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.
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.
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.
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}
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.
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.}
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.
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.Originally Posted by quasimodo1
LET THERE BE LIGHT
"Love follows knowledge." – St. Catherine of Siena
My literature blog: http://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot.com/
Don't like it either, Virgil; it's so unlike the rest. Perhaps the poem had a private use or meaning.
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.
Yeah, now that's a great one.
LET THERE BE LIGHT
"Love follows knowledge." – St. Catherine of Siena
My literature blog: http://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot.com/
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.
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.
Strange form though, seems to be a mix of various French forms.
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.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
