of her wrist
The grandiose gestures
Of her thought.

The rumpling of the plumes
Of this creature of the evening
Came to be sleights of sails
Over the sea.

And thus she roamed
In the roamings of her fan,

Partaking of the sea,
And of the evening,
As they flowed around
And uttered their subsiding sound.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Late Poems

CONVERSATION WITH THREE WOMEN OF NEW ENGLAND

The mode of the person becomes the mode of the world,
For that person, and, sometimes, for the world itself. ...


...And you, you say that the capital things of the mind
Should be as natural as natural objects,
So that a carved king found in a jungle, huge
And weathered, should be part of a human landscape,
That a figure reclining among columns toppled down,
Stiff in eternal lethargy, should be,
Not the beginning but the end of artifice,
A nature of marble in a marble world.

And then, finally, it is you that say
That only in man's definitions of himself,
Only encompassed in humanity, is he
Himself. The author of man's cannons is man,
Not some outer patron and imaginer.

In which one of these three worlds are the four of us
The most at home? Or is it enough to have seen
And felt and known the differences we have seen
And felt and known in the colors in which we live,
In the excellences of the air we breathe,
The bouquet of being-- enough to realize
That the sense of being changes as we talk,
That talk shifts the cycle of the scenes of kings?
{excerpt}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Letters

TO MARIANNE MOORE

Dear Miss Moore:
Sometime ago The Dial sent me Gorham Munson's note in your November number. I ought to have thanked you, and Munson too; but there are a lot of things one ought to do. Generally, people look at it the other way: there are a lot of things one ought not to do. And I feel sure that one of the things I ought not to do is to review Williams' book. What Columbus discovered is nothing to what Williams is looking for. However much I might like to try to make that out-- evolve a mainland from his leaves, scents and floating bottles and boxes-- there is a baby at home. All lights are out at nine. At present there are no poems, no reviews. I am sorry. Perhaps one is better off in bed anyhow on cold nights. 
Sincerely,

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Harmonium

THE APOSTROPHE TO VINCENTINE

I. I figured you as nude between
Monotonous earth and dark blue sky.
It made you seem so small and lean
And nameless,
Heavenly Vincentine.

II. I saw you then, as warm as flesh,
Brunette,
But yet not too brunette,
As warm, as clean.
Your dress was green,
Was whited green,
Green Vincentine.

III. Then you came walking,
In a group
Of human others,
Voluble.
Yes: you came walking,
Vincentine.
Yes: you came talking.

IV. And what I knew you felt
Came then.
Monotonous earth I saw become
Illimitable spheres of you,
And that white animal, so lean,
Turned Vincentine,
Turned heavenly Vincentine,
And that white animal, so lean,
Turned heavenly, heavenly Vincentine.

----------


## quasimodo1

Wallace Stevens


from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Harmonium

FLORAL DECORATIONS FOR BANANAS

Well, uncle, this plainly won't do
These insolent, linear peels
And sullen, hurricane shapes
Won't do with your eglantine.
They require something serpentine.
Blunt yellow in such a room!

You should have had plums tonight,
In an eighteenth-century dish,
And pettifogging buds,
For the women of primrose and purl,
Each one in her decent curl.
Good God! What a precious light!

But bananas hacked and hunched. . .
The table was set by an ogre,
His eye on an outdoor gloom
And a stiff and noxious place.
Pile the bananas on planks.
The women will be all shanks
And bangles and slatted eyes.

And deck and bananas in leaves
Plucked from the Carib trees,
Fibrous and dangling down,
Oozing cantankerous gum
Out of their purple maws,
Darting out of their purple craws
Their musky and tingling tongues.

----------


## Virgil

:FRlol:  I loved that one Quasi. 




> But bananas hacked and hunched. . .
> The table was set by an ogre,
> His eye on an outdoor gloom
> And a stiff and noxious place.


 :Biggrin:

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Harmonium

ANECDOTE OF THE PRINCE OF PEACOCKS

In the moonlight
I met Berserk,
In the moonlight
On the bushy plain.
Oh, sharp he was
As the sleepless!

And, "Why are you red
In this milky blue?"
I said.
"Why sun-colored,
As if awake
In the midst of sleep?"

"You that wander,"
So he said,
"On the bushy plain,
Forget so soon.
But I set my traps
In the midst of dreams."

I knew from this
That the blue ground
Was full of blocks
And blocking steel.
I knew the dread
Of the bushy plain,

And the beauty
Of the moonlight
Falling there,
Falling
As sleep falls
In the innocent air.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Harmonium

A HIGH-TONED OLD CHRISTIAN WOMAN

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began. Allow,
Therefore, that in the planetary scene
Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,
Proud of such novelties of the sublime,
Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Harmonium

A PLACE OF THE SOLITAIRES

Let the place of the solitaires
Be a place of perpetual undulation.

Whether it be in mid-sea
On the dark, green water-wheel,
Or on the beaches,
There must be no cessation
Of motion, or of the noise of motion,
The renewal of noise
And manifold continuation;
And, most, of the motion of thought
And its restless iteration,

In the place of the solitaires,
Which is to be a place of perpetual undulation.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Harmonium

THE WEEPING BURGHER

It is with a strange malice
That I distort the world.

Ah! that ill humors
Should mask as white girls.
And ah! that Scaramouche
Should have black barouche.

The sorry verities!
Yet in excess, continual,
There is sure of sorrow.

Permit that if as ghost I come
Among the people burning in me still,
I come as belle design
Of foppish line.

And I, then, tortured for old speech,
A white of wildly woven rings;
I, weeping in a calcined heart,
My hands such sharp, imagined things.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Harmonium

THE CURTAINS IN THE HOUSE OF THE METAPHYSICIAN

It comes about that the drifting of these curtains
Is full of long motions; as the ponderous
Deflations of distance; or as clouds
Inseparable from their afternoons;
Or the changing of light, the dropping
Of the silence, wide sleep and solitude
Of night, in which all motion
Is beyond us, as the firmament,
Up-rising and down-falling, bares
The last largeness, bold to see.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Harmonium

OF THE SURFACE OF THINGS

I. In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;
But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four
hills and a cloud.

II. From my balcony, I survey the yellow air,
Reading where I have written,
"The spring is like a belle undressing."

III. The gold tree is blue.
The singer has pulled his cloak over his head.
The moon is in the folds of the cloak.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Harmonium

ANECDOTE OF CANNA

Huge are the canna in the dreams of
X, the mighty thought, the mighty man.
They fill the terrace of his capitol.

His thought sleeps not. Yet thought that wakes
In sleep may never meet another thought
Or thing . . . Now day-break comes . . .

X promenades the dewy stones,
Observes the canna with a clinging eye,
Observes and then continues to observe.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Harmonium

OF THE MANNER OF ADDRESSING CLOUDS

Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns,
Meekly you keep the moral rendezvous,
Eliciting the still sustaining pomps
Of speech which are like music so profound
They seem an exaltation without sound.
Funest philosophers and ponderers,
Their evocations are the speech of clouds.
So speech of your processionals returns
In the casual evocations of your tread
Across the stale, mysterious seasons. These
Are the music of meet resignation; these
The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you
To magnify, if in that drifting waste
You are to be accompanied by more
Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Harmonium

THE SILVER PLOUGH-BOY

A black figure dances in a black field.
It seizes a sheet, from the ground, from a bush, as if spread
there by some wash-woman for the night.
It wraps the sheet around its body, until the black figure is
silver.
It dances down a furrow, in the early light, back of a crazy
plough, the green blades following.
How soon the silver fades in the dust! How soon the black
figure slips from the wrinkled sheet! How softly the
sheet falls to the ground!

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Harmonium

THE JACK-RABBIT

In the morning,
The jack-rabbit sang to the Arkansaw.
He carolled in caracoles
On the feat sandbars.

The black man said,
"Now, grandmother,
Crochet me this buzzard
On your winding-sheet,
And do not forget his wry neck
After the winter."

The black man said,
"Look out, O caroller,
The entrails of the buzzard
Are rattling."

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Harmonium

VALLEY CANDLE

My candle burned alone in an immense valley.
Beams of the huge night converged upon it,
Until the wind blew.
Then beams of the huge night
Converged upon its image,
Until the wind blew.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Harmonium

THE COMEDIAN AS THE LETTER C

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 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 pate', 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.

Could Crispin stem verboseness in the sea,
The old age of a watery realist,
Triton, dissolved in shifting diaphanes
Of blue and green? A wordy, watery age
That whispered to the sun's compassion, made
A convocation, nightly, of the sea-stars,
And on the clopping foot-ways of the moon
Lay grovelling. Triton iincomplicate with that
Which made him Triton, nothing left of him,
Except in faint, memorial gesturings,
That were like arms and shoulders in the waves,
Here, something in the rise and fall of wind
That seemed hallucinating horn, and here,
A sunken voice, both of remembering
And of forgetfulness, in alternate strain.
Just so an ancient Crispin was dissolved.
The valet in the tempest was annulled.
Bordeaux to Yucatan, Havana next,
And then to Carolina. Simple jaunt.
Crispin, merest minuscule in the gales,
Dejected his manner to the turbulence.
The salt hung on his spirit like a frost,
The dead brine melted in him like a dew
Of winter, until nothing of himself
Remained, except some starker, barer self
In a starker, barer world, in which the sun
Was not the sun because it never shone
With bland complaisance, on pale parasols,
Beetled, in chapels, on the chaste bouquets.
Against his pipping sounds a trumpet cried
Celestial sneering boisterously. Crispin
Became an introspective voyager.

Here was the veritable ding an sich, at last,
Crispin confronting it, a vocable thing,
But with a speech belched out of hoary darks
Noway resembling his, a visible thing,
And excepting negligible Triton, free
From the unavoidable shadow of himself
That lay elsewhere around him. Severence
Was clear. The last distortion of romance
Forsook the insatiable egotist. The sea
Severs not only lands but also selves.
Here was no help before reality.
Crispin beheld and Crispin was made new.
The imagination, here, could not evade,
In poems of plums, the strict austerity
Of one vast, subjugating, final tone.
The drenching of stale lives no more fell down.
What was this gaudy, gusty panoply?
Out of what swift destruction did it spring?
It was caparison of wind and cloud
And something given to make whole among
The ruses that were shattered by the large.

----------


## quasimodo1

II. Concerning the Thunderstorms of Yucatan

In Yucatan, the Maya sonneteers
Of the Caribbean amphitheatre,
In spite of hawk and falcon, green toucan
And jay, still to the night-bird made their plea,
As if raspberry tanagers in palms,
High up in orange air, were barbarous.
But Crispin was too destitute to find
In any commonplace the sought-for aid.
A man come out of luminous traversing,
Much trumpeted, made desperately clear,
Fresh from discoveries of tidal skies,
To whom oracular rockings gave no rest.
Into a savage color he went on.
How greatly had he grown in his demesne,
This auditor of insects! He that saw
The stride of vanishing autumn in a park
By way of decorous melancholy; he
That wrote his couplet yearly to the spring,
As dissertation of profound delight,
Stopping, on voyage, in a land of snakes,
Found his vicissitudes had much enlarged
His apprehension, made him intricate
In moody rucks, and difficult and strange
In all desires, his destitution's mark.
He was in this as other freemen are,
Sonorous nutshells rattling inwardly.
His violence was for aggrandizement
And not for stupor, such as music makes
For sleepers halfway waking. He perceived
That coolness for his heat came suddenly,
And only, in the fables that he scrawled
With his own quill, in its indigenous dew,
Of an aesthetic tough, diverse, untamed,
Incredible to prudes, the mint of dirt,
Green barbarism turning paradigm.
Crispin foresaw a curious promenade
Or, nobler, sensed an elemental fate,
And elemental potencies and pangs,
And beautiful barenesses as yet unseen
Making the most of savagery of palms,
Of moonlight on the thick, cadaverous bloom
That yuccas breed, and of the panther's tread.
The fabulous and its intrinsic verse
Came like two spirits parleying adorned
In radiance from the Atlantic coign,
For Crispin and his quill to catechize.
But they came parleying of such an earth,
So thick with sides and jagged lops of green,
So intertwined with serpent-kin encoiled
Among the purple tufts, the scarlet crowns,
Scenting the jungle in their refuges,
So streaked with yellow, blue and green and red
In beak ad bud and fruity gobbet-skins,
That earth was like a jostling festival
Of seeds grown fat, too juicily opulent,
Expanding in the gold's maternal warmth.

So much for that. The affectionate emigrant found
A new reality in parrot-squawks.
Yet let that trifle pass. Now, as this odd
Discoverer walked through the harbor streets
Inspecting the cabildo, the facade
Of the cathedral, making notes, he heard
A rumbling, west of Mexico, it seemed,
Approaching like a gasconade of drums.
The white cabildo darkened, the façade,
As sullen as the sky, was swallowed up
In swift, successive shadows, dolefully.
The rumbling broadened as it fell. The wind,
Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry
Came bluntly thundering, more terrible
Than the revenge of music on bassoons.
Gesticulating lightning, mystical,
Made pallid flitter. Crispin, here, took flight.
An annotator has his scruples, too.
He knelt in the cathedral with the rest,
This connoisseur of elemental fate,
Aware of exquisite thought. The storm was one
Of many proclamations of the kind,
Proclaiming something harsher than he learned
From hearing signboards whimper in cold nights
Or seeing the midsummer artifice
Of heat upon his pane. This was the span
Of force, the quintessential fact, the note
Of Vulcan, that a valet seeks to own,
The thing that makes him envious in phrase.

And while the torrent of the roof still droned
He felt the Andean breath. His mind was free
And more than free, elate, intent, profound
And studious of a self possessing him.
That was not in him in the crusty town
From which he sailed. Beyond him, westward, lay
The mountainous ridges, purple balustrades,
In which the thunder, lapsing in its clap,
Let down gigantic quavers of its voice,
For Crispin to vociferate again.
{from THE COMEDIAN AS THE LETTER C- Part II}

----------


## quasimodo1

III. Approaching Carolina

The book of moonlight is not written yet
Nor half begun, but, when it is, leave room
For Crispin, fagot in the lunar fire,
Who, in the hubbub of his pilgrimage
Through sweating changes, never could forget
That wakefulness or meditating sleep,
In which the sulky strophes willingly
Bore up, in time, the somnolent, deep songs.
Leave room, therefore, in that unwritten book
For the legendary moonlight that once burned
In Crispin's mind above a continent.
America was always north to him,
A northern west or western north, but north
And thereby polar, polar-purple, chilled
And lank, rising and slumping from a sea
Of hardy foam, receding flatly, spread
In endless ledges, glittering, submerged
And cold in a boreal mistiness of the moon.
The spring came there in clinking pannicles
Of half-dissolving frost, the summer came,
If ever, whisked and wet, not ripening,
Before the winter's vacancy returned.
The myrtle, if the myrtle ever bloomed,
Was like a glacial pink upon the air.
The green palmettoes in crepuscular ice
Clipped frigidly blue-black meridians,
Morose chiaroscuro, gauntly drawn.

How many poems he denied himself
In his observant progress, lesser things
Than the relentless contact he desired;
How many sea-masks he ignored; what sounds
He shut out from his tempering ear; what thoughts,
Like jades affecting the sequestered bride;
And what descants, he sent to banishment!
Perhaps the Arctic moonlight really gave
The liaison, the blissfful liaison,
Between himself and his environment,
Which was, and is, chief motive, first delight,
For him, and not for him alone. It seemed
Illusive, faint, more mist than moon, perverse,
Wrong as a divagation to Peking,
To him that postulated as his theme
The vulgar, as his theme and hymn and flight,
A passionately niggling nightingale.
Moonlight was an evasion, or, if not,
A minor meeting, facile, delicate.

Thus he conceived his voyaging to be
An up and down between two elements,
A fluctuating between sun and moon,
A sally into gold and crimson forms,
As on this voyage, out of goblinry,
And then retirement like a turning back
And sinking down to the indulgences
That in the moonlight have their habitude.
But let these backward lapses, if they would,
Grind their seductions on him, Crispin knew
It was a flourishing tropic he required
For his refreshment, an abundant zone,
Prickly and obdurate, dense, harmonious
Yet with harmony not rarefied
Nor fined for the inhibited instruments
Of over-civil stops. And thus he tossed
Between a Carolina of old time,
A little juvenile, an ancient whim,
And the visible, circumspect presentment drawn
From what he saw across his vessel's prow.

He came. The poetic hero without palms
Or jugglery, without regalia.
And as he came he saw that it was spring,
A time abhorrent to the nihilist
Or searcher for the fecund minimum.
The moonlight fiction disappeared. The spring,
Although contending featly in its veils,
Irised in dew and early fragrancies,
Was gemmy marionette to him that sought
A sinewy nakedness. A river bore
The vessel inward. Tilting up his nose,
He inhaled the rancid rosin, burly smells
Of dampened lumber, emanations blown
From warehouse doors, the gustiness of ropes,
Decays of sacks, and all the arrant stinks
That helped him round his rude aesthetic out.
He savored rankness like a sensualist.
He marked the marshy ground around the dock,
The crawling railroad spur, the rotten fence,
Curriculum for the marvellous sophomore.
It purified. It made him see how much
Of what he saw he never saw at all.
He gripped more closely the essential prose
As being, in a world so falsified,
The one integrity for him, the one
Discovery still possible to make,
To which all poems were incident, unless
That prose should wear a poem's guise at last.
{THE COMEDIAN AS THE LETTER C, Part III}

----------


## quasimodo1

IV. The Idea of a Colony

Nota: his soil is man's intelligence.
That's better. That's worth crossing seas to find.
Crispin in one laconic phrase laid bare
His cloudy drift and planned a colony.
Exit the mental moonlight, exit lex,
Rex and principium, exit the whole
Shebang. Exeunt omnes. Here was prose
More exquisite than any tumbling verse:
A still new continent in which to dwell.
What was the purpose of his pilgrimage,
Whatever shape it took in Crispin's mind,
If not, when all is said, to drive away
The shadow of his fellows from the skies,
And, from their stale intelligence released,
To make a new intelligence prevail?
Hence the reverberations in the words
Of his first central hymns, the celebrants
Of rankest trivia, tests of the strength
Of his aesthetic, his philosophy,
The more invidious, the more desired.
The florist asking aid from cabbages,
The rich man going bare, the paladin
Afraid, the blind man as astronomer,
The appointed power unwielded from disdain.
{first stanza of "The Comedian as the Letter C"}

----------


## quasimodo1

His western voyage ended and began.
The torment of fastidious thought grew slack,
Another, still more bellicose, came on.
He, therefore, wrote his prolegomena,
And, being full of the caprice, inscribed
Commingled souvenirs and prophecies.
He made a singular collation. Thus:
The natives of the rain are rainy men.
Although they paint effulgent, azure lakes,
And April hillsides wooded white and pink,
Their azure has a cloudy edge, their white
And pink, the water bright that dogwood bears.
And in their music showering sounds intone.
On what strange froth does the gross Indian dote,
What Eden sapling gum, what honeyed gore,
What pulpy dram distilled of innocence,
That streaking gold should speak in him
Or bask within his images and words?
If these rude instances impeach themselves
By force of rudeness, let the principle
Be plain. For application Crispin strove,
Abhorring Turk as Esquimau, the lute
As the marimba, the magnolia as rose.
{2nd stanza, part IV, THE COMEDIAN AS THE LETTER C}

----------


## JBI

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Uncollected Prose

INTRODUCTION TO SAMUEL FRENCH MORSE'S "TIME OF YEAR"

What is there about a book of first poems that immediately interests us? For one thing, it is possible that we are going to have a fresh opportunity to become aware that the people in the world, and the objects in it, and the world as a whole, are not absolute things, but, on the contrary, are the phenomena of perception. In short, it is possible that a new poet is that special person at our elbow with his special, possibly even extraordinary, perception, to whom Thoreau refers at the end of the passage from "Autumnal Tints," with which Mr. Morse introduces his collection. Since the perception of life is life itself, a book containing the first poems of a poet new to us has a natural and intense attraction.

................

The fact is that the saying of new things in new ways is grateful to us. If a bootblack says that he was so tired that he lay down like a dog under a tree, he is saying a new thing about an old thing, in a new way. His new way is not a literary novelty; it is an unaffected statement of his perception of the thing.
Poems written with this in mind will often not possess, nor be intended to possess, either emotion or the music of emotion. Instead, they will possess, and be intended to possess, the "moral beauty" that Mr. Venturi spoke of recently as being present in the painting of Cezanne. As the writer of such poems becomes more and more the master of his own poetry: that is to say, as he becomes better able to realize his individual perceptions, and as he acquires faith in his function as a poet, he is likely to project the rigors of his early work into what he does later. So that his early work really discloses his identity.

