The Collected Poems by Wallace Stevens

Author:Wallace Stevens [Stevens, Wallace]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Amazon: B006KU98Y8
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 1967-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

404 Like a momentary color, in which swans

405 Were seraphs, were saints, were changing essences.

406 The west wind was the music, the motion, the force

407 To which the swans curveted, a will to change,

408 A will to make iris frettings on the blank.

409 There was a will to change, a necessitous

410 And present way, a presentation, a kind

411 Of volatile world, too constant to be denied,

412 The eye of a vagabond in metaphor

413 That catches our own. The casual is not

414 Enough. The freshness of transformation is

[Page 398 ]

415 The freshness of a world. It is our own,

416 It is ourselves, the freshness of ourselves,

417 And that necessity and that presentation

418 Are rubbings of a glass in which we peer.

419 Of these beginnings, gay and green, propose

420 The suitable amours. Time will write them down.

It Must Give Pleasure

I

421 To sing jubilas at exact, accustomed times,

422 To be crested and wear the mane of a multitude

423 And so, as part, to exult with its great throat,

424 To speak of joy and to sing of it, borne on

425 The shoulders of joyous men, to feel the heart

426 That is the common, the bravest fundament,

427 This is a facile exercise. Jerome

428 Begat the tubas and the fire-wind strings,

429 The golden fingers picking dark-blue air:

430 For companies of voices moving there,

431 To find of sound the bleakest ancestor,

432 To find of light a music issuing

433 Whereon it falls in more than sensual mode.

434 But the difficultest rigor is forthwith,

435 On the image of what we see, to catch from that

436 Irrational moment its unreasoning,

437 As when the sun comes rising, when the sea

438 Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall

[Page 399 ]

439 Of heaven-haven. These are not things transformed.

440 Yet we are shaken by them as if they were.

441 We reason about them with a later reason.

II

442 The blue woman, linked and lacquered, at her window

443 Did not desire that feathery argentines

444 Should be cold silver, neither that frothy clouds

445 Should foam, be foamy waves, should move like them,

446 Nor that the sexual blossoms should repose

447 Without their fierce addictions, nor that the heat

448 Of summer, growing fragrant in the night,

449 Should strengthen her abortive dreams and take

450 In sleep its natural form. It was enough

451 For her that she remembered: the argentines

452 Of spring come to their places in the grape leaves

453 To cool their ruddy pulses; the frothy clouds

454 Are nothing but frothy clouds; the frothy blooms

455 Waste without puberty; and afterward,

456 When the harmonious heat of August pines

457 Enters the room, it drowses and is the night.

458 It was enough for her that she remembered.

459 The blue woman looked and from her window named

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460 The corals of the dogwood, cold and clear,

461 Cold, coldly delineating, being real,

462 Clear and, except for the eye, without intrusion.

III

463 A lasting visage in a lasting bush,

464 A face of stone in an unending red,

465 Red-emerald, red-slitted-blue, a face of slate,

466 An ancient forehead hung with heavy hair,

467 The channel slots of

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