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"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
".....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
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}
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}
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. ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by 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
That is a great line. My favorite stanza from Sunday Morning I think might be the fifth:
Quote:
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
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.
"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}
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
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
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}
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.
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
Ah Quasi. That warms my ideological heart. :) 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. :DQuote:
Originally Posted by 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}