...................

What, then, is the identity of Mr. Morse? It is something that he is serious about poetry. The passage from Thoreau demonstrates that, and so do the three or four words from Job which, in the Bible, follow the verse in which Job cries "Or seest thou as man seeth?" But what is his exact character as a poet? One of his poems, "The Track into the Swamp," relates to one of the abandoned roads, the lost roads, of which New England is so full. We have been accustomed to think that at the far end of such roads the ghosts of the Trancendentalists still live. Obviously they do not live at this end. Mr. Morse is not the ghost of a Transcendentalist. If he has any use at all for Kant, it is to keep up the window in which the cord is broken. He is anti-transcendental.

----------


## quasimodo1

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 flamingos flapped his bays.
Sepulchral senors, bibbing pale mescal,
Oblivious to the Aztec almanacs,
Should make the intricate Sierra scan.
And cark Brazilians in their cafes,
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.
{cont. from post 147, stanza three, part IV, The Idea of a Colony}

----------


## quasimodo1

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 le the rabbit run, the **** declaim.

Trinket pasticcio, flaunting skyey sheets,
With Crispin as the tiptoe cozener?
No, no: veracious page on page, exact.
{stanza 4, part IV, of THE COMEDIAN AS THE LETTER C}

----------


## quasimodo1

V. A Nice Shady Home

Crispin as hermit, pure and capable,
Dwelt in the land. Perhaps if discontent
Had kept him still the pricking 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. {cont. THE COMEDIAN AS THE LETTER C, Part 5, stanza 1}

----------


## quasimodo1

Was he to bray this in profoundest brass
Anointing his dreams with frugal 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 the 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 realists, 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.
{THE COMEDIAN AS THE LETTER C, Part V, stanza 2}

----------


## quasimodo1

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,
Yeaman 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.
{cont. from THE COMEDIAN AS THE LETTER C, Part V. stanza 3)

----------


## quasimodo1

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.

----------


## quasimodo1

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 unforseen. 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 self-same lights
That spread chromatics in hilarious dark,
Four questioners and four sure answerers. {THE COMEDIAN AS THE LETTER C, Part VI, stanza 2}

----------


## quasimodo1

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 law, 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 portions 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.
{end of THE COMEDIAN AS THE LETTER C}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Harmonium

EARTHY ANECDOTE

Every time the bucks went clattering
Over Oklahoma
A firecat bristled in the way.

Wherever they went,
They went clattering,
Until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the right,
Because of the firecat.

Or until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the left,
Because of the firecat.

The bucks clattered.
The firecat went leaping,
To the right, to the left,
And
Bristled in the way.

Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes
And slept.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Harmoniium

INVECTIVE AGAINST SWANS

The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks
And far beyond the discords of the wind.

A bronze rain from the sun descending marks
The death of summer, which that time endures

Like one who scrawls a listless testament
Of golden quirks and Paphian caricatures,

Bequeathing your white feathers to the moon
And giving your bland motions to the air.

Behold, already on the long parades
The crows anoint the statues with their dirt.

And the soul, O ganders, being lonely, flies
Beyond your chilly chariots, to the skies.

----------


## Riesa

a few great lines, and may have been mentioned before:


"of love, it is a book too mad to read
Before one merely reads to pass the time."


"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."

probably my favorite, and I only found it after my eggplant poem and makes me love him more:

"We hang like warty squashes, streaked and rayed,
The laughing sky will see the two of us
Washed into rinds by rotting winter rains." 

"lend no part to any humanity that suffuses
you in its own light"


"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."

"His thought sleeps not. Yet thought that wakes
In sleep may never meet another thought
Or thing....Now day-break comes...

X promenades the dew stones,
Observes the canna with a clinging eye,
Observes and then continues to observe."

"In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;
But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four
hills and a cloud."


"You that wander,"
"On the bushy plain, 
Forget so soon,
But I set my traps 
In the midst of dreams."

"And the beauty
of the moonlight
Falling there,
Falling
as sleep falls
In innocent air."


"In the place of the solitaires,
Which is to be a place of perpetual undulation."


"I was myself the compas of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange."

"Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else 
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?"



"I meaure myself
Against a tall tree.
I find that I am much taller,
For I reach right up to the sun
With my eye."


etc.

----------


## lavendar1

I love this; it's where I am:

HOME AGAIN

Back within the valley,
Down from the divide,
No more flaming clouds about,
O! the soft hillside,
And my cottage light,
And the starry night.

_Opus Posthumous_

----------


## quasimodo1

to lavendar1: Love this poem, it's from Stevens' Uncollected works but still under copyright.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Harmonium

THE PLOT AGAINST THE GIANT

First Girl

When this yokel comes maundering,
Whetting his hacker,
I shall run before him,
Diffusing the civilest odors
Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.
It will check him.

Second Girl

I shall run before him,
Arching cloths besprinkled with colors
As small as fish-eggs.
The threads
Will abash him.

Third Girl

Oh, la . . .le pauvre!
I shall run before him,
With a curious puffing.
He will bend his ear then.
I shall whisper
Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.
It will undo him.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Harmonium

THE SNOW MAN

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Harmonium

THE ORDINARY WOMEN

Then from their poverty they rose,
From dry catarrhs, and to guitars
They flitted
Through the palace walls

They flung monotony behind,
Turned from their want, and, nonchalant,
They crowded
The nocturnal halls.

The lacquered loges huddled there
Mumbled zay-zay and a zay, a-zay.
The moonlight
Fubbed the girandoles.

And the cold dresses that they wore,
In the vapid haze of the window-bays,
Were tranquil
As they leaned and looked

From the window-sills at the alphabets,
At beta b and gamma g,
To study
The canting curlicues

Of heaven and of the heavenly script.
And there they read of marriage-bed.
Ti-lill-o!
And they read right long.

The gaunt guitarists on the strings
Rumbled a-day and a-day, a-day.
The moonlight
Rose on the beachy floors.

How explicit the coiffures became,
The diamond point, the sapphire point,
The sequins
Of the civil fans!

Insinuations of desire,
Puissant speech, alike in each,
Cried quittance
To the wickless halls,

Then from their poverty they rose,
From dry guitars, and to catarrhs
They flitted
Through the palace walls.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Harmonium

THE LOAD OF SUGAR-CANE

The going of the glade-boat
Is like water flowing;

Like water flowing
Through the green saw-grass,
Under the rainbows;

Under the rainbows
That are like birds,
Turning, bedizened,

While the wind still whistles
As kildeer do,

When they rise 
At the red turban
Of the boatman.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Harmonium

LE MONOCLE DE MON ONCLE

I. "Mother of heaven, regina of the clouds,
O sceptre of the sun, crown of the moon,
There is not nothing, no, no, never nothing,
Line the clashed edges of two words that kill."
And so I mocked her in magnificent measure.
Or was it that I mocked myself alone?
I wish that I might be a thinking stone.
The sea of spuming thought foists up again
The radiant bubble that she was. And then
A deep up-pouring from some saltier well
Within me, bursts its watery syllable.

II. A red bird flies across the golden floor.
It is a red bird that seeks out his choir
Among the choirs of wind and wet and wing.
A torrent will fall from him when he finds.
Shall I uncrumple this much-crumpled thing?
I am a man of fortune greeting heirs;
For it has come that thus I greet the spring.
These choirs of welcome choir for me farewell.
No spring can follow past meridian.
Yet you persist with anecdotal bliss
To make believe a starry connaissance.

III. Is it for nothing, then, that old Chinese
Sat titivating. By their mountain pools
Or in the Yangtse studied out their beards?
I shall not play the flat historic scale.
You know how Utamaro's beauties sought
The end of love in their all-speaking braids.
You know the mountainous coiffures of Bath.
Alas! Have all the barbers lived in vain
That not one curl in nature has survived?
Why, without pity on these studious ghosts,
Do you come dripping in your hair from sleep?

IV. This luscious and impeccable fruit of life
Falls, it appears, of its own weight to earth.
When you were Eve, its acrid juice was sweet,
Untasted, in its heavenly, orchard air.
An apple serves as well as any skull
To be the book in which to read a round,
And is as excellent, in that it is composed
Of what, like skulls, comes rotting back to ground.
But it excels in this, that as the fruit
Of love, it is a book too mad to read
Before one merely reads to pass the time.
{four of twelve parts}

----------


## quasimodo1

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, 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.
Descensiouns of their tinkling bells arrive.
These muleteers are dainty of their way.
Meantime, centurions guffaw and beat
Their shrilling tankards of 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,
We hang like warty squashes, streaked and rayed,
Into the autumn weather, splashed with frost,
Distorted by hale fatness, turned grotesque.
The laughing sky will see the two of us
Washed into rinds by rotting winter rains.
{LE MONOCLE DE MON ONCLE, Parts 5 thru 8}

----------


## quasimodo1

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 side-long 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 never knew
That fluttering things have so distinct a shade.
{end of LE MONOCLE DE MON ONCLE, 9 thru 12}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Harmonium

NUANCES OF A THEME BY WILLIAMS

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 nothiing.

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.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Harmonium

PLOUGHING ON SUNDAY

The white ****'s tail
Tosses in the wind.
The turkey ****'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 ****'s tail
Spreads to the sun.

The white ****'s tail
Streams to the moon.
Water in the fields.
The wind pours down.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Harmonium

METAPHORS OF A MAGNIFICO

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 en 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. . .

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Harmonium

 CY EST POURTRAICTE, MADAME
STE URSULE, ET LES UNZE
MILLE VIERGES*

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.

 "Here is Depicted Madam Saint Ursula and The Eleven Thousand Virgins"

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Harmonium

HIBISCUS ON THE SLEEPING SHORES

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.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Harmonium

FABLIAU OF FLORIDA

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.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Harmonium

THE DOCTOR OF GENEVA

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.

----------


## quasimodo1

THE PALTRY NUDE STARTS ON A SPRING VOYAGE*

But not on a shell, she starts,
Archaic, for the sea.
But on the first-found weed
She scuds the glitters,
Noiselessly, like one more wave.

She too is discontent
And would have purple stuff upon her arms,
Tired of the salty harbors,
Eager for the brine and bellowing
Of the high interiors of the sea.

The wind speeds her,
Blowing upon her hands
And watery back.
She touches the clouds, where she goes
In the circle of her traverse of the sea.

Yet this is meagre play
In the scurry and water-shine,
As her heels foam--
Not as when the goldener nude
Of a later day

Will go, like the centre of sea-green pomp,
In an intenser calm
Scullion of fate,
Across the spick torrent, ceaselessly,
Upon her irretrievable way.

{second posting*}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Harmonium

ANOTHER WEEPING WOMAN

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.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Harmonium

THE CUBAN DOCTOR

I went to Egypt to escape
The Indian, but the Indian struck
Out of his cloud and from his sky.

This was no worm bred in the moon,
Wriggling far down the phantom air,
And on a comfortable sofa dreamed.

The Indian struck and disappeared.
I knew my enemy was near-- I,
Drowsing in summer's sleepiest horn.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Harmonium

THE EMPEROR OF ICE-CREAM

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Harmonium

DEPRESSION BEFORE SPRING

The **** crows
But no queen rises.

The hair of my blonde
Is dazzling,
In the spittle of cows
Threading the wind.

Ho! Ho!

But ki-ki-ri-ki
Brings no rou-cou,
No rou-cou-cou.

But no queen comes
In slipper green.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Harmonium

EXPOSITION OF THE CONTENTS OF A CAB

Victoria Clementina, negress,
Took seven white dogs
To ride in a cab.

Bells of the dogs chinked.
Harness of the horses shuffled
Like brazen shells.

Oh-he'-he' Fragrant puppets
By the green lake-pallors,
She too is flesh,

And a breech-cloth might wear,
Netted of topaz and ruby
And savage blooms;

Thridding the squawkiest jungle
In a golden sedan,
White dogs at bay.

What breech-cloth might you wear,
Except linen, embroidered
By elderly women?

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Harmonium

DISILLUSIONMENT OF TEN O'CLOCK

The houses are haunted
By white night gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.

----------


## quasimodo1

SUNDAY MORNING
1
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound.
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre {from Harmonium}

----------


## lavendar1

I will continue with "Sunday Morning"--my favorite stanza:

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.

----------


## Virgil

"Sunday Morning" is truely a great poem. Let me continue with the third stanza:




> 3
> Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
> No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
> Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
> He moved among us, as a muttering king,
> Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
> Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
> With heaven, brought such requital to desire
> The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
> ...

----------


## quasimodo1

4
She says, "I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?"
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured
As April's green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow's wings. {from Sunday Morning}

----------


## quasimodo1

5
She says, "But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss."
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves. {from Sunday Morning}

----------


## JBI

Quasi, Sunday morning is public domain last time I checked, why not just post the whole thing? As a poem, it needs really to be read in entirety anyway.

----------


## quasimodo1

JBI, posting complete poem...

----------


## quasimodo1

Sunday Morning
1
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound.
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

2
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measure destined for her soul.

3
Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

4
She says, "I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?"
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured
As April's green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow's wings.

5
She says, "But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss."
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

6
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

7
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feel shall manifest.

8
She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, "The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay."
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Harmonium

THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A BLACKBIRD

I. Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the black bird.

II. I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III. The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV. A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V. I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI. Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII. O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII. I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX. When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X. At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI. He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII. The river is moving
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII. It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

----------


## Virgil

I always loved that Blackbird poem but for the life of me I can't understand. Or at least there is something critical I'm missing. Welcome back Qasi.  :Smile:

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Harmonium

EXPLANATION

Ach, Mutter,
This old, black dress,
I have been embroidering
French flowers on it.

Not by way of romance,
Here is nothing of the ideal,
Nein,
Nein.

It would have been different,
Liebchen,
If I had imagined myself,
In an orange gown,
Drifting through space,
Like a figure on the church-wall.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Harmonium

THE VIRGIN CARRYING A LANTERN

There are no bears among the roses,
Only a negress who supposes
Things false and wrong

About the lantern of the beauty
Who walks, there, as a farewell duty,
Walks long and long.

The pity that her pious egress
Should fill the vigil of a negress
With heat so strong!

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Harmonium

SIX SIGNIFICANT LANDSCAPES

I. An old man sits
In the shadow of a pine tree
In China.
He sees larkspur,
Blue and white,
At the edge of the shadow,
Move in the wind.
His beard moves in the wind.
The pine tree moves in the wind.
Thus water flows
Over weeds.

II. The night is of the color
Of a woman's arm:
Night, the female,
Obscure,
Fragrant and supple,
Conceals herself.
A pool shines,
Like a bracelet
Shaken in a dance.

III. I measure myself
Against a tall tree.
I find that I am much taller,
For I reach right up to the sun,
With my eye;
And I reach to the shore of the sea
With my ear.
Nevertheless, I dislike
The way the ants crawl
In and out of my shadow.

IV. When my dream was near the moon
The white folds of its gown
Filled with yellow light.
The soles of its feet
Grew red.
Its hair filled
With certain blue crystallizations
From stars,
Not far off.

V. Not all the knives of the lamp-posts,
Nor the chisels of the long streets,
Nor the mallets of the domes
And high towers,
Can carve 
What one star can carve,
Shining through the grape-leaves.

VI. Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses--
As for example, the ellipse of the half-moon--
Rationalists would wear sombreros.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens' Collected Poetry & Prose
from Harmonium

BANTAMS IN PINE-WOODS

Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan
Of tan with henna hackles, halt!

Damned universal ****, as if the sun
Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail.

Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal.
Your world is you. I am my world.

You ten-foot poet among inchlings. Fat!
Begone! An inchling bristles in these pines,

Bristles, and points their Appalachian tangs,
And fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Harmonium

ANECDOTE OF THE JAR

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

----------


## Virgil

> from Stevens' Collected Poetry & Prose
> from Harmonium
> 
> BANTAMS IN PINE-WOODS
> 
> Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan
> Of tan with henna hackles, halt!
> 
> Damned universal ****, as if the sun
> ...


I always get a kick out of this poem. Stevens is just so original. I do think he's the finest poet of the 20th century in English.

----------


## quasimodo1

You know Virgil, this poem is a gem and as always, Stevens not only commands the language but has working possession of the most unusual and arcane words.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Harmonium

FROGS EAT BUTTERFLIES. SNAKES EAT FROGS.
HOGS EAT SNAKES. MEN EAT HOGS

It is true that the rivers went nosing like swine,
Tugging at banks, until they seemed
Bland belly-sounds in somnolent troughs,

That the air was heavy with the breath of these swine,
The breath of turgid summer, and
Heavy with thunder's rattapallax,

That the man who erected this cabin, planted
This field, and tended it awhile,
Knew not the quirks of imagery,

That the hours of his indolent, arid days,
Grotesque with this nosing in banks,
This somnolence and rattapallax,

Seemed to suckle themselves on his arid being,
As swine-like rivers suckled themselves
While they went seaward to the sea-mouths.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Harmonium

CORTEGE FOR ROSENBLOOM

Now, the wry Rosenbloom is dead
And his finical carriers tread,
On a hundred legs, the tread
Of the dead.
Rosenbloom is dead.

They carry the wizened one
Of the color of horn
To the sullen hill,
Treading a tread
In unison for the dead.

Rosenbloom is dead.
The tread of the carriers does not halt
On the hill, but turns
Up the sky.
They are bearing his body into the sky.

It is the infants of misanthropes
And the infants of nothingness
That tread
The wooden ascents
Of the ascending of the dead.

It is turbans they wear
And boots of fur
As they tread the boards
In a region of frost,
Viewing the frost.

To a chirr of gongs
And a chitter of cries
And the heavy thrum
Of the endless tread
That they tread.

To a jangle of doom
And a jumble of words
Of the intense poem
Of the strictest prose
Of Rosenbloom.

And they bury him there,
Body and soul,
In a place in the sky.
The lamentable tread!
Rosenbloom is dead.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Harmonium

TATOO

The light is like a spider.
It crawls over the water.
It crawls over the edges of the snow.
It crawls under your eyelids
And spreads its webs there--
Its two webs.

The webs of your eyes
Are fastened
To the flesh and bones of you
As to rafters or grass.

There are filaments of your eyes
On the surface of the water
And in the edges of the snow.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Harmonium

LIFE IS MOTION

In Oklahoma,
Bonnie and Josie,
Dressed in calico,
Danced around a stump.
They cried,
"Ohoyaho,
Ohoo". . . .
Celebrating the marriage
Of flesh and air.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Harmonium

TWO FIGURES IN DENSE VIOLET NIGHT

I had as lief be embraced by the porter at the hotel
As to get no more from the moonlight
Than your moist hand.

Be the voice of night and Florida in my ear.
Use dusky words and dusky images.
Darken your speech.

Speak, even, as if I did not hear you speaking,
But spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts,
Conceiving words,

As the night conceives the sea-sounds in silence,
And out of their droning sibilants makes
A serenade.

Say, puerile, that the buzzards crouch on the ridge-pole
And sleep with one eye watching the stars fall
Below Key West.

Say that the palms are clear in a total blue,
Are clear and are obscure, that it is night;
That the moon shines.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Harmonium

HYMN FROM A WATERMELON PAVILION

You dweller in the dark cabin,
To whom the watermelon is always purple,
Whose garden is wind and moon,

Of the two dreams, night and day,
What lover, what dreamer, would choose
The one obscured by sleep?

Here is the plantain by your door
And the best **** of red feather
That crew before the clocks.

A feme may come, leaf-green,
Whose coming may give revel
Beyond revelries of sleep,

Yes, and the blackbird spread its tail,
So that the sun may speckle,
While it creaks hail.

You dweller in the dark cabin,
Rise, since rising will not waken,
And hail, cry hail, cry hail.

----------


## Virgil

Oooh, I really like that llast one Quasi. I hadn't seen it before.




> Yes, and the blackbird spread its tail,
> So that the sun may speckle,
> While it creaks hail.


What marvelous lines!

----------


## Virgil

> from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
> from Harmonium
> 
> CORTEGE FOR ROSENBLOOM
> 
> Now, the wry Rosenbloom is dead
> And his finical carriers tread,
> On a hundred legs, the tread
> Of the dead.
> ...


