Wallace Stevens

[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,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

"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.

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.