Wallace Stevens

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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}

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,

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,

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.

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.

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}

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}

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}

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}