Oh!!! This one is perfection. My God what a poem.

----------


## quasimodo1

They carry the wizened one
Of the color of horn
To the sullen hill,
Treading a tread
In unison for the dead.

Rosenbloom is dead.
The tread of the carriers does not halt
On the hill, but turns
Up the sky.
They are bearing his body into the sky.

It is the infants of misanthropes
And the infants of nothingness
That tread
The wooden ascents
Of the ascending of the dead.

These three stanzas are exceptional genius within Stevens' regular genius. And to think the man spent time selling insurance in Connecticut.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Harmonium

PETER QUINCE AT THE CLAVIER

I. Just as my fingers on these keys
Make music, so the self-same sounds
On my spirit make a music, too.

Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you.

Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music. It is like the strain
Waked in the elders by Susanna;

Or a green evening, clear and warm,
She halted in her still garden, while
The red-eyed elders, watching, felt

The basses of their beings throb
In witching chords, and their thin blood
Pulse pizzicati of Hosannna.

II. In the green water, clear and warm,
Susanna lay.
She searched
The touch of springs,
And found
Concealed imaginings.
She sighed,
For so much melody.

Upon the bank, she stood
In the cool
Of spent emotions.
She felt, among the leaves,
The dew
Of old devotions.

She walked upon the grass,
Still quavering.
The winds were like her maids,
On timid feet,
Fetching her woven scarves,
Yet wavering.

A breath upon her hand
Muted the night.
She turned--
A cymbal crashed,
And roaring horns.

III. Soon, with a noise like tambourines,
Came her attendant Byzantines.

They wondered why Susanna cried
Against the elders by her side;

And as they whispered, the refrain
Was like a willow swept by rain.

Anon, their lamps' uplifted flame
Revealed Susanna and her shame.

And then, the simpering Byzantines
Fled, with a noise like tambourines.

IV. Beauty is momentary in the mind--
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.

The body dies; the body's beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.
So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
The cowl of winter, done repenting.
So maidens die, to the auroral
Celebration of a maiden's choral.

Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings
Of those white elders; but, escaping,
Left only Death's ironic scraping.
Now, in its immortality, it plays
On the clear viol of her memory,
And makes a constant sacrament of praise.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Harmonium

TO THE ROARING WIND

What syllable are you seeking,
Vocalissimus,
In the distances of sleep?
Speak it.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Harmonium

TEA

When the elephant's-ear in the park
Shrivelled in frost,
And the leaves on the paths
Ran like rats,
Your lamp-light fell
On shining pillows,
Of sea-shades and sky-shades,
Like umbrellas in Java.

----------


## quasimodo1

THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR 


I

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are 
Are changed upon the blue guitar."

And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."

II

I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.

I sing a hero's head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,

Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.

If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,

Say it is the serenade 
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

III

Ah, but to play man number one,
To drive the dagger in his heart,

To lay his brain upon the board 
And pick the acrid colors out,

To nail his thought across the door,
Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,

To strike his living hi and ho,
To tick it, tock it, turn it true,
 
To bang from it a savage blue,
Jangling the metal of the strings�

IV

So that's life, then: things as they are?
It picks its way on the blue guitar.

A million people on one string?
And all their manner in the thing,

And all their manner, right and wrong,
And all their manner, weak and strong?

The feelings crazily, craftily call,
Like a buzzing of flies in autumn air,

And that's life, then: things as they are,
This buzzing of the blue guitar.

V

Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry,
Of the torches wisping in the underground,

Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light.
There are no shadows in our sun,

Day is desire and night is sleep.
There are no shadows anywhere.

The earth, for us, is flat and bare.
There are no shadows. Poetry

Exceeding music must take the place
Of empty heaven and its hymns,

Ourselves in poetry must take their place,
Even in the chattering of your guitar.


{excerpt, poem of 33 parts, 1937}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Parts of a World

THUNDER BY THE MUSICIAN

Sure enough, moving, the thunder became men,
Ten thousand, men hewn and tumbling,
Mobs of ten thousand, clashing together,
This way and that.

Slowly, one man, savager than the rest,
Rose up, tallest, in the black sun,
Stood up straight in the air, struck off
The clutch of the others.

And, according to the composer, this butcher,
Held in his hand the suave egg-diamond
That had flashed (like vicious music that ends
In transparent accords).

It would have been better, the time conceived,
To have had him holding-- what?
His arm would be trembling, he would be weak,
Even though he shouted. ... {excerpt}

----------


## quasimodo1

Now that the poems from Harmonium have all been posted, the remainder of Stevens' work, prose and poetry, is under copyright and only excerpts will be posted. Anyone wishing the entire text, need only PM to me and I'll send the complete text. q1

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Parts of a World

CONTRARY THESES (II)

One chemical afternoon in mid-autumn,
When the grand mechanics of earth and sky were near,
Even the leaves of the locust were yellow then,

He walked with his year-old boy on his shoulder.
The sun shone and the dog barked and the baby slept.
The leaves, even of the locust, the green locust.

He wanted and looked for a final refuge,
From the bombastic intimations of winter
And the martyrs a la mode. He walked toward

An abstract, of which the sun, the dog, the boy
Were contours. Cold was chilling the wide-moving swans.
The leaves were falling like notes from a piano. ... {excerpt}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from The Rock

PROLOGUES TO WHAT IS POSSIBLE

I. There was an ease of mind that was like being alone in a 
boat at sea,
A boat carried forward by waves resembling the bright backs
Of rowers,
Gripping their oars, as if they were sure of the way to their
destinations,
Bending over and pulling themselves erect on the wooden
handles,
Wet with water and sparkling in the one-ness of their
motion.

The boat was built of stones that had lost their weight and
being no longer heavy
Had left in them only a brilliance, of unaccustomed origin,
So that he that stood up in the boat leaning and looking
before him
Did not pass like someone voyaging out of and beyond the
familiar.
He belonged to the far-foreign departure of his vessel and
was part of it,
Part of the speculum of fire on its prow, its symbol,
whatever it was,
Part of the glass-like sides on which it glided over the salt-
stained water,
As he traveled alone, like a man lured on by a syllable
without any meaning
A syllable of which he felt, with an appointed sureness,
That it contained the meaning into which he wanted to
enter,
A meaning which, as he entered it, would shatter the boat
and leave the oarsmen quiet
As at a point of central arrival, an instant moment, much or
little,
Removed from any shore, from any man or woman, and
needing none.
{...excerpt, one of two parts}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from The Rock

THE WORLD AS MEDITATION

J'ai passe' trop de temps a' travailler mon violin, a' voyager. Mais l'exercice essentiel du compositeur-- la meditation-- rien ne l'a jamais suspendu en moi. . . . Je vis un reve permanent, qui ne s'arrete ni nuit ni jour. Georges Enesco

It is Ulysses that approaches from the east,
The interminable adventurer? The trees are mended.
That winter is washed away. Someone is moving
On the horizon and lifting himself up above it.
A form of fire approaches the cretonnes of Penelope,
Whose mere savage presence awakens the world in which
she dwells.

She has composed, so long, a self with which to welcome
him,
Companion to his self for her, which she imagined,
Two in a deep-founded sheltering, friend and dear friend.

The trees had been mended, as an essential excercise
In an inhuman meditation, larger than her own.
No winds like dogs watched over her at night.

She wanted nothing he could not bring her by coming
alone.
She wanted no fetchings. His arms would be her necklace
And her belt, the final fortune of their desire.

But was it Ulysses? Or was it only the warmth of the sun
On her pillow? The thought kept beating in her like her
heart. ..... {excerpt} [Enesco quote..."I have spent a great deal of time working with my violin, traveling. But nothing was ever able to suspend in me the composer's essential exercise-- meditation. . . .I live a continuing dream, which never stops, night or day."]

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Uncollected Poems

PIANO PRACTICE AT THE ACADEMY OF THE HOLY ANGELS

The time will come for these children, seated before their
long black instruments, to strike the themes of love--
All of them, darkened by time, moved by they know not
what, amending the airs they play to fulfill themselves;
Seated before these shining forms, like the duskiest glass,
reflecting the piebald of roses or what you will.
Blanche, the blonde, whose eyes are not wholly straight, in
a room of lustres, shed by turquoise falling,
Whose heart will murmur with the music that will be a
voice for her, speaking the dreaded change of speech;
And Rosa, the muslin dreamer of satin and cowry-kin,
disdaining the empty keys; and the young infanta,
Jocunda, who will arrange the roses and rearrange, letting
the leaves lie on the water-like lacquer;
And that confident one, Marie, the wearer of cheap stones,
who will have grown still and restless;
And Crispine, the blade, reddened by some touch,
demanding the most from the phrases
Of the well-thumbed, infinite pages of her masters, who will
seem old to her, requiting less and less her feeling:
In the days when the mood of love will be swarming for
solace and sink deeply into the thin stuff of being,
And these long, black instruments will be so little to them
that will be needing so much, seeking so much in their
music.

{1919}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose

MOZART, 1935

................
Be seated at the piano.

That lucid souvenir of the past,
The divertimento;
That airy dream of the future,
The unclouded concerto. . . .
The snow is falling.
Strike the piercing chord.

Be thou the voice,
Not you. Be thou, be thou
The voice of angry fear,
The voice of this besieging pain.

Be thou that wintry sound
As of the great wind howling,
By which sorrow is released,
Dismissed, absolved
In a starry placating.

We may return to Mozart.
He was young, and we, we are old.
The snow is falling
And the streets are full of cries.
Be seated, thou.
{excerpt}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Uncollected Poems

BALLADE OF THE PINK PARASOL

I pray thee where is the old-time wig,
And where is the lofty hat?
Where is the maid on the road in her gig,
And where is the fire-side cat?
Never was sight more fair than that,
Outshining, outreaching them all,
There in the night where lovers sat--
But where is the pink parasol?

Where in the pack is the dark spadille
With scent of lavender sweet,
That never was held in the mad quadrille.
And where are the slippered feet?
Ah! We'd have given a pound to meet
The card that wrought our fall,
The card none other of all could beat--
But where is the pink parasol?

Where is the roll of the old calash,
And the jog of the light sedan?
Whence Chloe's diamond brooch would flash
And conquer poor peeping man.
Answer me, where is the painted fan
And the candles bright on the wall,
Where is the coat of yellow and tan--
but where is the pink parasol?

Prince, these baubles are far away,
In the ruin of palace and hall,
Made dark by the shadow of yesterday--
But where is the pink parasol?

{1900}

----------


## Virgil

That one is great Quasi. Obviously a really early poem. Gosh he not even 20 years old I think. But it has some of the characteristics of his mature work. 




> Where is the roll of the old calash,
> And the jog of the light sedan?
> Whence Chloe's diamond brooch would flash
> And conquer poor peeping man.


 :Biggrin:

----------


## quasimodo1

In the Uncollected Poems, which I'm presuming to be unpublished back in the day, there are quite a few gems pre-1923.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Uncollected Poems

OUTSIDE THE HOSPITAL

See the blind and the lame at play,
There on the summer lawn--
She with her graceless eyes of clay,
Quick as a frightened fawn,
Running and tripping into his way
Whose legs are gone.

How shall she 'scape him, where shall she fly,
She who never sees?
Now he is near her, now she is by--
Into his arms she flees.
Hear her gay laughter, hear her light cry
Among the trees.

"Princess, my captive." "Master, my king."
"Here is a garland bright."
"Red roses, I wonder, red with the Spring,
Red with a reddish light?"
"Red roses, my princess, I ran to bring,
And be your knight."

{1900}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Uncollected Poems

VITA MEA

With fear I trembled in the House of Life,
Hast'ning from door to door, from room to room,
Seeking a way from that impenetrable gloom
Against whose walls my strength lay weak from strife.
All dark! All dark! And what sweet wind was rife
With earth, or sea, or star, or new sun's bloom,
Lay sick and dead within that place of doom,
Where I went raving like the winter's wife.
"In vain, in vain," with bitter lips I cried;
"In vain, in vain," along the hall-ways died
And sank in silences away. Oppressed
I wept. Lo! Through those tears the window-bars
Shone bright, where Faith and Hope like long-sought stars
First gleamed upon that prison of unrest.
{written in 1898 when Stevens was 19}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Uncollected Poems

BLANCHE McCARTHY

Look in the terrible mirror of the sky
And not in this dead glass, which can reflect
Only the surfaces-- the bending arm,
The leaning shoulder and the searching eye.

Look in the terrible mirror of the sky.
Oh, bend against the invisible; and lean
To symbols of descending night; and search
The glare of revelations going by!

Look in the terrible mirror of the sky.
See how the absent moon waits in a glade
Of your dark self, and how the wings of stars,
Upward, from unimagined coverts, fly.

{1915-16}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from OWL'S CLOVER
{from Section IV, part six}

VI. If these were theoretical people, like
Small bees of spring, sniffing the coldest buds
Of a time to come-- A shade of horror turns
The bees to scorpions blackly-barbed, a shade
Of fear changes the scorpions to skins.
The civil fiction, the calico idea,
The Johnsonian composition, abstract man,
All are evasions like a repeated phrase,
Which, by its repetition, comes to bear
A meaning without a meaning. These people have
A meaning within the meaning they convey,
Walking the paths, watching the gilding sun,
To be swept across them when they are revealed,
For a moment, once each century or two.
The future for them is always the deepest dome,
The darkest blue of the dome and the wings around
The giant Phosphor of their earliest prayers.
Once each century or two. But then so great,
So epical a twist, catastrophe
For Isaac Watts: the diverting of the dream
Of heaven from heaven to the future, as a god,
Takes time and tinkering, melodious
And practical. The envoi to the past
Is largely another winding of the clock.
The tempo, in short, of this complicated shift,
With interruptions by vast hymns, blood odes,
Parades of whole races with attendant bands,
And the bees, the scorpions, the men that think,
The summer Sundays in the park, must be
A leaden ticking circular in width.
How shall we face the edge of time? We walk
In the park. We regret we have no nightingale.
We must have the throstle on the gramophone.
Where shall we find more than derisive words?
When shall lush chorals spiral through our fire
And daunt that old assassin, heart's desire?

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Uncollected Poems

SONNETS

I. I strode along my beaches like a sea,
The sand before me stretching firm and fair;
No inland darkness cast its shadow there
And my long step was gloriously free.
The careless wind was happy company
That hurried past and did not question where;
Yet as I moved I felt a deep despair
And wonder of the thoughts that came to me.

For to my face the deep wind brought the scent
Of flowers I could not see upon the strand;
And in the sky a silent cloud was blent
With dreams of my soul's stillness; and the sand,
That had been naught to me, now trembled far
In mystery beneath the evening star.

(1899)

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Uncollected Poems

SONNETS 

II. Come, said the world, thy youth is not all play,
Upon these hills vast palaces must rise,
And over this green plain that calmly lies
In peace, a mighty city must have sway.
These weak and murmuring reeds cannot gainsay
The building of my wharves; this flood that flies
Unfathomed clear must bear my merchandise,
And sweep my burdens on their seaward way.

No, cried my heart, this thing I cannot do,
This is my home, this plain and water clear
Are my companions faultless as the sky--
I cannot, will not give them up to you.
And if you come upon them I shall fear,
And if you steal them from me I shall die.

{1899}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Uncollected Poems

SONNETS

III. When I think of all the centuries long dead,
The cities fall'n to dust, the kingdoms won
And in a moment lost again, the sun
That in a high and cloudless heaven led
Sad days of vanished beauty ere they fled,
Sad days so far and fair to muse upon, --
The earth grown grey and covered with the run
And progress of her years' unending tread.

Then my youth leaves me, and the blood
Leaps in its ardor like a flood.
Others with hot and angry pride, I cry
Others in their thin covered dust may lie
And give their majesty to some pale bud
But not-- if strength of will abides-- not I.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Uncollected Poems

SONNETS

IV. Through dreary winter had my soul endured
With futile striving and grave argument
Brief sunless days of bitter discontent,
Until, at length, to all its griefs inured
It ceased from idle turmoil, and secured
A new and rich repose; each hour was blent
With easeful visions of the Orient
And cities on uncertain hills immured.

It seemed as though upon a mournful world
A pure-voiced robin had sent forth a ray
Of long-impending beauty, to allay
Her wild desire; as though her deep unrest
Was in a moment's minstrelsy uphurled
Sweet-startling from her heavy-laden breast.
{1899}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Uncollected Poems

SONNETS

V. The rivers flow on idly in their light
The world is sleeping, and the golden dower
Of heaven is silent as a languorous flower
That spreads its deepness on the tender night.
The distant cities glimmer pale and bright
Each like a separate far and flaring bower
Noiseless and undisturbed in resting power
Filled with the semblance of a vaster might.

Upon this wide and star-kissed plain, my life
Is soon to feel the stir and heat of strife.
Let me look on then for a moment here
Before the morn wakes up my lust for wrong,
Let me look on a moment without fear
With eyes undimmed and youth both pure and strong.

{1899}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Uncollected Poems

SONNNETS

VI. If we are leaves that fall upon the ground
To lose our greenness in the quiet dust
Of forest-depths; if we are flowers that must
Lie torn and creased upon a bitter mound,
No touch of sweetness in our ruins found;
If we are weeds whom no one wise can trust
To live and hour before we feel the gust
Of Death, and by our side its last keen sound

Then let a tremor through our briefness run,
Wrapping it in with mad, sweet sorcery
Of love; for in the fern I saw the sun
Take fire against the dew; the lily white
Was soft and deep at morn; the rosary
Streamed forth a wild perfume into the light.
{1899}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Parts of a World

YELLOW AFTERNOON

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. ... {excerpt}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Parts of a World

ARRIVAL AT THE WALDORF


..........

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.
{excerpt}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Parts of a World

EXTRACTS FROM ADDRESSES TO
THE ACADEMY OF FINE IDEAS

I. A crinkled paper makes a brilliant sound.
The wrinkled roses tinkle, the paper ones,
And the ear is glass, in which the noises pelt,
The false roses-- Compare the silent rose of the sun
And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell,
With this paper, this dust. That states the point.

.Messieurs,
It is an artificial world. The rose
Of paper is of the nature of its world.
The sea is so many written words; the sky
Is blue, clear, cloudy, high, dark, wide and round;
The mountains inscribe themselves upon the walls.
And, otherwise, the rainy rose belongs
To naked men, to women naked as rain.

Where is that summer warm enough to walk
Among the lascivious poisons, clean of them,
And in what covert may we, naked, be
Beyond the knowledge of nakedness, as part
Of reality, beyond the knowledge of what
Is real, part of a land beyond the mind?

Rain is an unbearable tyranny. Sun is
A monster-maker, an eye, only an eye,
A shapener of shapes for only the eye,
Of things no better than paper things, of days
That are paper days. The false and true are one.

II. The eye believes and its communion takes.
The spirit laughs to see the eye believe
And its communion take. And now of that.
Let the Secretary for Porcelain observe
That evil made magic, as in catastrophe,
If neatly glazed, becomes the same as the fruit
Of an emperor, the egg-plant of a prince.
The good is evil's last invention. Thus
The maker of catastrophe invents the eye
And through the eye equates ten thousand deaths
With a single well-tempered apricot, or, say,
An egg-plant of good air.

..My beards, attend
To the laughter of evil: the fierce ricanery
With the ferocious chu-chot-chu between, the sobs
For breath to laugh the louder, the deeper gasps
Uplifting the completest rhetoric
Of sneers, the fugues commencing at the toes
And ending at the finger-tips. . . . . It is death
That is ten thousand deaths and evil death.
Be tranquil in your wounds. It is good death
That puts an end to evil death and dies.
Be tranquil in your wounds. The placing star
Shall be the gentler for the death you die
And the helpless philosophers say still helpful things.
Plato, the reddened flower, the erotic bird.

{excerpted from the poem, of eight parts}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Poems Added to Harmonium

SONATINA TO HANS CHRISTIAN

If any duck in any brook,
Fluttering the water
For your crumb,
Seemed the helpless daughter

Of a mother
Regretful that she bore her;
Or of another,
Barren, and longing for her,

What of the dove,
Or thrush, or any singing mysteries?
What of the trees
And intonations of the trees?

What of the night
That lights and dims the stars?
Do you know, Hans Christian,
Now that you see the night?

