Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955)
American poet and businessman.
One might have thought of sight, but who could think
Of what it sees, for all the ill it sees?
Speech found the ear, for all the evil sound,
But the dark italics it could not propound.
And out of what sees and hears and out
Of what one feels, who could have thought to make
So many selves, so many sensuous worlds,
As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming
With the metaphysical changes that occur,
Merely in living as and where we live.
There is always an analogy between nature and the imagination, and possibly poetry is merely the strange rhetoric of that parallel.
The poem goes form the poet’s gibberish to
The gibberish of the vulgate and back again.
The first idea is an imagined thing.
A grandiose subject is not an assurance of a grandiose effect but, most likely, of the opposite.
Of these beginnings, gay and green, propose
The suitable amours. Time will write them down.
I like my philosophy smothered in beauty and not the opposite.
Soldier, there is a war between the mind
And sky, between thought and day and night. It is
For that the poet is always in the sun,
Upon the bank, she stood
In the cool
Of spent emotions.
She felt, among the leaves,
The dew
Of old devotions.
Perhaps,
The man-hero is not the exceptional monster,
But he that of repetition is most master.
The monastic man is an artist.The philosopher
Appoints man’s place in music, say, today.
But the priest desires. The philosopher desires.
The old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets
Inhaled the appointed odor, while the doves
Rose up like phantoms from chronologies.
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.