The Collected Poems

Author:Wallace Stevens
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Poetry
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 1990-01-14T18:30:00+00:00

631 Soldier, there is a war between the mind

632 And sky, between thought and day and night. It is

633 For that the poet is always in the sun,

634 Patches the moon together in his room

635 To his Virgilian cadences, up down,

636 Up down. It is a war that never ends.

637 Yet it depends on yours. The two are one.

638 They are a plural, a right and left, a pair,

639 Two parallels that meet if only in

640 The meeting of their shadows or that meet

641 In a book in a barrack, a letter from Malay.

642 But your war ends. And after it you return

643 With six meats and twelve wines or else without

644 To walk another room ... Monsieur and comrade,

645 The soldier is poor without the poet's lines,

646 His petty syllabi, the sounds that stick,

647 Inevitably modulating, in the blood.

648 And war for war, each has its gallant kind.

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649 How simply the fictive hero becomes the real;

650 How gladly with proper words the soldier dies,

651 If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech.

[Page 409 ]

THE AURORAS OF AUTUMN

[Page 411 ]

Stevens, Wallace, 1879-1955.: THE AURORAS OF AUTUMN [from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (1954), Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.: THE AURORAS OF AUTUMN]

I

1 This is where the serpent lives, the bodiless.

2 His head is air. Beneath his tip at night

3 Eyes open and fix on us in every sky.

4 Or is this another wriggling out of the egg,

5 Another image at the end of the cave,

6 Another bodiless for the body's slough?

7 This is where the serpent lives. This is his nest,

8 These fields, these hills, these tinted distances,

9 And the pines above and along and beside the sea.

10 This is form gulping after formlessness,

11 Skin flashing to wished-for disappearances

12 And the serpent body flashing without the skin.

13 This is the height emerging and its base

14 These lights may finally attain a pole

15 In the midmost midnight and find the serpent there,

16 In another nest, the master of the maze

17 Of body and air and forms and images,

18 Relentlessly in possession of happiness.

19 This is his poison: that we should disbelieve

20 Even that. His meditations in the ferns,

21 When he moved so slightly to make sure of sun,

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22 Made us no less as sure. We saw in his head,

23 Black beaded on the rock, the flecked animal,

24 The moving grass, the Indian in his glade.

II

25 Farewell to an idea ... A cabin stands,

26 Deserted, on a beach. It is white,

27 As by a custom or according to

28 An ancestral theme or as a consequence

29 Of an infinite course. The flowers against the wall

30 Are white, a little dried, a kind of mark

31 Reminding, trying to remind, of a white

32 That was different, something else, last year

33 Or before, not the white of an aging afternoon,

34 Whether fresher or duller, whether of winter cloud

35 Or of winter sky, from horizon to horizon.

36 The wind is blowing the sand across the floor.

37 Here, being visible is

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