----------


## quasimodo1

August 9, 1931

Pure Poetry and Mr. Wallace Stevens 
By PERCY HUTCHISON 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
HARMONIUM 
By Wallace Stevens.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

More than one critic, and not a few poets, have toyed with the idea of what has been termed  :Tongue: ure poetry," which is to say, a poetry which should depend for its effectiveness on its rhythms and the tonal values of the words employed with as complete a dissociation from ideational content as may be humanly possible. Those who have argued for such "pure poetry" have frequently, if not always, been obsessed with some hazy notion of an analogy between music and poetry. As a shining example of this school take Sidney Lanier, who was a skilled musician as well as a notable poet. Lanier advanced the theory that every vowel has its color value. This was not an association of ideas; the letter "e" was not red because it is in the word red, or green because it is in the word green, but the hearer, experiencing the word should, on Lanier's theory, experience, simultaneously with the sound, a distinct sensation of color. In the second decade of this century--the movement began in the first decade--numerous poetic schools drove theory hard. Perhaps none strove especially to carry out Lanier's color hypothesis, but there were the Imagists, and there was Vorticism and Cubism, and many more "isms" besides. For the most part, these schools have died the death which could have been prophesied for them. Poetry is founded in ideas; to be effective and lasting, poetry must be based on life, it must touch and vitalize emotion. For proof, one has but to turn to the poetry that has endured. In poetry, doctrinaire composition has no permanent place. 

Hence, unpleasant as it is to record such a conclusion, the very remarkable work of Wallace Stevens cannot endure. The verses which go to make up the volume "Harmonium" are as close to "pure poetry" as one could expect to come. And so far as rhythms and vowels and consonants may be substituted for musical notes, the volume is an achievement. But the achievement is not poetry, it is a tour de force, a "stunt" in the fantastic and the bizarre. From one end of the book to the other there is not an idea that can vitally affect the mind, there is not a word that can arouse emotion. The volume is a glittering edifice of icicles. Brilliant as the moon, the book is equally dead. Only when Stevens goes over to the Chinese does he score, and then not completely, for with all the virtuosity that his verse displays he fails quite to attain the lacquer finish of his Oriental masters. The following, "Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores," is the piece that comes nearest to the Chinese, and this is marred by the intrusion in the last line of the critical adjective "stupid." 


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 the 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 cafe--
And roamed there all the stupid afternoon.


For the full tonal and rhythmic effect of this it must be read aloud, chanted, as Tennyson and Swinburne chanted their verses. Then, within its limits, its very narrow limits, "Hibiscus" will be found to be a musical attainment not before guessed at. But it is not poetry in the larger meaning of the term. And it is not actually music that one has here, but an imitation of music. And if there is a mood conveyed, the mood could have been equally as well conveyed by other lines equally languid of rhythm. No doubt the theorists in poetry have enriched their craft, but at a disservice to themselves. Wallace Stevens is a martyr to a lost cause. 



{from the New York Times}

----------


## Virgil

I guess Quasi there is no link to that entire article. Looks like a very interesting article. This thread of yours has convinced me (though I always suspected) that Stevens is the finest American poet of the 20th century and therefore perhaps of all time.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Poems Added to Harmonium

THE MAN WHOSE PHARYNX WAS BAD

The time of year has grown indifferent.
Mildew of summer and the deepening snow
Are both alike in the routine I know.
I am too dumbly in my being pent.

The wind attendant of the solstices
Blows on the shutters of the metropoles,
Stirring no poet in his sleep, and tolls
The grand ideas of the villages.

The malady of the quotidian. . . . .
Perhaps, if winter once could penetrate
Through all its purples to the final slate,
Persisting bleakly in an icy haze,

One might in turn become less diffident,
Out of such mildew plucking neater mould
And spouting new orations of the cold.
One might. One might. But time will not relent.

----------


## Virgil

> from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
> 
> from Poems Added to Harmonium
> 
> THE MAN WHOSE PHARYNX WAS BAD
> 
> The time of year has grown indifferent.
> Mildew of summer and the deepening snow
> Are both alike in the routine I know.
> ...


 :FRlol:  Qusai, I was going to say what a terrible poem. And it is. But then I realized the significance of the title, "The Man Whose Pharanx Was Bad," and that is the point of the poem. The pharanx is bad.  :Biggrin:  Cute and clever, but I never really like when poets consciously write bad stuff. Sure it's consciously done, but it's still bad stuff.  :Wink:

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from The Man With The Blue Guitar

THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR

Part XXII

Poetry is the subject of the poem,
From this the poem issues and

To this returns. Between the two,
Between issue and return, there is

An absence in reality,
Things as they are. Or so we say.

But are these separate? Is it
An absence for the poem, which acquires

Its true appearances there, sun's green,
Cloud's red, earth feeling, sky that thinks?

From these it takes. Perhaps it gives,
In the universal intercourse.

----------


## Virgil

Quasi, you've inspired me to pull out my "The Man With The Blue Guitar." I shall go through it tonight.  :Smile:

----------


## quasimodo1

Gray Room" (1917)

Although you sit in a room that is gray, 
Except for the silver 
Of the straw-paper, 
And pick 
At your pale white gown; 
Or lift one of the green beads 
Of your necklace, 
To let it fall; 
Or gaze at your green fan 
Printed with the red branches of a red willow; 
Or, with one finger, 
Move the leaf in the bowl-- 
The leaf that has fallen from the branches of the forsythia 
Beside you... 
What is all this? 
I know how furiously your heart is beating. 

online source: http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilre...gray-room.html

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Poems Added to Harmonium

THE DEATH OF A SOLDIER

Life contracts and death is expected,
As in a season of autumn.
The soldier falls.

He does not become a three-days personage,
Imposing his separation,
Calling for pomp.

Death is absolute and without memorial,
As in a season of autumn,
When the wind stops,

When the wind stops and, over the heavens,
The clouds go, nevertheless,
In their direction.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Poems Added to Harmonium

NEW ENGLAND VERSES

I. The Whole World Including the Speaker
Why nag at the ideas of Hercules, Don Don?
Widen your sense. All things in the sun are sun.

II. The Whole World Excluding the Speaker
I found between moon-rising and moon-setting
The world was round. But not from my begetting.

III. Soupe aux Perles
Health-O, when ginger and fromage bewitch
The vile antithesis of poor and rich.

IV. Soupe Sans Perles
I crossed in '38 in the Western Head.
It depends which way you crossed, the tea-belle said.

V. Boston With a Note-book
Lean encyclopaeedists, inscribe an Iliad.
There's a weltanschauung of the penny pad.

VI. Boston Without a Note-book
Let us erect in the Basin a lofty fountain.
Suckled on ponds, the spirit craves a watery mountain.

VII. Artist In Tropic
Of Phoebus Apothicaire the first beatitude:
Blessed, who is his nation's multitude.

VIII. Artist In Arctic
And of Phoebus the Tailor the second saying goes:
Blessed, whose beard is cloak against the snows.

IX. Statue Against a Clear Sky
Ashen man on ashen cliff above the salt halloo,
O ashen admiral of the hale, hard blue. . . .

X. Statue against a Cloudy Sky
Scaffolds and derricks rise from the reeds to the clouds
Meditating the will of men in formless crowds.

XI. Land of Locust
Patron and patriarch of couplets, walk
In fragrant leaves heat-heavy yet nimble in talk.

XII. Land of Pine ad Marble
Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints
Of he North have earned this crumb by their complaints.

XIII. The Male Nude
Dark cynic, strip and bathe and bask at will.
Without cap or strap, you are the cynic still.

XIV. The Female Nude
Ballatta dozed in the cool on a straw divan
At home, a bit like the slenderest courtesan.

XV. Scene Fletrie
The people dress in autumn and the belfry breath
Hunted autumnal farewells of academic death.

XVI. Scene Fleurie
A perfect fruit in perfect atmosphere.
Nature as Pinakothek. Whist! Chanticleer. . . . .

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from The Man With The Blue Guitar

THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR

Part XXI

A substitute for all the gods:
This self, not that gold self aloft,

Alone, one's shadow magnified,
Lord of the body, looking down,

As now and called most high,
The shadow of Chocorua

In an immenser heaven, aloft,
Alone, lord of the land and lord

Of the men that live in the land, high lord.
One's self and the mountains of one's land,

Without shadows, without magnificence,
The flesh, the bone, the dirt, the stone.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from The Man With The Blue Guitar

THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR

Part XXIX

In the cathedral, I sat there, and read,
Alone, a lean Review and said,

"These degustations in the vaults
Oppose the past and the festival.

What is beyond the cathedral, outside,
Balances with nuptial song.

So it is to sit and to balance things
To and to and to the point of still,

To say of one mask it is like,
To say of another it is like,

To know that the balance does not quite rest,
That the mask is strange, however like."

The shapes are wrong and the sounds are false.
The bells are the bellowings of bulls.

Yet Franciscan don was never more
Himself than in this fertile glass.

----------


## Virgil

Oh Quasi. I was reading Margaret Avison last night and didn't get to Stevens. Perhaps once we're done with Avison we can set up a separate thread strictly for The Man With The Blue Guitar. How's that?

----------


## quasimodo1

THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR most definitely deserves a dedicated thread but you are right about seeing some completion on Avison.

----------


## Virgil

Great.  :Smile:

----------


## quasimodo1

http://www.dotcalmvillage.net/nowwha...legacysep.html --- Picasso and Stevens 

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.

The man replied, Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from The Man With The Blue Guitar

THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR
Part I

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."

And they said then, "but play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A man upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."

Part II

I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.

I sing a hero's head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,

Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.

If so serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are.

Say that it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

----------


## Nick Capozzoli

*The Auroras of Autumn III*

Farewell to an idea...The mother's face,
The purpose of the poem, fills the room.
They are together here, and it is warm,

With none of the prescience of oncoming dreams,
It is evening. The house is evening, half dissolved.
Only the half they can never possess remains,

Still starred. It is the mother they possess,
Who gives transparence to their present peace.
She makes that gentler that can gentle be.

And yet she too is dissolved, she is destroyed.
She gives transparence. But she has grown old.
The necklace is a carving not a kiss.

The soft hands are a motion not a touch.
The house will crumble and the books will burn.
They are at ease in a shelter of the mind

And the house is of the mind and they and time,
Together, all together. Boreal night
Will look like frost as it approaches them

And to the mother as she falls asleep
And as they say good-night, good night. Uptairs
The windows will be lighted, not the rooms.

And wind will spread its windy grandeurs round
And knock like a rifle butt against the door.
The wind will command them with invincible sound.

----------


## Nick Capozzoli

(excerpt)

The crow looks rusty as he rises up.
Bright is the malice in his eye...

One joins him there for company,
But at a distance, in another tree.

----------


## Nick Capozzoli

My two favorite passages from Sunday Morning are:

_
She says, "I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings...
...
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured
As April's green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow's wings._

and,

_Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darknessw, on extended wings._

----------


## Virgil

> My two favorite passages from Sunday Morning are:
> 
> _
> She says, "I am content when wakened birds,
> Before they fly, test the reality
> Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings...
> ...
> There is not any haunt of prophecy,
> Nor any old chimera of the grave,
> ...


That is such a great poem Nick. Welcome to lit net.  :Smile: 

I'm not sure which part is my favorite. It's all great. How about I highlight the second stanza:




> Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
> What is divinity if it can come
> Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
> Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
> In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
> In any balm or beauty of the earth,
> Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
> Divinity must live within herself:
> Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
> ...

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Uncollected Poems

PHASES

"La justice sans force est contredite, parce qu'il y a toujours
des mechants; la force sans la justice est accusee'" --Pascal

I. There was heaven,
Full of Raphael's costumes;
And earth,
A thing of shadows,
Stiff as stone,
Where Time, in fitful turns,
Resumes
His own. . . . .

A dead hand tapped the drum
An old voice cried out, "Come!"
We were obedient and dumb.

II. There's a little square in Paris,
Waiting until we pass.
They sit idly there,
They sip the glass.

There's a cab-horse at the corner,
There's rain. The season grieves.
It was silver once,
And green with leaves.

There's a parrot in a window,
Will see us on parade,
Hear the loud drums roll--
And serenade.

III. This was the salty taste of glory,
That it was not
Like Agamemnon's story.
Only, an eyeball in the mud,
And Hopkins,
Flat and pale and gory!

IV. But the bugles, in the night,
Were wings that bore
To where our comfort was;

Arabesques of candle beams,
Winding
Through our heavy dreams;

Winds that blew
Where the bending iris grew;

Birds of intermitted bliss,
Singing in the night's abyss;

Vines with yellow fruit,
That fell
Along the walls
That bordered Hell.

V. Death's nobility again
Beautified the simplest men.
Fallen Winkle felt the pride
Of Agamemnon
When he died.

What could London's 
Work and waste
Give him--
To that salty, sacrificial taste?

What could London's
Sorrow bring--
To that short, triumphant sting?

VI. The crisp, sonorous epics
Mongered after every scene.
Sluggards must be quickened! Screen,

No more, the shape of false Confusion.
Bare his breast and draw the flood
Of all his Babylonian blood.

VII. {Belgian Farm, October, 1914}
The vaguest line of smoke, (a year ago),
Wavered in evening air, above the roof,
As if some Old Man of the Chimney, sick
Of summer and that unused hearth below,

Stretched out a shadowy arm to feel the night.
The children heard him in their chilly beds,
Mumbling and musing of the silent farm.
They heard his mumble in the morning light.

Now, soldiers, hear me: mark this very breeze,
That blows about in such a hopeless way,
Mumbling and musing like the most forlorn.
It is that Old Man, lost among the trees.

VIII. What shall we say to the lovers of freedom,
Forming their states for new eras to come?
Say that the fighter is master of men.

Shall we, then, say too the lovers of freedom
That force, and not freedom, must always prevail?
Say that the fighter is master of men.

Or shall we say to the lovers of freedom
That freedom will conquer and always prevail?
Say that the fighter is master of men.

IX. Life, the hangman, never came,
Near our mysteries of flame.

When we marched across his towns,
He cozened us with leafy crowns.

When we marched along his roads,
He kissed his hand to ease our loads.

Life, the hangman, kept away,
From the field where soldiers pay.

X. Peace means long, delicious valleys,
In the mode of Claude Lorraine;
Rivers of jade,
In serpentines,
About the heavy grain;

Leaning trees,
Where the pilgrim hums
Of the dear
And distant door.
Peace means these,
And all things, as before.

XI. War has no haunt except the heart,
Which envy haunts, and hate, and fear,
And malice, and ambition, near
The haunt of love. Who shall impart,

To that strange commune, strength enough
To drive the laggard phantoms out?
Who shall dispel for it the doubt
Of its own strength? Let Heaven snuff

The tapers round her futile throne.
Close tight the prophets' coffin-clamp.
Peer inward, with the spirit's lamp,
Look deep, and let the truth be known.

[1914}

{Pascal quote...Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.}

----------


## Virgil

Is this the poem that was discovered Quasi? I read the first few stanzas and it sounded great, very much like early Stevens. I will come back to read it in its entirety a little later. I don't have the time or proper frame of mind. Thanks.  :Smile:

----------


## quasimodo1

Yes, Virgil, "Phases" is the one, definitely world war II related (or is it WWI), you can sense the younger idealism coming through yet as ironic and complex as only Stevens can be. The translation of the Pascal quote is a bit tentative... do you know it? I know you're busy so post later on if possible.

----------


## jinjang

> "La justice sans force est contredite, parce qu'il y a toujours
> des mechants; la force sans la justice est accusee'" --Pascal


My translation:
The justice without force is contradicted, because there are always bad people; the force without the justice is accused.

The original sounds so awkward. Let him do the math instead.

Great poem!

Either fate or some other force drove people to war. 
War has its futility and vain glories. After so many lives lost and searching for peace, people realize:

"War has no haunt except the heart,
Which envy haunts, and hate, and fear,
And malice, and ambition, near
The haunt of love. Who shall impart,"

Wrapping up a war is a lot more daunting task. Trying to dispel such phantoms that drove people to war is when people woke up to a dismal realization of

"The tapers round her futile throne.
Close tight the prophets' coffin-clamp.
Peer inward, with the spirit's lamp,
Look deep, and let the truth be known."

It is an excellent poem and I hope I interpreted as well as the poet intended.

Reference to Raphael and Claude Lorraine is my favorite part since it helps my imagination. I searched for Hopkins in vain but I figure it must be a general who fell to his death.

----------


## Nick Capozzoli

Quasi,

Where did you find "Phases?" It must be some very early stuff that Stevens did not wish to preserve for posterity, with good reason. It doesn't have anything that I recognize as Steven's genius.

Nick

----------


## quasimodo1

To Nick: I have this collection of Stevens' collected work....everything he ever wrote as far as anybody knows and this one, obviously, from his earlier days. Great in it's own way, don't you think? q1

----------


## Nick Capozzoli

> To Nick: I have this collection of Stevens' collected work....everything he ever wrote as far as anybody knows and this one, obviously, from his earlier days. Great in it's own way, don't you think? q1


It's interesting. I wouldn't call it great poetry. Kind of sophomoric and ho-hum to my taste. What is the title of the collection, who published it, and when? I'd like to get a copy. It has nothing of Stevens' genius, but I suppose it would be interesting to a reader trying to flesh out Stevens' poetic maturation.

Nick

----------


## Virgil

> It's interesting. I wouldn't call it great poetry. Kind of sophomoric and ho-hum to my taste. What is the title of the collection, who published it, and when? I'd like to get a copy. It has nothing of Stevens' genius, but I suppose it would be interesting to a reader trying to flesh out Stevens' poetic maturation.
> 
> Nick


Other than a few lines, which I agree are not the quality of Stevens' mature poetry, the poem is not bad, especially when you consider this wasn't polished for publication. I certainly wouldn't consider it a great poem. Actually there are echoes to my ear of Steven's "Peter Quince at the Clavier". From part four of Perter Quince:




> IV 
> 
> Beauty is momentary in the mind -- 
> The fitful tracing of a portal; 
> But in the flesh it is immortal. 
> 
> The body dies; the body's beauty lives. 
> So evenings die, in their green going, 
> A wave, interminably flowing. 
> ...


Still I see your point Nick. There are moments in it that are promising, but there are some rather mudane lines. And it does get kind of didactic toward the end.

----------


## jinjang

> Was it not common knowledge that the sun diverts our attention from the intellectual to the sensual? It benumbs and bewitches both reason and memory such that the soul in its elation quite forgets its true nature and clings with rapt delight...


 from _Death in Venice_ by Thomas Mann

The quote may not quite fit in this case, but 

Mr. Quasimodo1 is the sun who gently nudges and encourages to appreciate poems to incompetent pupils like me, which is much more than any literature professors ever did for me. Who is any supercilious person to say otherwise if I say I like it?

----------


## quasimodo1

I do take exception to Nick's sophmoric remark; would love to have written something like that, especially with a war in the backround, as Freshman, Senior or PHD.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Uncollected Poems

INSTANT OF CLEARNESS
{by Jean Le Roy}

I feel an apparition
at my back,
an ebon wrack,
of more than man's condition,
that leans upon me there;
and then in back, one more;
and then, still further back,
still other men aligned;
and then, toujours plus grands, immensities of night,
who, less and less defined
by light,
stretch off in the black:

ancestors from the first days of the world.

Before me, I know more,
one smaller at the first, and then one smaller still,
and more and more, that are my son and then his sons.

They lie buried in dumb sleep,
or bury themselves in the future.

And for the time, just one exists:
I.
Just one exists and I am time,
the whole of time
I am the whole of light.

My flesh alone, for the moment, lives,
my heart alone gives,
my eyes alone have sight.
I am emblazoned, the others, all, are black.
I am the whole of light!
And those behind and those before
are only routineers of rounding time.
In back, they lie perdu in the black: the breachless grime,
(just one exists and I am time) 
in front, they lie in the ruddyings
of an incalculable ether that burns and stings.
My will alone commands me: I am time!
Behind they passed the point of man,
before they are not embryo-- I, only, touch with prime.
And that will last long length of time,
think what you will!

I am between two infinite states
on the mid-line dividing,
between the infinite that waits
and the long-abiding,
at the golden spot, where the mid-line swells
and yields to a supple, quivering, deep
Inundation.

What do we count? All is for us that live!
Time, even time, and the day's strength and beam.
My fellows, you that live around me,
are you not surprised to be supreme,
on the tense line, in this expanse
of dual circumstance?
And are you not surprised to be the base
on which the eternal poising turns?
To know that, without you, the scale of lives
would sink upon death's pity under-place?
And are you not surprised to be the very poles?

Let us make signals in the air and cry aloud.
We, must leave a wide noise tolling
in the night;
and, in the deep of time,
set the wide wind rolling.

{translated 1918}

{from Notes INSTANT OF CLEARNESS The French poem is titled "Instant de Clare'" In Stevens manuscript, the title "Instant of Clearness" is canceled and above it is written, in another hand, "Moment of Insight"}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Uncollected Poems

INSCRIPTION FOR A MONUMENT

To the imagined lives
Evoked by music,
Creatures of horns, flutes, drums,
Violins, bassoons, cymbals--
Nude porters that glistened in Burma
Defiling from sight;
Island philosophers spent
By long thought beside fountains;
Big-bellied ogres curled up in the sunlight,
Stuttering dreams. . . . . . {1916}

----------


## Virgil

> from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
> 
> from Uncollected Poems
> 
> INSCRIPTION FOR A MONUMENT
> 
> To the imagined lives
> Evoked by music,
> Creatures of horns, flutes, drums,
> ...


Oh that sounds like a good one. Is that another early one? I imagine so by that date. "Nude porters"?  :FRlol:  That's beginning to sound like the mature Stevens. (Note: I don't mean the nude porters sounds like the mature Stevens, just the overall voice itself.)

----------


## quasimodo1

Hey Virgil, I was having a hard time pulling a visual on those porters. Thanks.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Uncollected Poems

ROMANCE FOR A DEMOISELLE LYING IN THE GRASS

It is grass.
It is monotonous.

The monotony
Is like your port which conceals
All your characters
And their desires.

I might make many images of this
And twang nobler notes
Of larger sentiment.

But I invoke the monotony of monotonies
Free from images and change.

Why should I savor love
With tragedy or comedy?

Clasp me,
Delicatest machine.

{1919-1920?}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Uncollected Poems

THE SHAPE OF THE CORONER

It was the morn
And the palms were waved
And the brass was played
Then the coroner came
In his limpid shoes.

The palms were waved
For the beau of illusions.
The termagant fans
Of his orange days
Fell, famous and flat,
And folded him round,

Folded and fell
And the brass grew cold
And the coroner's hand
Dismissed the band.

It was the coroner
Poured this elixir
Into the ground,
And a shabby man,
An eye too sleek,
And a biscuit cheek.

And the coroner bent
Over the palms.
The elysium lay
In a parlor of day.

{1923}

----------


## Virgil

> Hey Virgil, I was having a hard time pulling a visual on those porters. Thanks.


 :FRlol:  Let's hope we don't actually run into any.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Uncollected Poems

LULU GAY

Lulu sang of barbarians before the eunuchs
Of gobs, who called her orchidean,
Sniffed her and slapped heavy hands
Upon her.
She made the eunuchs ululate.
She described for them
The manners of the barbarians
What they did with their thumbs.
The eunuchs heard her
With continual ululation.
She described how the barbarians kissed her
With their wide mouths
And breaths as true
As the gum of the gum-tree.
"Olu" the eunuchs cried. "Ululalu"

{1921}

----------


## Virgil

> from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
> from Uncollected Poems
> 
> LULU GAY
> 
> Lulu sang of barbarians before the eunuchs
> Of gobs, who called her orchidean,
> Sniffed her and slapped heavy hands
> Upon her.
> ...


 :FRlol:  That is great!! Pure Stevens humor. He could be so analytical and then be so down to earth. This is great. ")

----------


## quasimodo1

For Stevens, that has to be the most humorous piece yet.

----------


## Jozanny

To return way way back to the beginning of this thread, with the famous "Emperor", just as a technical matter, it is very difficult to read the first stanza and maintain your speaking poise:




> *The muscular one, and bid him whip
> In kitchen cups concupiscent curds*


Tragi-comically a playful piece? Maybe, but Stevens seems to refuse the reader the ease of entering into the poetic narrative, without getting your tush jilted by potholes. "Concupiscent" is a lovely word, playful, slightly lewd, but I can guarantee you my editors today would put a bullet through my eyes for such alliteration.

As practiced as I am, I could not perform this poem for an audience.

----------


## quasimodo1

It's not "The Emporer of Ice Cream" ... is it? On your account JoZ, I'll return to Stevens less tacky work.

----------


## Jozanny

I don't know enough of Stevens to makes any judgments about tacky, though I'd love to know how he got that line through a copy editor  :Biggrin: .

On my account, you will do nothing of the sort but to do what pleases you. I am just a bitter writer who frolics in the sandbox here.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Parts of a World

THE SEARCH FOR SOUND FREE FROM MOTION

All afternoon the gramaphone
Parl-parled the West -Indian weather.
The zebra leaves, the sea
And it all spoke together.

The many-stanzaed sea, the leaves
And it spoke all together.
But you, you used the word,
Your self its honor.

All afternoon the gramaphoon,
All afternoon the gramaphoon,
The world as word,
Parl-parled the West-Indian hurricane.
{excerpt}

{circa. 19442}

----------


## Virgil

> I don't know enough of Stevens to makes any judgments about tacky, though I'd love to know how he got that line through a copy editor .
> 
> On my account, you will do nothing of the sort but to do what pleases you. I am just a bitter writer who frolics in the sandbox here.


I haven't forgotten that I promised to send you some of my favorite Stevens poems Jozy. I'm planning on doing that tomorrow.

----------


## Nick Capozzoli

> I do take exception to Nick's sophmoric remark; would love to have written something like that, especially with a war in the backround, as Freshman, Senior or PHD.


I meant that it was sophomoric when compared to the stuff in Stevens' Collected Poems...not to the average Freshman to PhD creatuve writng student. Stevens obviously didn't think it was worth collecting, and he was right. :Yawnb:

----------


## quasimodo1

to Nick: I'll withdraw that bit of sarcasm. And he didn't publish it although the decisions about what Stevens got published sometimes was not his own. In this case, I think he demurred. q1

----------


## quasimodo1

footnote on "Phases" "...525.9...Sections II to V of this group were published in a special 'War Number' of POETRY, November 1914"

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR XXVII

It is the sea that whitens the roof.
The sea drifts through the winter air.

It is the sea that the north wind makes.
The sea is in the falling snow.

This gloom is the darkness of the sea.
Geographers and philosophers,

Regard. But for that salty cup,
But for the icicles on the eaves--

The sea is a form of ridicule.
The iceberg settings satirize

The demon that cannot be himself,
That tours to shift the shifting scene.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens' Collected Poetry & Prose

from Ideas of Order

LIONS IN SWEDEN

No more phrases, Swenson: I was once
A hunter of those sovereigns of the soul
And savings banks, Fides, the sculptor's prize,
All eyes and size, and galled Justitia,
Trained to poise the tables of the law,
Patientia forever soothing wounds
And mighty Fortitudo, frantic bass.
But these shall not adorn my souvenirs,
Of the soul must likewise be at fault, and first.
If the fault is with the souvenirs, yet these
Are the soul itself. And the whole of the soul, Swenson,
As every man in Sweden will concede,
Still hankers after lions, or, to shift,
Still hankers after sovereign images.
{excerpt}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Ideas of Order

HOW TO LIVE. WHAT TO DO

Last evening the moon rose above this rock
Impure upon a world unpurged.
The man and his companion stopped
To rest before the heroic height.

Coldly the wind fell upon them
In many majesties of sound.
They that had left the flame-freaked sun
To seek a sun of fuller fire.

.........................................

There was neither voice nor crested image,
No chorister, nor priest. There was
Only the great height of the rock
And the two of them standing still to rest.

There was the cold wind and the sound
It made, away from the muck of the land
That they had left, heroic sound
Joyous and jubilant and sure.
{excerpt}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Parts Of A World

THE BLUE BUILDINGS IN THE SUMMER AIR

I. Cotton Mather died when I was a boy. The books
He read, all day, all night and all the nights,
Had got him nowhere. There was always the doubt,
That made him preach the louder, long for a church
In which his voice would roll its cadences,
After the sermon, to quiet that mouse in the wall.

II. Over wooden Boston, the sparkling Byzantine
Was everything that Cotton Mather was
And more. Yet the eminent thunder from the mouse,
The grinding in the arches of the church,
The plaster dropping, even dripping, down,
The mouse, the moss, the woman on the shore. . . .

III. If the mouse should swallow the steeple, in its time
It was a theologian's needle, much
Too sharp for that. The shore, the sea, the sun,
Their brilliance through the lattices, crippled
The chandeliers, their morning glazes spread
In opal blobs along the walls and floor.

IV. Look down now, Cotton Mather, from the blank.
Was heaven where you thought? It must be there.
It must be where you think it is, in the light
On bed-clothes, in an apple on a plate.
It is the honey-comb of the seeing man.
It is the leaf the bird brings back to the boat.

{excerpt}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Parts Of A World

CUISINE BOURGEOISE

These days of disinheritance, we feast
On human heads. True, birds rebuild
Old nests and there is blue in the woods.
The church bells clap one night in the week.
But that's all done. It is what used to be,
As they used to lie in the grass, in the heat,
Men on green beds and women half of sun.
The words are written, though not yet said.

It is like the season when, after summer,
It is summer and it is not, it is autumn
And it is not, it is day and it is not,
As if last night's lamps continued to watch
The sky, half porcelain, preferring that
To shaking out heavy bodies in the glares
Of this present, this science, this unrecognized,

This outpost, this douce, this dumb, this dead, in which
We feast on human heads, brought in on leaves,
Crowned with the first, cold buds. On these we live,
No longer on the ancient cake of seed,
The almond and deep fruit. .......... {excerpt}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Parts Of A World

POEM WITH RHYTHMS

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. ... {excerpt}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Parts Of A World

"THE IMMENSE POETRY OF WAR"

The immense poetry of war and the poetry of a work of the imagination are two different things. In the presence of the violent reality of war, consciousness takes the place of the imagination. And consciousness of an immense war is a consciousness of fact. If that is true, it follows that the poetry of war as a consciousness of the victories and defeats of nations, is a consciousness of fact, but of heroic fact, of fact on such a scale that the mere consciousness of it affects the scale of one's thinking and constitutes a participating in the heroic.
It has been easy to say in recent times that everything tends to become real, or, rather, that everything moves in the direction of reality, that is to say, in the direction of fact. We leave fact and come back to it, come back to what we wanted fact to be, not to what it was, not to what it has too often remained. The poetry of a work of the imagination constantly illustrates the fundamental and endless struggle with fact. It goes on everywhere, even in the periods that we call peace. But in war, the desire to move in the direction of fact as we want it to be and to move quickly is overwhelming.
Nothing will ever appease this desire except a consciousness of fact as everyone is at least satisfied to have it be.
W.S.

----------


## jinjang

I really appreciated the quote "THE IMMENSE POETRY OF WAR."

We Koreans went through so many wars during our 5000 years of history. There is even a Korean word, "han" that means "sadness ingrained in our heart." If we did not have a direct experience of war, we would go through with it indirectly by our mothers and grandmothers. Grandmothers who lost all but one child would tell you how she lost her children so often that there is not much room for imagination when it comes to war. Now the Korean War Memorial reminds younger generations of our wars. I will put a war poem under Korean poems.

Thank you as always.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

OWL'S CLOVER

I. The Old Woman & The Statue

Another evening in another park,
A group of marble horses rose on wings
In the midst of a circle of trees, from which the leaves
Raced with the horses in bright hurricanes. 

II. So much the sculptor had forseen: autumn,
The sky above the plaza widening
Before the horses, clouds of bronze imposed
On clouds of gold, and green engulfing bronze,
The marble leaping in the storms of light.
So much he had devised: white forelegs taut
To the muscles' very tip for the vivid plunge,
The heads held high and gathered in a ring
At the center of the mass, the haunches low,
Contorted, staggering from the thrust against
The earth as the bodies rose on feathery wings,
Clumped carvings, circular, like blunted fans,
Arranged for phantasy to form an edge
Of crisping light along the statue's rim.
More than his muddy hand was in the manes,
More than his mind in the wings. The rotten leaves
Swirled round them in immense autumnal sounds.

III. But her he had not forseen: the bitter mind
In a flapping cloak. She walked along the paths
Of the park with chalky brow scratched over black
And black by thought that could not understand
Or, if it understood, repressed itself
Without any pity in a somnolent dream.
The golden clouds that turned to bronze, the sounds
Descending, did not touch her eye and left
Her ear unmoved. She was that tortured one,
So destitute that nothing but herself
Remained and nothing of herself except
A fear too naked for her shadow's shape.
To search for clearness all an afternoon
And without knowing, and then upon the wind
To hear the stroke of one's certain solitude,
What sound could comfort away the sudden sense?
What path could lead apart from what she was
And was to be? Could it happen to be this,
This atmosphere in which her musty mind
Lay black and full of black misshapen? Wings
And light lay deeper for her than her sight.

{long poem of five parts}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Chronology 

1934 After long hiatus, new poems ("things more or less improvised") appear in journals. Writes introduction for William Carlos Williams' COLLECTED POEMS, 1921-1931. Is made a vice-president of the Hartford.

1935 Meets and spends time with Robert Frost in Key West. Discouraged by Elsie from drinking at home, becomes connoisseur of teas; frequently joins friends for martinis at the Canoe Club in Hartford. Ronald Lane Latimer's Alcestis Press publishes limited edition of IDEAS OF ORDER in August. Begins working on poetic sequence OWL'S CLOVER.

1936 Provokes drunken fight with Ernest Hemingway while in Key West in February; breaks right hand in two places from hitting Hemingway's jaw, and is knocked down; the two make up before Stevens leaves (tells Elsie he fell down a flight of stairs). IDEAS OF ORDER published by Knopf in October, favorable reviews acknowledge Stevens as a major American poet. In fall, along with brother John, begins to support ailing brother Garrett Jr. OWL'S CLOVER published by Alcestis Press in November, reads portions of it, along with lecture "The Irrational Element in Poetry," at Harvard in December. Wins poetry prize from The Nation for "The Men That Are Falling."

----------


## quasimodo1

Stevens in a letter to Harriet Monroe, 1922... "The desire to write a long poem or two is not obsequiousness to the 

judgment of people. On the contrary, I find that prolonged attention to a single subject has the same result that 

prolonged attention to a senora has, according to the authorities. All maner of favors drop from it. Only it 

requires a skill in the varying of the serenade that occasionally makes me feel like a Guatemalan when one 

particularly wants to feel like an Italian" Continued in his next letter... "I wish that I could put everything 

else aside and amuse myself on a large scale for a while. One never gets anywhere in writinng or thinking or 

observing unless one can do long stretches at a time. Often I have let go, in the most insignificant poem, which 

scarcely serves to remind me of it, the most skyey of skyey sheets. And often when I have a real fury for 

indulgence I must stint myself."

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from The Man With The Blue Guitar

OWL'S CLOVER

III. High up in heaven as sprawling portent moves,
As if it bears all darkness in its bulk,
But this we cannot see. The shaggy top
Broods in tense meditation, constantly,
On the city, on which it leans, the people there,
Its shadow on their houses, on their walls,
Their beds, their faces drawn in distant sleep.
This is invisible. The supporting arms
Reach from the horizons, rim to rim,
While the shaggy top collects itself to do
And the shoulders run, breathing immense intent.
All this is hidden from sight.
It is the form
Of a generation that does not know itself,
Still questioning if to crush the soaring stacks.
The man below beholds the portent poised,
An image of his making, beyond the eye.
The year's dim elongations stretch below
To tumbled rock, its bright projections lie
The shallowest iris on the emptiest eye.
The future must bear within it every past,
Not least the pasts destroyed, magniloquent
Syllables, pewter on ebony, yet still
A board for bishops' grapes, the happy form
That revolution takes for connoisseurs:
The portent may itself be memory;
And memory may itself be time to come
And must be, when the portent, changed, takes on
A mask up-gathered brilliantly from the dirt,
And memory's lord is the lord of prophesy
And steps forth, priestly in severity,
Yet lord, a mask of flame, the darkest form
A wandering orb upon a path grown clear.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from The Necessary Angel
(Essays on Reality and the Imagination)

VII. THE RELATIONS BETWEEN POETRY AND PAINTING

Roger Fry concluded a note on Claude by saying that "few of us live so strenuously as never to feel a sense of nostalgia for the Saturnian reign to which Virgil and Claude can waft us." He spoke in that same note of Corot and Whistler and Chinese landscape and certainly he might just as well have spoken, in relation to Claude, of many poets, as, for example, Chenier or Wordsworth. This is simply the analogy between two different forms of poetry. It might be better to say that it is the identity of poetry revealed as between poetry in words and poetry in paint.
Poetry, however, is not limited to Virgilian landscape, nor painting to Claude. We find the poetry of mankind in the figures of the old men of Shakespeare, say, ad the old men of Rembrandt; or in the figures of Biblical women, on the hand, and of the madonnas of all Europe, on the other; and it is easy to wonder whether the poetry of children has not been created by the poetry of the Child, until one stops to think how much of the poetry of the whole world is the poetry of children, both as they are and as they have been written of and painted, as if they were the creatures of a dimension in which life and poetry are one. The poetry of humanity is, of course, to be found everywhere.
There is a universal poetry that is reflected in everything. This remark approaches the idea of Baudelaire that there exists an unascertained and fundamental aesthetic, or order, of which poetry and painting are manifestations, but of which, for that matter, sculpture or music or any other aesthetic realization would equally be a manifestation. Generalizations as expansive as these: that there is universal poetry that is reflected in everything or that there may be a fundamental aesthetic of which poetry and painting are related but dissimilar manifestations, are speculative. One is better satisfied by particulars.
No poet can have failed to recognize how often a detail, a propos or remark, in respect to painting, applies also to poetry. The truth is that there seems to exist a corpus of remarks in respect to painting, most often the remarks of painters themselves, which are a s significant to poets as to painters. ...

----------


## quasimodo1

Variations on a Summer Day
I 

Say of the gulls that they are flying 
In light blue air over dark blue sea. 

II 

A music more than a breath, but less 
Than the wind, sub-music like sub-speech, 
A repetition of unconscious things, 
Letters of rock and water, words 
Of the visible elements and of ours. 

III 

The rocks of the cliffs are the heads of dogs 
That turn into fishes and leap 
Into the sea. 

IV 

Star over Monhegan, Atlantic star, 
Lantern without a bearer, you drift, 
You, too, are drifting, in spite of your course; 
Unless in the darkness, brightly-crowned 
You are the will, if there is a will, 
Or the portent of a will that was, 
One of the portents of the will that was. 

V 

The leaves of the sea are shaken and shaken. 
There was a tree that was a father. 
We sat beneath it and sang our songs. 


VI 

It is cold to be forever young, 
To come to tragic shores and flow, 
In sapphire, round the sun-bleached stones, 
Being, for old men, time of their time. 

VII

One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls, 
When it sings. The gull sits on chimney-tops. 
He mocks the guineas, challenges 
The crow, inciting various modes. 
The sparrow requites one, without intent. 

VIII 

An exercise in viewing the world. 
On the motive! But one looks at the sea 
As one improvises, on the piano. 

IX

This cloudy world, by aid of land and sea, 
Night and day, wind and quiet, produces 
More nights, more days, more clouds, more worlds. 

X 

To change nature, not merely to change ideas,
To escape from the body, so to feel 
Those feelings that the body balks, 
The feelings of the natures round us here: 
As a boat feels when it cuts blue water. 
{from Stevens' Parts of a World, 10 of 20 stanzas, 1946}

----------


## Lady Otter

> Thank you Quasi. He did lead an interesting life. He wrote poetry as a young man but then got a job in the business world and wrote poems on the side when not busy, sort of like me at my job.  He ultimately became vice-president of his company and like you said finally made it big in the poetry world after he had retired at an old age. He did like going to Florida and many of his poems contrast the wintery north with the summery south. In one famous incident I think in the Florida Keys he got into a fist fight with Ernest Hemmingway. Unfortunate for Stevens, who was not normally a fighting man, was punched out and I think knocked out by Hemmingway. His poetry strikes me as a gentle soul. 
> 
> If anyone gets a chance to read "The Auroras of Autumn," (the poem, not the enite book of the same name) please do. It is a wonderful poem. I couldn't find it on the internet and it was a little long to type out.


Hi, Virgil - Marlow: Greetings, and where did you find this information? 

Cheers,
Winifred

----------


## Virgil

> Hi, Virgil - Marlow: Greetings, and where did you find this information? 
> 
> Cheers,
> Winifred


Winifred? Is that a long lost Winifred from another place?  :Biggrin: 

What speicifically are you referring to, the biographical info or the Hemingway fight? The biographical you can get by going to wikipedia. The fight with Hemingway i remember reading it somewhere and it stuck in my head. I can't remember where. Sorry.

----------


## Lady Otter

Greetings, Virgil - No, not lost, just very busy, although our lit forum is small and intimate: 
http://www.literaturejunction.com/bo...eds-reads.html

The info about an insurance salesman fighting Hemingway just sounded wild!!!

This looks like an interesting place, too.

----------


## Virgil

> Greetings, Virgil - No, not lost, just very busy, although our lit forum is small and intimate: 
> http://www.literaturejunction.com/bo...eds-reads.html
> 
> The info about an insurance salesman fighting Hemingway just sounded wild!!!
> 
> This looks like an interesting place, too.


It's a better place.  :Biggrin:  Stick around.  :Wink:

----------


## quasimodo1

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/bo...Stevens&st=cse

----------


## Virgil

> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/bo...Stevens&st=cse


Quasi is back.  :Banana:  Good article. Thanks Quasi.

----------


## quasimodo1

ANOTHER WEEPING WOMAN




Pour the unhappiness out



From your too bitter heart,



Which grieving does 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.



(from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose, p.19)

----------


## DanielBenoit

Wallace Stevens, of the modernists, is my most ideal poet and one whom I can understand (or relate to) the most. He is also the one I find most fascinating, simply a genius.

I'm not sure if this was posted yet or not, but it's too good to ignore:

Not Ideas about the Thing, But the Thing Itself
By Wallace Stevens

At the earliest ending of winter, 
In March, a scrawny cry from outside 
Seemed like a sound in his mind. 

He knew that he heard it, 
A bird’s cry at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six, 
No longer a battered panache above snow . . . 
It would have been outside. 

It was not from the vast ventriloquism 
Of sleep’s faded papier mâché . . .
The sun was coming from outside. 

. . . . .
[find the rest in Stevens collection of poems "The Rock"]


Though I'm not an expert on Stevens, here's a short essay I wrote for my blog:



This late poem by the philosophical poet of the imagination; Wallace Stevens, seems as an appropriate closing to his work, and yet there are some ambiguities.

Throughout this poem we encounter concepts of inside and outside, of internal and external, subjective and objective. It begins with the untimely ending of winter in March and with the uncanny sound of a “scrawny cry from outside”. Stevens then contradicts himself with the speculative “Seemed like a sound in his mind.” 

Here already we have established confusion between the real and the imagination. Stevens never deliberately establishes an explanation of the source of the cry, though he seems to take its externality for granted in the second line, but then hesitating with the acknowledging phrase seemed.

In the next stanza, the occurrence of the cry is postulated, though the time frame seems even more ambiguous with the temporal conjecture “at daylight or before”. 

In the next line, we learn that it is daybreak; a rather weary time for those waking up from the hypnotic hallucinations of sleep. Thus suggesting that the “early March wind” of the previous line and serve as an incarnate metaphor for the dreary hypnopoicacy the subjects’ early morning awakening, with all of the surreal ambiguities of the process. 

Within this stanza and the one following it, the author attempts to establish a base of reasoning for knowledge of the source. Here, there is a forceful assurance of the externality of the sun, which has ceased to be a “battered panache above snow.” This paradoxical choice of adjectives seems to suggest the sun as once a failed ambition or over-bearer, once in the chaos and confusion of flamboyant youth, it has now matured and learned to sing, rather than scorch. This then gives the sun both subjective and objective meanings: It is seen as a mirror to the psychological development of the author, but, as we will soon see, it also acts as the complete opposite; that seemingly vast and distant external truth that we can never reach. 

By the following stanza, Stevens dismisses hypnopoicacy; “It was not from the vast ventriloquism / Of sleeps faded papier mâché. . .” and makes the bold assertion that “it was coming from outside.”

Now building upon his postulations, Stevens turns his attention back to the thing-itself: “That scrawny cry[.]” Here we now find a symbolic summing up of everything said and considered in a pattern of c’s: we encounter chorister, choir, colossal, choral, all having subliminal ties to the sun. First we see that the root of the source in question is described as “a chorister whose c preceded the choir,” a chorister being the leader of a choir, who here begins the chorus in C. Stevens then enigmatically states that “[i]t was part of the colossal sun,” which in fact builds a bridge between two seemingly unrelated metaphors; that of the sun and the scrawny cry and the choir. This analogy of a chorister starting up the chorus and the scrawny cry allegedly coming from outside, is a vivid illustration of the entire epistemological problem following the reader throughout the course of the entire poem, and Steven’s life. Such a problem is that of the foundations of knowledge; how can the waking sleeper be certain of the source of the scrawny cry?

Throughout Stevens’ life he has expressed skepticism towards an answer to this question, but this poem, one of his last ones, ends on an optimistic note, which, despite its intelligence and elegancy, is, in the context of his life’s work, a bit of a cop-out, or at least the dying hopes of an old man.

The final three lines of the poem are overlooked by the overly-comforting and sentimental line “It was like / A new knowledge of reality[,]” which, outside the context of the poem (for it does work rather well within the poem), is quite weak. For, after two-thousand years of Aristotle and Plato, and four-hundred years of a slightly more reasonable Descartes and Kant, the world of philosophy and philosophical literature has grown weary and tired of such old and overused statements, to the point that to say it in Stevens’ time and certainly today, it is almost certainly an epistemological cliché.

But that is if one lets Stevens’ tonal error to allow you to neglect the most important piece of the puzzle. For despite this, Stevens does express his doubts, though much more subtly, with “Surrounded by its coral rings / Still far away,” the second line obviously possessing the maxim, being preceded by a rather mythical and fanciful, perhaps pious, image of a distant sun, which despite its truth and beauty, is still far away. This then brings us the answer to the double-meaning of the sun: it is a pun in the greatest sense of the word, for it is that vast and distant external truth which for two-thousand years no philosopher or thinker has been able to draw an epistemic bridge to, but, more importantly it is his attitude throughout his life towards this dreadful indifference, Stevens now becomes Hamlet and accepts it for what it is and recognizing the victory already won. Maybe this is his declaration of knowledge. Maybe this is his bridge to reality, or at least reality as it can be known. But more or less, Stevens has created a bridge that is not some impersonal, distant and useless form of transcendence, but rather, a bridge inward, to ourselves; for the true meaning of the pun lies not in the one that leads us to despair, but to self-realization. Stevens thus is unique among the philosophers; he is one of the only ones who could dare to utter the infinite aloofness of the sun and not sink in terror or evasion and declare it a curse or loss upon mankind, but instead declaring that the knowledge that we posses about ourselves is our victory.

----------


## Virgil

Looks like a fine essay Daniel. There is a growing number of Wallace Stevens lovers here on Lit Net. Stevens is an acquired taste, but once one understands him, at least somewhat, one just finds enormous depth and incredible poetic skill in his work. I consider him the best American poet of the 20th century. I will make a point to read that poem carefully tonight, before going to bed, and then try to come back to your essay. Thanks for all that.  :Smile:

----------


## quasimodo1

"Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom."

----------


## Barbarous

> Looks like a fine essay Daniel. There is a growing number of Wallace Stevens lovers here on Lit Net. Stevens is an acquired taste, but once one understands him, at least somewhat, one just finds enormous depth and incredible poetic skill in his work. I consider him the best American poet of the 20th century.


And I agree. I recently dived into his works for the first time, and now I'm in love! I have lived in Connecticut all my life, and to have a vision of New Haven or Hartford in a poetic light is simply amazing, it's brilliant, something to be greatly admired for. He's very meticulous, which is great, thus proving poetry, when crafted right, is above the universal language and is suppose to synthesize all aspects of reality, which I think one tends to forget.

Here's a great one I like a lot. 

*Hibiscus by the Sleeping Shore*

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 seaweeds 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 bespent and sought the flaming red

Dabbled with yellow pollen --- red as red
As the flag above the old cafe---
And roamed there all the stupid afternoon

----------


## Virgil

It's amazing. Poems I had just glossed over in the past once one is forced to focus on just shine with brilliance. That is a great poem Barbarous. I just never realized it. Look at how special this little triplet is:



> Then it was that that monstered moth
> Which had lain folded against the blue
> And the colored purple of the lazy sea,

----------


## quasimodo1

OF MODERN POETRY 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

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. ... {excerpt, from the collection, Parts of a World}

----------


## AuntShecky

Thank you, quasi, for posting the link to the NYT article about W.S. which I have saved to read later. (BTW, I was glad to see the byline-- Helen Vendler, whose name has popped up before on the LitNet in a poem written by Prince.)

Since the Wallace Stevens thread appeared on the "New Posts" today, maybe now is the appropriate time to ask a question about Mr. Stevens that I've been wondering about with all the threads discussing literature + atheism lately. So maybe Virgil, Quasimodo, DanielB, and/or any other fan of Wallace Stevens can scratch this brain itch:

When we read Wallace Stevens even the most otiose* reader (such as yours truly) can sense the recurrent theme of appreciating "things as they are" in the world that exists by transforming such things through the imagination. In the modern world, imagination is supposedly a substitute for religion. I'm thinking of these beautifully-scannable lines from "Sunday Morning":

_What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?_

and later, a denial of the Resurrection:

_A voice that cries, "The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay_."

immediately followed by a denial of a Creator:

_We live in an old chaos of the sun
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free_ 

Here's the question finally:
Is this the philosophical stance of the speaker only, or do you think it reflects the religious views (or lack of them) of Wallace Stevens himself?

Not that it diminishes the power of his work at all, but was Wallace Stevens an atheist, an agnostic, or what?


*"otiose" _cf._ an song old parody by Stan Freburg: "Otiose, Muchachos."

----------


## quasimodo1

The question has come up concerning Stevens point of view on the deity and/or religion. After reading almost all of his poetry and all of his prose, at least what is available to date, one gets the feeling that he at least did not espouse atheism. It is not clear if he was religious in a formal sense although no biographies are taken into account here. In his writing Stevens seems to make opposite points and in fact declares god the supreme leap of imagination. From his UNCOLLECTED PROSE and the essay “A Collect of Philosophy” Stevens quotes Leibniz… “We know a very small part of eternity, which is immeasurable in its extent… Nevertheless from so slight an experience we rashly judge regarding the immeasurable and eternal, like men who, having been born and brought up in prison, or perhaps in the subterranean salt mines of the Sarmatians, should think that there is no other light in the world than that of the feeble lamp which hardly suffices to direct their steps.” Within the essay Stevens quotes Bertrand Russell, Victor Hugo, Copernican theory, Nietzche, Lucretius, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Socrates, Plato, Schopenhauer, Kant and others. The least common denominator of all these philosophies is a bit of higher math I won’t attempt. Stevens writes “I suppose that some kinds of faith require logical, even though fantastic, structures of this kind to support them on the way of that ascent. The number of ways of passing between the traditional two fixed points of man’s life, that is to say, of passing from the self to God, is fixed only be the limitations of space, which is limitless. The eternal philosopher is the eternal pilgrim on that road.” God, Stevens says, is the ultimate poetic idea, and quotes Samuel Alexander’s SPACE, TIME AND DEITY to validate this point. Stevens: “The most significant deduction possible relates to the question of supremacy as between philosophy and poetry. If we say that philosophy is supreme, this means that the reason is supreme over the imagination. But is it? Does not philosophy carry us to a point at which there is nothing left except the imagination? If we rely on the imagination (or, say, intuition), to carry us beyond that point, and if the imagination succeeds in carrying us beyond that point (as in respect to the idea of God, if we conceive of the idea of God as this world’s capital idea), then the imagination is supreme, because its powers have shown themselves to be greater than the powers of the reason. … I might have cited the idea of God when I was speaking of the infinity of the world, of the infinite spaces, which terrified Pascal, the most devout of believers and, in the same abandonment to the superlative, the most profound of thinkers: and it would have been possible, in that case, to conclude what I have to say by placing here at the end a figure which would leave the question of supremacy a question too difficult to attempt to solve. In his words about the sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere, which I quoted a moment ago, we have an instance of words in which traces of the reason and traces of the imagination are mingled together.” After this passage Stevens defers to Max Planck which only underscores the ambivalence which in the end captures his view of both heaven and earth. {a few of Stevens' poems which relate to this... "God is Good, It is a Beautiful Night" -- "The Men That are Falling" -- "Cathedrals are not Built Along the Sea" -- "Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb" -- "Saint Armorer's Church from the Outside"}

----------


## AuntShecky

Thank you for such a thoughtful and enlightening answer, Quasi. Now that you've whet my appetite for Stevens's prose writings, I'm going to go back and try to locate/read this particular essay. Also, I should read a biography as well.

My instinct tells me that since W.S. was so prominent in his community, he probably did attend some kind of church services in Hartford, at least in a _pro forma_ sort of way,but his core beliefs? Hmm. Poems such as the one I cited "Sunday Morning" and "Air Without Angels"-- the operative word being "without"-- might lead one to believe that W.S. might have stuck his toe in the heathen waters and stopped short of taking the plunge. On the other hand, the theme of reconciling belief with science (the bulk of human knowledge of the time) occurs nearly everywhere in literature -- even with poets who zealously profess their religion faith: from T.S. Eliot all the way back to John "Justify God's ways to Man" Milton (whom you mentioned) and John Donne " 'Tis all in peeces, all coherence gone."

So, when you said that Stevens never blatantly expressed an atheistic belief, I tend to agree with you. But I do think he tended toward agnosticim -- not disbelief in, but "not knowing" God. But far from being comfortable in that stance, there is a constant searching, a quest for reconciliation, an all-out effort to know ("The mind can never be satisfied, never.") 

I'm also glad that you brought up an extremely important aspect of Stevens's themes: the imagination. Thanks again for your answer.

----------


## quasimodo1

"Gray Room" (1917)



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Although you sit in a room that is gray, 
Except for the silver 
Of the straw-paper, 
And pick 
At your pale white gown; 
Or lift one of the green beads 
Of your necklace, 
To let it fall; 
Or gaze at your green fan 
Printed with the red branches of a red willow; 
Or, with one finger, 
Move the leaf in the bowl-- 
The leaf that has fallen from the branches of the forsythia 
Beside you... 
What is all this? 
I know how furiously your heart is beating.

----------


## quasimodo1

From: THE NECESSARY ANGEL (Essays on Reality and the Imagination) From: Part II. The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet. Section 5. THE centuries have a way of being male. Without pretending to say whether they get this character from their good heroes or their bad ones, it is certain that they get it, in part, from their philosophers and poets. It is curious, looking back at them, to see how much of the impression that they leave has been derived from the progress of thought in their time and from the abundance of the arts, including poetry, left behind and how little of it comes from prouder and much noisier things. Thus, when we think of the seventeenth century, it is to be remarked how much of the strength of its appearance is associated with the idea that this was a time when the incredible suffered most at the hands of the credible. We think of it as a period of hard thinking. We have only their records and memories by which to recall such eras, not the sight and sound of those that lived in them preserved in an eternity of dust and dirt. When we look back at the face of the seventeenth century, it is at the rigorous face of the rigorous thinker and, say, the Miltonic image of a poet, severe and determined. In effect, what we are remembering is the rather haggard background of the incredible, the imagination without intelligence, from which a younger figure is emerging, stepping forward in the company of a muse of its own, still half-beast and somehow more than human, a kind of sister of the Minotaur. This younger figure is the intelligence that endures. It is the imagination of the son still bearing an antique imagination of the father. It is the clear intelligence of the young man still bearing the burden of the obscurities of the intelligence of the old. It is the spirit out of its own self, not out of some surrounding myth, delineating with accurate speech the complications of which it is composed. For this Aeneas, it is the past that is Anchises.

----------


## quasimodo1

From THE NECESSARY ANGEL, Part VI, Imagination as Value It does not seem possible to say of the imagination that it has a certain single characteristic which of itself gives it a certain single value as, for example, good or evil. To say such a thing would be the same thing as to say that the reason is good or evil or, for that matter, that human nature is good or evil. Since that is my first point, let us discuss it. Pascal called the imagination the mistress of the world. But as he seems never to have spoken well of it, it is certain that he did not use this phrase to speak well of it. He called it the deceptive element in man, the mistress of error and duplicity and yet not always that, since there would be an infallible measure of truth if there were an infallible measure of untruth. But being most often false, it gives no sign of its quality and indicates in the same way both the true and the false. A little farther on in his Pensees he speaks of magistrates, their red robes, their ermines in which they swathe themselves, like furry cats, the palaces in which they sit in judgment, the fleurs-de-lis, and the whole necessary, august apparatus. He says, and he enjoys his own malice in saying it, that if medical men did not have their cassocks and the mules they wore and if doctors did not have their square hats and robes four times too large, they would never have been able to dupe the world, which is incapable of resisting so genuine a display. He refers to soldiers and kings, of whom he speaks with complete caution and respect, saying that they establish themselves by force, the others par grimace. He justifies monarchs by the strength they possess and says that it is necessary to have a well-defined reason to regard like anyone else the Grand Seigneur surrounded, in his superb seraglio, by forty thousand janissaries.

----------


## quasimodo1

From THE NECESSARY ANGEL, Part VII, Section 3: One of the characteristics of modern art is that it is uncompromising. In this it resembles modern politics, and perhaps it would appear on study, including a study of the rights of man and of womens hats and dresses, that everything modern, or possibly merely new, is, in the nature of things, uncompromising. It is especially uncompromising in respect to precinct. One of the De Goncourts said that nothing in the world hears as many silly things said as a picture in a museum; and in thinking about that remark one has to bear in mind that in the days of the De Goncourts there was no such thing as a museum of modern art. A really modern definition of modern art, instead of making concessions, fixes limits which grow smaller and smaller as time passes and more often than not come to include one man alone, just as if there should be scrawled across the façade of the building in which we now are, the words Cezanne delineavit. Another characteristic of modern art is that it is plausible. It has reason for everything. Even the lack of a reason becomes a reason. Picasso expresses surprise that people should ask what a picture means and says that pictures are not intended to have meanings. This explains everything. Still another characteristic of modern art is that it is bigoted. Every painter who can be defined as a modern painter becomes, by virtue of that definition, a freeman of the world of art and hence the equal of any other modern painter. We recognize that they differ one from another but in any event they are not to be judged except by other modern painters.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Ideas Of Order

THE FADING OF THE SUN

Who can think of the sun costuming clouds
When all people are shaken
Or of night endazzled, proud,
When people awaken
And cry and cry for help?

The warm antiquity of self,
Everyone, grows suddenly cold.
The tea is bad, bread sad.
How can the world so old be so mad
That the people die?

If joy shall be without a book
It lies, themselves within themselves,
If they will look
Within themselves
And will not cry for help,

Within as pillars of the sun,
Supports of night. The tea,
The wine is good. The bread,
The meat is sweet.
And they will not die.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose
from Parts of a World

EXAMINATION OF THE HERO IN A TIME OF WAR

I. Force is my lot and not pink-clustered
Roma ni Avignon ni Leyden,
And cold, my element. Death is my
Master and, without light, I dwell. There
The snow hangs heavily on the rocks, brought
By a wind that seeks out shelter from snow. Thus
Each man spoke in winter. Yet each man spoke of
The brightness of arms, said Roma wasted
In its own dirt, said Avignon was
Peace in a time of peace, said Leyden
Was always the other mind. The brightness
Of arms, the will opposed to cold, fate
In its cavern, wings subtler than any mercy,
These were the psalter of their sybils.

II. The Got whome we serve is able to deliver
Us. Good chemistry, good common man, what
Of that angelic sword? Creature of 
Ten times ten times dynamite, convulsive
Angel, convulsive shatterer, gun,
Click, click, the Got whom we serve is able,
Still, still to deliver us, still magic,
Still moving yet motionless in smoke, still
One with us, in the heaved-up noise, still
Captain, the man of skill, the expert
Leader, the creator of bursting color
And rainbow sortilege, the savage weapon
Against enemies, against the prester,
Presto, whose whispers prickle the spirit.

{excerpt, two of sixteen parts}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Transport to Summer (1947)

CERTAIN PHENOMENA OF SOUND

I. The cricket in the telephone is still.
A geranium withers on the window-sill.

Cat's milk is dry in the saucer. Sunday song
Comes from the beating of the locust's wings,

That do not beat by pain, but calendar,
Nor mediate the world as it goes round.

Someone has left for a ride in a balloon
Or in a bubble examines the bubble of air.

The room is emptier than nothingness.
Yet a spider spins in the left shoe under the bed--

And old John Rocket dozes on his pillow.
It is safe to sleep to a sound that the time brings back.

II. So you're home again, Redwood Roamer, and ready
To feast . . . .Slice the mango, Naaman, and dress it

With white wine, sugar and lime juice. Then bring it,
After we've drunk the Moselle, to the thickest shade

Of the garden. We must prepare to hear the Roamer's
Story . . . .The sound of that slick sonata,

Finding its way from the house, makes music seem
To be a nature, a place in which itself

Is that which produces everything else, in which
The Roamer is a voice taller than the redwoods,

Engaged in the most prolific narrative,
A sound producing the things that are spoken.

{excerpt, 2 of 3 parts}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from The Rock

LEBENSWEISHEISPIELEREI

Weaker and weaker, the sunlight falls
In the afternoon. The proud and the strong
Have departed.

Those that are left are the unaccomplished,
The finally human,
Natives of a dwindled sphere.

Their indigence is an indigence
That is an indigence of the light,
A stellar pallor that hangs on the threads.

Little by little, the poverty
Of autumnal space becomes
A look, a few words spoken.

Each person completely touches us
With what he is and as he is,
In the stale grandeur of annihilation.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Uncollected Poems

PHASES

"La justice sans force est contredite, parce qu'il y a toujours
des mechants; la force sans la justice est accusee'" --Pascal

I. There was heaven,
Full of Raphael's costumes;
And earth,
A thing of shadows,
Stiff as stone,
Where Time, in fitful turns,
Resumes
His own. . . . .

A dead hand tapped the drum
An old voice cried out, "Come!"
We were obedient and dumb.

II. There's a little square in Paris,
Waiting until we pass.
They sit idly there,
They sip the glass.

There's a cab-horse at the corner,
There's rain. The season grieves.
It was silver once,
And green with leaves.

There's a parrot in a window,
Will see us on parade,
Hear the loud drums roll--
And serenade.

III. This was the salty taste of glory,
That it was not
Like Agamemnon's story.
Only, an eyeball in the mud,
And Hopkins,
Flat and pale and gory!

IV. But the bugles, in the night,
Were wings that bore
To where our comfort was;

Arabesques of candle beams,
Winding
Through our heavy dreams;

Winds that blew
Where the bending iris grew;

Birds of intermitted bliss,
Singing in the night's abyss;

Vines with yellow fruit,
That fell
Along the walls
That bordered Hell. {4 of 11 parts, 1914}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Uncollected Poems

QUATRAIN

He sought the music of the distant spheres
By night, upon an empty plain, apart;
Nor knew they hid their singing all the years
Within the keeping of his human heart.

{1900}

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from The Notebooks

MATERIA POETICA

I. Merit in poets is as boring as merit in people.
II. It is life that one is trying to get at in poetry.
III. The poet confers his identity on the reader. He cannot do this if he intrudes personally.
IV. Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
V. Collecting poetry from one's experience as one goes along is not the same thing as merely writing poetry.
VI. The relation of art to life is of the first importance especially in a skeptical age since, in the absence of a belief in God, the mind turns to its own creations and examines them, not alone from the aesthetic point of view, but for what they reveal, for what they validate and invalidate, for the support that they give.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Parts of a World

THE POEMS OF OUR CLIMATE

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.

----------


## Virgil

I don't know "The Poems of our Climate" but how wonderful. I just love that Stevens diction.  :Smile:

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Late Poems 

AS AT A THEATRE

Another sunlight might make another world,
Green, more or less, in green and blue in blue,
Like taste distasting the first fruit of a vine,
Like an eye too young to grapple its primitive,
Like the artifice of a new reality,
Like the chromatic calendar of time to come.

It might be the candle of another being,
Ragged in unkempt perceptions, that stands
And meditates an image of itself,
Studies and shapes a tallowy image, swarmed
With slight, prismatic reeks not recollected,
A bubble without a wall on which to hang.

The curtains, when pulled, might show another whole,
An azure outre-terre, oranged and rosed,
At the elbow of Copernicus, a sphere,
A universe without life's limp and lack,
Philosophers' end. . . .What difference would it make,
So long as the mind, for once, fulfilled itself?

----------


## quasimodo1

"The Snowman" --- http://www.online-literature.com/for...ead.php?t=4124

----------


## Dinkleberry2010

xxxxx

----------


## Virgil

> It's amazing to me that such a wonderful and original poet as Wallace Stevens should be so relatively unknown and underrated.


Jermac, he's not really unkonwn and not underrated. He's generally regarded as the top American poet of the 20th century. I agree though, he's not a household name.

----------


## Dinkleberry2010

That's why I included the word "relatively." Wallace Stevens generally doesn't really enter into a discussion of the great American poets of the twentieth century. Personally, I think he was one of the great American poets, but I dare say that if you took a hundred people who were even remotely interested in poetry and asked them who were the great American poets of the twentieth century, ten of them might include Wallace Stevens; ninety of them would not mention him.

----------


## Virgil

Sadly you're right.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Uncollected Poems

MANDOLIN AND LIQUEURS

La-la! The cat is in the violets
And the awnings are let down.
The cat should not be where she is
And the awnings are too brown,
Emphatically so.

If awnings were celeste and gay,
Iris and orange, crimson and green,
Blue and vermillion, purple and white,
And not this tinsmith's galaxy,
Things would be different.

The sun is gold, the moon is silver.
There must be a planet that is copper
And in whose light the roses
Would have a most singular appearance,
Or nearly so.

I love to sit and read the Telegraph,
That vast confect of telegrams,
And to find how much that really matters
Does not really matter
At all.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Transport to Summer

DEBRIS OF LIFE AND MIND

There is so little that is close and warm.
It is as if we were never children.

Sit in the room. It is true in the moonlight
That it is as if we had never been young.

We ought not to be awake. It is from this
That a bright red woman will be rising

And, standing in violent golds, will brush her hair.
She will speak thoughtfully the words of a line.

She will think about them not quite able to sing.
Besides, when the sky is so blue, things sing themselves,

Even for her, already for her. She will listen
And feel that her color is a meditation,

The most gay and yet not so gay as it was.
Stay here. Speak of familiar things a while.

----------


## Virgil

Ooh, I love those last sentences:



> ...She will listen
> And feel that her color is a meditation,
> 
> The most gay and yet not so gay as it was.
> Stay here. Speak of familiar things a while.


Hey Quasi. Nice to see you back.  :Smile:

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Poems Added to Harmonium

THE DEATH OF A SOLDIER

Life contracts and death is expected,
As in a season of autumn.
The soldier falls.

He does not become a three-days personage,
Imposing hi separation,
Calling for pomp.

Death is absolute and without memorial,
As in a season of autumn,
When the wind stops,

When the wind stops and, over the heavens,
The clouds go, nevertheless,
In their direction.

----------


## Virgil

> from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
> 
> from Poems Added to Harmonium
> 
> THE DEATH OF A SOLDIER
> 
> Life contracts and death is expected,
> As in a season of autumn.
> The soldier falls.
> ...


That's a great one! Thanks Quasi. I've never seen it before.

----------


## armen_r10

> Jermac, he's not really unkonwn and not underrated. He's generally regarded as the top American poet of the 20th century. I agree though, he's not a household name.


Well, I guess Stevens will eventually come to get the reputation and popularity he deserves, in part thanks to Mr. Bloom, who has been jeering at Eliot and Pound and Williams whenever he can (that knucklehead!)

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Letters

TO RONALD LANE LATIMER
{November 26, 1935}

Dear Mr. Latimer: 
The music of poetry which creates its own fictions is one of the "sisterhood of the living dead". It is a muse; all of the muses are of that sisterhood. But then I cannot say, at this distance of time, that I specifically meant the muses; this is just an explanation. I don't think that I meant anything definitely except all the things that live in memory and imagination.
Titles with me are, of course, of the highest importance. Some years ago a student of Wesleyan came up to the office. Apparently he had been given the job of writing a paper on Harmonium. He was under the impression that there was no relation whatever between the titles and the poems. Possibly the relation is not as direct and as literal as it ought to be. Very often the title occurs to me before anything else occurs to me. This is not uncommon; I knew a man in New York who ought to know who once told me that many more people have written the first chapters of novels than have written the rest of them, and that still more people have given their novels titles without having given them any bodies.
When you ask about a pattern of metaphors you are asking about the sort of thing with which one constantly experiments. For instance, I am very much afraid that what you like in my poetry is just the sort of thing that you ought not to like: say, its music or color. If that is true, then an appropriate experiment would be to write poetry without music and without color.* But so many of these experiments come to nothing. If they were highly successful, well and good, but they so rarely are.
I suppose that the explanation for the bursts of freedom is nothing more than this: that when one is thinking one's way the pattern becomes small and complex, but when one has reached a point and finds it possible to move emotionally one goes ahead rapidly. One of the most difficult things in writing poetry is to know what one's subject is. Most people know what it is and do not write poetry, because they are so conscious of that one thing. One's subject is always poetry, or should be. But sometimes it becomes a little more definite and fluid, and then the thing goes ahead rapidly.
Yours very truly, WS

*In music, this would give you Schonberg.

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from The Rock

THE IRISH CLIFFS OF MOHER

Who is my father in this world, in this house,
At the spirit's base?
 
My father's father, his father's father, his--
Shadows like winds

Go back to a parent before thought, before speech,
At the head of the past.

They go to the cliffs of Moher rising out of the mist,
Above the real,

Rising out of present time and place, above
The wet, green grass.

This is not landscape, full of the somnambulations
Of poetry

And the sea. This is my father or, maybe,
It is as he was,

A likeness, one of the race of fathers: earth
And sea and air.

----------


## Janine

I have an older book of Wallace Stevens around my house somewhere. I think it was from my college days. Anyway, I never took to his poetry until I read the ones presented here. Thanks for posting them, *quasi.* I really loved the last 3 or 4. I will have to read the whole thread. Some beautiful flowing poetry. I'm impressed!

----------


## Virgil

> I have an older book of Wallace Stevens around my house somewhere. I think it was from my college days. Anyway, I never took to his poetry until I read the ones presented here. Thanks for posting them, *quasi.* I really loved the last 3 or 4. I will have to read the whole thread. Some beautiful flowing poetry. I'm impressed!


Janine, Stevens is a bit of an acquired taste. But once you see his art, you realize what a master he is.

----------


## quasimodo1

Stevens, an acquired taste for sure, and some patience is required but he's not as inaccessible as some new readers might expect. "To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game; the ideal is to suggest." 
Wallace Stevens (1879 - 1955)

----------


## quasimodo1

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Transport to Summer

HUMAN ARRANGEMENT

Place-bound and time-bound in evening rain
And bound by a sound which does not change,

Except that it begins and ends,
Begins again and ends again--

Rain without change within or from
Without. In this place and in this time

And in this sound, which do not change,
In which the rain is all one thing,

In the sky, an imagined, wooden chair
Is the clear-point of an edifice,

Forced up from nothing, evening's chair,
Blue-strutted curule, true-- unreal,

The center of transformations that
Transform for transformation's self,

In a glitter that is a life, a gold
That is a being, a will, a fate.

----------


## quasimodo1

"Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!" 
Wallace Stevens

----------


## quasimodo1

THE EMPEROR OF ICE-CREAM

by: Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

CALL the roller of big cigars, 
The muscular one, and bid him whip 
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds. 
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress 
As they are used to wear, and let the boys 
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers. 
Let be be finale of seem. 
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. 

Take from the dresser of deal, 
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet 
On which she embroidered fantails once 
And spread it so as to cover her face. 
If her horny feet protrude, they come 
To show how cold she is, and dumb. 
Let the lamp affix its beam. 
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

----------


## quasimodo1

Gray Room" (1917)

Although you sit in a room that is gray, 
Except for the silver 
Of the straw-paper, 
And pick 
At your pale white gown; 
Or lift one of the green beads 
Of your necklace, 
To let it fall; 
Or gaze at your green fan 
Printed with the red branches of a red willow; 
Or, with one finger, 
Move the leaf in the bowl-- 
The leaf that has fallen from the branches of the forsythia 
Beside you... 
What is all this? 
I know how furiously your heart is beating. 

online source: http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilre...gray-room.html

----------


## Virgil

Hey, that must be a really early poem if it's written in 1917. I really like that one. It's as goods as his mature poems.

"THE EMPEROR OF ICE-CREAM" is one of those classic poems. It is so ideosyncratic Stevens that no one but no one else could have written it.

----------


## stlukesguild

"THE EMPEROR OF ICE-CREAM" is one of those classic poems. It is so ideosyncratic Stevens that no one but no one else could have written it.

I still remember my first experience with Stevens. His poems largely left me baffled... far beyond anything even in T.S. Eliot... but _The Emperor of Ice Cream_... this poem immediately resonated with me to such an extent that I knew I'd need to delve deeper into this poet's oeuvre.

----------


## quasimodo1

A Postcard from the Volcano 


Children picking up our bones 
Will never know that these were once 
As quick as foxes on the hill; 


And that in autumn, when the grapes 
Made sharp air sharper by their smell 
These had a being, breathing frost; 


And least will guess that with our bones 
We left much more, left what still is 
The look of things, left what we felt 


At what we saw. The spring clouds blow 
Above the shuttered mansion house, 
Beyond our gate and the windy sky 


Cries out a literate despair. 
We knew for long the mansion's look 
And what we said of it became 


A part of what it is ... Children, 
Still weaving budded aureoles, 
Will speak our speech and never know, 


Will say of the mansion that it seems 
As if he that lived there left behind 
A spirit storming in blank walls, 


A dirty house in a gutted world, 
A tatter of shadows peaked to white, 
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

----------


## Virgil

What a powerful poem Quasi. I would not have guessed that to be Stevens by the themes but one can certainly see his style. I'm very much haunted by this one. Such an expression of despair.

What marvelous poetry:




> And that in autumn, when the grapes 
> Made sharp air sharper by their smell 
> These had a being, breathing frost;


and




> ...Children, 
> Still weaving budded aureoles, 
> Will speak our speech and never know
> 
> Will say of the mansion that it seems 
> As if he that lived there left behind 
> A spirit storming in blank walls, 
> 
> 
> ...


"A dirty house in a gutted world" - What a phrase!

But why "_literate_ despair?" Any thoughts?

----------


## quasimodo1

"The spring clouds blow 
Above the shuttered mansion house, 
Beyond our gate and the windy sky 


Cries out a literate despair." Virgil: The poem is stunning and the last line has that haunting ending Stevens does with consumate skill. The "literate despair" to my understanding is not literate in the academic sense but more likely meaning litoral or real. Many of Stevens' poems have poetic sentence structure although he weaves his meaning in such a way as to put the reader off the scent of subject, verb, object. Literate's other meaning just adds to the irony. q1

----------


## Virgil

Oh I think you're right Quasi. Thanks

----------


## quasimodo1

Farewell to Florida 


I 
Go on, high ship, since now, upon the shore, 
The snake has left its skin upon the floor. 
Key West sank downward under massive clouds 
And silvers and greens spread over the sea. The moon 
Is at the mast-head and the past is dead. 
Her mind will never speak to me again. 
I am free. High above the mast the moon 
Rides clear of her mind and the waves make a refrain 
Of this: that the snake has shed its skin upon 
The floor. Go on through the darkness. The waves fly back 


II 
Her mind had bound me round. The palms were hot 
As if I lived in ashen ground, as if 
The leaves in which the wind kept up its sound 
From my North of cold whistled in a sepulchral South, 
Her South of pine and coral and coraline sea, 
Her home, not mine, in the ever-freshened Keys, 
Her days, her oceanic nights, calling 
For music, for whisperings from the reefs. 
How content I shall be in the North to which I sail 
And to feel sure and to forget the bleaching sand ... 


III 
I hated the weathery yawl from which the pools 
Disclosed the sea floor and the wilderness 
Of waving weeds. I hated the vivid blooms 
Curled over the shadowless hut, the rust and bones, 
The trees likes bones and the leaves half sand, half sun. 
To stand here on the deck in the dark and say 
Farewell and to know that that land is forever gone 
And that she will not follow in any word 
Or look, nor ever again in thought, except 
That I loved her once ... Farewell. Go on, high ship. 


IV 
My North is leafless and lies in a wintry slime 
Both of men and clouds, a slime of men in crowds. 
The men are moving as the water moves, 
This darkened water cloven by sullen swells 
Against your sides, then shoving and slithering, 
The darkness shattered, turbulent with foam. 
To be free again, to return to the violent mind 
That is their mind, these men, and that will bind 
Me round, carry me, misty deck, carry me 
To the cold, go on, high ship, go on, plunge on.

----------


## quasimodo1

A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts 


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 peacefullest time, 
Without that monument of cat, 
The cat forgotten in the moon; 


And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light, 
In which everything is meant for you 
And nothing need be explained; 


Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself; 
And east rushes west and west rushes down, 
No matter. The grass is full 


And full of yourself. The trees around are for you, 
The whole of the wideness of night is for you, 
A self that touches all edges, 


You become a self that fills the four corners of night. 
The red cat hides away in the fur-light 
And there you are humped high, humped up, 


You are humped higher and higher, black as stone— 
You sit with your head like a carving in space 
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.

----------


## Virgil

> A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts


Oh that's one of my favorites. Stevens at his playful best.  :Smile: 




> To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time, 
> Without that monument of cat, 
> The cat forgotten in the moon; 
> 
> 
> And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light, 
> In which everything is meant for you 
> And nothing need be explained;


I love that!

----------


## quasimodo1

Ariel was glad he had written his poems.
They were of a remembered time
Or of something seen that he liked.

Other makings of the sun
Were waste and welter
And the ripe shrub writhed.

His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of his self,
Were no less makings of the sun.

It was not important that they survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,

Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.

----------


## quasimodo1

MAN CARRYING THING 



The poem must resist the intelligence 
Almost successfully. Illustration: 

A brune figure in winter evening resists 
Identity. The thing he carries resists 

The most necessitous sense. Accept them, then,
As secondary (parts not quite perceived 

Of the obvious whole, uncertain particles 
Of the certain solid, the primary free from doubt,

Things floating like the first hundred flakes of snow 
Out of a storm we must endure all night, 

Out of a storm of secondary things), 
A horror of thoughts that suddenly are real. 

We must endure our thoughts all night, until 
The bright obvious stands motionless in cold. 



http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20445

----------


## quasimodo1

Two Figures in Dense Violet Light 



I had as lief be embraced by the portier of the hotel
As to get no more from the moonlight
Than your moist hand.

Be the voice of the night and Florida in my ear.
Use dasky words and dusky images.
Darken your speech.

Speak, even, as if I did not hear you speaking,
But spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts,
Conceiving words,

As the night conceives the sea-sound in silence,
And out of the droning sibilants makes
A serenade.

Say, puerile, that the buzzards crouch on the ridge-pole
and sleep with one eye watching the stars fall
Beyond Key West.

Say that the palms are clear in the total blue.
Are clear and are obscure; that it is night;
That the moon shines.

----------


## ennison

I've never taken to the cove. Pessimistic. Oh certainly clever and a stripped down beauty but not my cup-of-tea. But then again it's over twenty years since I read any serious quantity of his verse.

----------


## quasimodo1

THE NECESSARY ANGEL {Essays on Reality and the Imagination} I am the necessary angel of earth, Since, in my sight, you see the earth again. from THE AURORAS OF AUTUMN .INTRODUCTION.One function of the poet at any time is to discover by his own thought and feeling what seems to him to be poetry at that time. Ordinarily he will disclose what he finds in his own poetry by way of the poetry itself. He exercises this function most often without being conscious of it, so that the disclosures in his poetry, while they define what seems to him to be poetry, are disclosures of poetry, not disclosures of definitions of poetry. The papers that have been collected here are intended to be contributions to the theory of poetry and it is this and this alone that binds them together. Obviously, they are not the carefully organized notes of systematic study. Except for the paper on one of Miss Moores poems, they were written to be spoken and this affects their character. While all of them were published, after they had served the purposes for which they were written, I had no thought of making a book out of them. Several years ago, when this was suggested, I felt that their occasional and more or less informal character made it desirable at least to postpone coming to a decision. The theory of poetry, as a subject of study, was something with respect to which I had nothing but the most ardent ambitions. It seemed to me to be one of the great subjects of study. I do not mean one more ARS POETICA having to do, say, with the techniques of poetry and perhaps with its history. I mean poetry itself, the naked poem, the imagination manifesting itself in its domination of words. The few pages that follow are, now, alas! The only realization possible to me of those excited ambitions. 
{excerpt}

----------


## Virgil

I am the necessary angel of earth, Since, in my sight, you see the earth again.

That's one of my all time favorite quotes. I absolutely love that quote. I have that book of essays and I have read one or two.

----------


## quasimodo1

"The theory of poetry, as a subject of study, was something with respect to which I had nothing but the most ardent ambitions. It seemed to me to be one of the great subjects of study. I do not mean one more ARS POETICA having to do, say, with the techniques of poetry and perhaps with its history. I mean poetry itself, the naked poem, 'the imagination manifesting itself in its domination of words.'" Virgil: This last sentence also stands out for me as the closest thing to a terse definition of poetry. q1

----------


## Virgil

> "The theory of poetry, as a subject of study, was something with respect to which I had nothing but the most ardent ambitions. It seemed to me to be one of the great subjects of study. I do not mean one more ARS POETICA having to do, say, with the techniques of poetry and perhaps with its history. I mean poetry itself, the naked poem, 'the imagination manifesting itself in its domination of words.'" Virgil: This last sentence also stands out for me as the closest thing to a terse definition of poetry. q1


You're right. I'm not sure I've ever seen that quote before, but if I did shame on me for not remembering. Very good Quasi. Thanks as always.  :Smile:

----------


## quasimodo1

…{continued from above post} … But to their extent they are a realization; and it is because that is true, that is to say, because they seem to me to communicate to the reader the portent of the subject, if nothing move, that they are presented here. Only recently I spoke of certain poetic acts as subtilizing experience and varying appearance: “The real is constantly being engulfed in the unreal… [Poetry] is an illumination of a surface, the movement of a self in the rock.” A force capable of bringing about fluctuations in reality in words free from mysticism is a force independent of one’s desire to elevate it. It needs no elevation. It has only to be presented, as best one is able to present it. These are not pages of criticism nor of philosophy. Nor are they merely literary pages. They are pages that have to do with one of the enlargements of life. They are without pretence beyond my desire to add my own definition in poetry’s many existing definitions. …WALLACE STEVENS

----------


## quasimodo1

Wallace Stevens: from UNCOLLECTED PROSE…  RAOUL DUFY Raoul Dufy’s sudden death in March, 1953, was like a rip in the rainbow. His work for the lithographs in the present portfolio had been completed. The collection was far advanced toward its appearance. It was based on his largest and most significant fresco. It had engaged him seriously for a long period of time. He regarded it as the typical and sympathetic undertaking and he looked forward to its publication as a kind of radiant realization. But this realization of the spirit of the artist was destined to be a realization on the part of others after his death. The work reveals Dufy, on a scale beyond comparison with anything else he has done, exploiting, as artist, the world we know and the world of what we know, which are always the same. It is a surface of prose changeable with the luster of poetry and thought. … {excerpt}
{ http://www.dufy.com/ }

----------


## stlukesguild

Raoul Dufy was a rather minor artist from the turn of the century. He merged the brilliant colors of Matisse (without his formal innovations) with the fluidity and sparkle of Chagall, and something of the _plein air_ picture postcards views of Paris and the south of France. He is something of a light-weight, populist hawking idealized images of Paris, French Hotel interiors, still life, artist's studios, and boat filled harbors in Nice or Cannes... imagery all popularized by the great French Modernists... especially Matisse. While he is not a major figure in the history of art, his work is not without a degree of charm. It is ever joyful... full of sparkle and color... with an ever exquisite light touch that could only come from a Frenchman:

----------


## quasimodo1

From STEVENS, COLLECTED POETRY & PROSE: from THE NECESSARY ANGEL: from RELATIONS BETWEEN POETRY & PAINTING: ________________________________ This reality is, also, the momentous world of poetry. Its instantaneities are the familiar intelligence of poets, although it has been the intelligence of another ambiance. Simone Weil in LA PESANTEUR ET LA GRACE has a chapter on what she calls decreation. She says that decreation is making pass from the created to the uncreated, but that destruction is making pass from the created to nothingness. Modern reality is a reality of decreation, in which our revelations are not the revelations of belief, but the precious portents of our own powers. The greatest truth we could hope to discover, in whatever field we discovered it, is that mans truth is the final resolution of everything. Poets and painters alike today make that assumption and this is what gives them the validity and serious dignity that become them as among those that seek wisdom, seek understanding. I am elevating this a little, because I am trying to generalize and because it is incredible that one should speak of the aspirations of the last two or three generations without a degree of elevation. Sometimes it seems the other way. Sometimes we hear it said that in the eighteenth century there were no poets and that the painters --- Chardin, Fragonard, Watteau -- were elegants and nothing more; that in the nineteenth century the last great poet was the man that looked most like one and that the whole Pierian sodality had better have been fed to the dogs. It occasionally seems like that today. It must seem as it may. In the logic of events, the only wrong would be to attempt to falsify the logic, to be disloyal to the truth. It would be tragic not to realize the extent of mans dependence on them has been questioned, as if the discipline of the arts was in no sense a moral discipline. We have not to discuss that here. It is enough to have brought poetry and painting into relation as sources of our present conception of reality, without asserting that they are the sole sources, and as supports of a kind of life, which it seems to be worth living, with their support, even if doing so is only a stage in the endless study of an existence, which is the heroic subject of all study. {excerpt and ending of the essay}

----------


## quasimodo1



----------


## Virgil

> 


Oh is that what she looked like. I wonder what year that was taken?

----------


## quasimodo1

--- http://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/06/ob...er-s-work.html

----------


## Virgil

Wow, Quasi. Are all these pictures now on the internet? Cool.

----------


## quasimodo1



----------


## Virgil

Stevens is such a big man compared to Frost. I wonder how tall Stevens was. Or was Frost short?  :FRlol:

----------


## quasimodo1

FROM STEVENS, COLLECTED POETRY & PROSE
From uncollected poems: SECRET MAN	

The sounds of rain on the roof
Are like the sound of doves.
It is long since there have been doves
On any house of mine.
It is better for me
In the rushes of autumn wind
To embrace autumn, without turning
To remember summer.
Besides, the world is a tower.
Its winds are blue.
The rain falls at its base,
Summers sink from it.
The doves will fly round.
When morning comes
The high clouds will move,
Nobly as autumn moves.
The man of autumn,
Behind its melancholy mask,
Will laugh in the brown grass,
Will shout from the tower’s rim.

----------


## DanielBenoit

At the earliest ending of winter, 
In March, a scrawny cry from outside 
Seemed like a sound in his mind. 

He knew that he heard it, 
A bird's cry at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six, 
No longer a battered panache above snow . . . 
It would have been outside. 

continued at http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20447

----------


## quasimodo1

The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad

The time of year has grown indifferent.
Mildew of summer and the deepening snow
Are both alike in the routine I know.
I am too dumbly in my being pent. 
The wind attendant on the solstices
Blows on the shutters of the metropoles,
Stirring no poet in his sleep, and tolls
The grand ideas of the villages. 

The malady of the quotidian...
Perhaps, if summer ever came to rest
And lengthened, deepened, comforted, caressed
Through days like oceans in obsidian 

Horizons full of night's midsummer blaze;
Perhaps, if winter once could penetrate
Through all its purples to the final slate,
Persisting bleakly in an icy haze; 

One might in turn become less diffident---
Out of such mildew plucking neater mould
And spouting new orations of the cold.
One might. One might. But time will not relent.

----------


## quasimodo1

CONTINUAL CONVERSATION WITH A SILENT MAN
The old brown hen and the old blue sky,
Between the two we live and die--
The broken cartwheel on the hill.

As if, in the presence of the sea,
We dried our nets and mended sail
And talked of never-ending things,

Of the never-ending storm of will,
One will and many wills, and the wind,
Of many meanings in the leaves,

Brought down to one below the eaves,
Link, of that tempest, to the farm,
The chain of the turquoise hen and sky

And the wheel that broke as the cart went by.
It is not a voice that is under the eaves.
It is not speech, the sound we hear

In this conversation, but the sound
Of things and their motion: the other man,
A turquoise monster moving round.

----------


## quasimodo1

From Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose. From Uncollected Prose. RUBBINGS OF REALITY If a man writes a little every day, as Williams does, or used to do,it may be that he is merely practicing in order to make perfect. On the other hand he may be practicing in order to get at his subject. If his subject is, say, a sense, a mood, an integration, and if his representation is faint or obscure, and if he practices in order to overcome his faintness or obscurity, what he really does is to bring, or try to bring, his subject into that degree of focus at which he sees it, for a moment, as it is and at which he is able to represent it in exact definition. A man does not spend his life doing this sort of thing unless doing it is something he needs to do. One of the sanctions of the writer is that he is doing something that he needs to do. The need is not the desire to accomplish through writing something not incidental to the writing itself. Thus a political or religious writer writes for political or religious reasons. Williams writes, I think, in order to write. He needs to write. What is the nature of this need? What does a man do when he delineates the images of reality? Obviously, the need is a general need and the activity a general activity. It is of our nature that we proceed from the chromatic to the clear, from the unknown to the known. Accordingly the writer who practices iin order to make perfect is really practicing to get at his subject and, in that exercise, is participating in a universal activity. He is obeying his nature. Imagism (as one of Williams' many involvements, however long ago) is not something superficial. It obeys an instinct. Moreover, imagism iis an ancient phase of poetry. It is something permanent. Williams is a writer to whome writing is the grinding of a glass, the polishing of a lens by means of which he hopes to be able to see clearly. His delineations are trials. They are rubbings of reality. ..... This is an intellectual "tenue". It is easy to see how underneath the chaos of life today and at the bottom of all the disintegrations there is the need to see, to understand: and, in so far as one is not completely baffled, to re-create. This is not emotional. It springs from the felief that we have only our own iintelligence on which torely. This manifests itself in many ways, in every living art as in every living phase of politics or science. If we could suddenly re-make the world on the bais of our own intelligence, see it clearly and represent it without faintness or obscurity, Williiams' poems would have a place there. {Briarcliff Quarterly, October 1946, excerpt}

----------


## quasimodo1

Nuances of a Theme by Williams

It's a strange courage 
you give me, ancient star: 
William Carlos Williams

Shine alone in the sunrise 
toward which you lend no part! 
William Carlos Williams

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.

----------


## quasimodo1

...from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose. ...from Uncolllected Prose. ON "THE EMPEROR 

OF ICE CREAM" --- I think I should select from my poems as my favorite "The Emporer of 

Ice Cream". This wears a deliberately commonnplace costume, and yet seems to me to contain 

something of the essential gaudiness of poetry; that is the reason why I like it. I do 

not remember the circumstances under which this poem was written, unless this means the 

state of mind from which it came. I dislike niggling, and like letting myself go. Poems 

of this sort are the pleasantest on which to look back, because they seem to remain 

fresher than others. This represented what was in my mind at the moment, with the least 

possible manipulation. {Fifty Poets: An American Auto-Anthology, 1933}

----------


## quasimodo1

From Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose. from Uncollected Prose. ON RECEIVING THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 

FOR POETRY: When a poet comes out of his cavern or wherever it is that he secretes hinmself, even if 

it is a law office or a place of business, and suddenly finds himself confronted by a great crowd of 

people, the last thing in the world that enters his mind is to thank those who are responsible for his 

being there. And this is paricularly true if the crowd has come not so much on his account as on 

account, say, of a novelist or some other figure, who is, as a rule, better known to it than any poet. 

And yet the crowd will have come to some extent on his account, because the poet exercises a power 

over life, by expressing life, just as the novelist does; and I am by no means sure that the poet 

does not exercise this power at more levels than the novelist, with more colors, with as much 

perception and certainly with more music, not merely verbal music, but the rhythms and tones of human 

feeling. I think then that the first thing that poet should do as he comes out of his cavern is to 

put on the strength of his particular calling as a poet, to address himself to what Rilke called the 

mighty burden of poetry and to have the courage to say that, in his sense of things, the significance 

of poetry is second to none. we can never have great poetry unless we believe that poetry serves 

great ends. We must recognize this from the beginning so that it will affect everything we do. Our 

belief in the greatness of poetry is a vital part of its greatness, an implicit part of the belief of 

others in its greatness. Now, at seventy-five, as I look back on the little that I have done and as I 

turn the pages of my own poems gathered together in a single volume, I have no choice except to 

paraphrase the old verse that says that it is not what I am, but what I aspired to be that comforts 

me. It is not what I have written that consitutes my true poems, the uncollected poems which I have 

not had the strength to realize. Humble as my actual contribution to poetry may be and homever 

modest my experience of poetry has been, I have learned through that contribution and by the aid of 

that experience of the greatness that lay beyond, the power over the mind that lies in the mind 

itself, the incalculable expanse of the imagination as it reflects itself in us and about us. This is 

the precious scope which every poet seeks to achieve as best he can. Awards and honors have nothing 

to do with this. The role of awards and honors in the life of a poet is simply to bring him back to 

reality, to remind him, in the midst of all his hopes for poetry, that he lives in the world of 

Darwin and not in the world of PLato. He does not accept them as a true satisfaction because there is 

no true satisfaction for the poet but poetry itself. He accepts them not for their immediate meaning 

but as symbols and it is their secondary value that makes him the richer for having recieved them. 

And having said this much, I feel better able to express my obligation to this body and to the judges 

for the privilege of being herwe today and for the honor they have done me and to say that I am 

grateful to them and thank them. And I am grateful to mhy publisher, Alfred Knopf, and his staff, 

and thank them for the notably handsome job they made of the COLLECTED POEMS. {January 25, 1955}

----------


## quasimodo1

Excerpt from Secretaries of the Moon

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Havana]
Oct. 20, 1945
My very dear friend: 

How opportune the arrival of your charming letter! I had just taken a wonderful bath ( it is 12 :40 morning, bright skies of azure tinges and a subtle breeze that spells perhaps a great hurricane or then a nice afternoon at the ball game. Yes, I go to such things: today the Almendares plays again the Habana in the inaugural game. Oh, it is silly but I find the people who go to this affair, a baseball game, amusing and really more interesting to talk to than most of the so-called clever fellows, of course I do not speak of really intelligent people like Lezama or Mariano ) and this bath was the first bath after four days with an acute attack of sinusitis which makes me very miserable. For that reason I have deserted Villa Olga. I had no one to take care of poor Pepe there. Pompilio is very indifferent in these matters and Lucera, well, she just makes funny faces and goes on chewing her pensive leaves of grass. I was delighted to read the little discourse on my animals (they are not worthy of such elegant attention ) and most assured by your opinion on the ignorant man. I say "assured" because I have many such ignorant men for friends and I have been criticized bitterly by some of my literary friends who consider it a waste of time and a contamination. "Think of your Spanish and your modales (manners)" they exclaim. Sometimes they accuse me of having the democratic virus and cite Baudelaire to reinforce their silly ideas. Of course, all these lads are the very ones who are so bored most of the time, and come to Villa Olga to entertain themselves, or their souls. They are amazed at the fact that I am contented, occupied and even a little fatter. They all go away, however, for the city has too many shallow distractions for such people. 

I agree with you, old wise man (how old are you anyway? I hope the old won't disgust you ) in that I do not think as much as I should. But remember that thinking is a difficult process and I did much rather look at Pompilio eating his oats or just converse with Evaristo, a blond guajiro who comes to bring the groceries. I will try to think more intensely and precisely as you recommend. 

I saw an article, very poor indeed, on your genre of poesia in the latest Sewanee. I could not define your poetry so easily, but I like it very much and read it quite often. In that Sewanee came the Phi Beta Kappa poem which I had already read (fragments ) in the Harvard Bulletin. Of lately I have been reading only poetry, 16 and 17th century Spanish poetry which is marvelous. That is enough for a few months, with our daily exercises of gymnastic thought. 

My essay on Scott Fitzgerald is gathering moths in the deepness of a drawer. I came to him with the best of intentions but he bores me so and there are so many more interesting things to read and do.... I am coming to regard reading now as a close circle and only the most excellent of poets and writers get around the circle. For instance, I discover that I knew nothing of the French theatre: Racine, Moliere and Corneille were unknown figures although I had gone thru the gestures of perusing some of their plays when learning French. I must therefore spend some time in their wonderful world, above all Moliere's. 

I might close by reiterating my invitation to have you lock up the Insurance and take a trip to Habana this winter. If you decide to do that, let me know in time. Otherwise, I might go to N.Y. this Xmas to see my sister Olga. 

An affectionate embrace,
Jose

----------


## quasimodo1

In 1916 the still relatively unknown Wallace Stevens won a two hundred dollar prize in a contest run by "Poetry" magazine. Quote from the Poetry Foundation... "The prize announcement, made in June 1916, hedged a bit, declaring: 'none of the submitted plays unites under a single title our own conditions of poetic beauty, actability, and a subject either American or of modern significance through life unlocalized.' Still, Steven's "Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise," stood out to all but one of the judges as "a strange and fantastic work of original genius . . . however diverting or repelling its story." Indeed, reading selections from the play today, one recoils at some of the racial and social attitudes it seems to promote. The prize itself was never awarded again, and the appearance of verse dramas in Poetry from that time on has been few and far between." For a slideshow including images of the original text in Poetry magazine... { http://www.poetryfoundation.org/jour...html?id=184137 }

----------


## quasimodo1

Gubbinal

by Wallace Stevens

That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

That tuft of jungle feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you say.

That savage of fire,
That seed,
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.
{ http://asitoughttobe.com/2010/03/20/...llace-stevens/ }

----------


## quasimodo1

http://www.wesleyan.edu/wstevens/alk.html 
OF MERE BEING

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze distance.

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.


~Wallace Stevens, 1954~

----------


## Pierre Menard

I know not many people respond anymore but I hope you keep posting quasimodo. I discovered Stevens last year and really like him. This thread has been a pleasure to work through.

----------


## quasimodo1

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&...tevens&f=false

----------


## quasimodo1

Ariel was glad he had written his poems.
They were of a remembered time
Or of something seen that he liked. . . .

It was not important that they survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,

Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.
{ from "The Planet on the Table" by Wallace Stevens }

----------


## quasimodo1

GUBBINAL That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

That tuft of jungle feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you say.

That savage of fire,
That seed,
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

----------


## stlukesguild

Quasi... good to see you still here championing poetry. You may have noticed the thread on Neruda. Not much discussions of specific poems yet.

----------


## Streber

I am posting this because I am interested in Wallace Stevens and I want to see if there is anybody here to talk to. I am going through his Collected Poems one by one with Eleanor Cook's Reader's Guide.

----------


## MorpheusSandman

Streber, I read through Stevens' poetry twice within the past year, once in the (superior) Library of America edition and again via the Collected/Opus Posthumous editions on my Kindle. He instantly became one of my favorites and I've read a handful of studies. While I have Cook's Reader's Guide on my Kindle I've yet to read it; but I have read: 

Lucy Beckett's Wallace Stevens
BJ Leggett's Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory: Conceiving the Supreme Fiction
Helen Vendler's two Stevens books: On Extended Wings and Words Chosen Out of Desire

All of them agree that the central concern of Stevens' poetry is the relationship between reality and the imagination, but they all take different routes in analyzing this concern. Of these, Beckett's is the best intro. I think she best explains the general way in which this theme plays out throughout Stevens' poetry. Her only flaw is a kind of superficiality compared to the others, but such superficiality makes for a perfect intro. Leggett's is an excellent reading of Stevens through the texts that most influenced Stevens' thought. Vendler's Words Chosen... instead of focusing on the theoretical aspect of Stevens' thought, focuses on the emotional desires that gave rise to his imagination. I think this book, above the others, digs into the emotional depth that so many readers feel in Stevens, but that gets glossed over in criticism that only focuses on his intellectual aspects. Her Extended Wings is an analysis of his long poetry, mostly concerned with how Stevens' techniques (such has his constant use of qualifiers and auxiliary verbs) illuminate what he's saying. Without this book, I don't know if I could've ever grasped both Creedences of Summer and The Auroras of Autumn.

----------

