Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955)
American poet and businessman.
This is old song
That will not declare itself...
Things as they are have been destroyed.
Have I? Am I a man that is dead
At a table on which the food is cold?
Is my thought a memory, not alive?
Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood
And whichever it may be, is it mine?
The imagination is one of the forces of nature.
Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
What is there in life except one's ideas.
Good air, good friend, what is there in life?
Is it ideas that I believe?
Man is an eternal sophomore.
Be content —
Expansions, diffusions — content to be
The unspotted imbecile revery,
The heraldic center of the world
Of blue, blue sleek with a hundred chins,
The amorist Adjective aflame...
My dame, sing for this person accurate songs.
Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are
Twenty men crossing a bridge
Into a village.
Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
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.
These
Are the music of meet resignation; these
The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you
To magnify, if in that drifting waste
You are to be accompanied by more
Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.
What is beyond the cathedral, outside,
Balances with nuptial song.
So it is to sit and to balance things
To and to and to the point of still,
To say of one mask it is like,
To say of another it is like,
To know that the balance does not quite rest,
That the mask is strange, however like.
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
You remain the more than natural figure. You
Become the soft-footed phantom, the irrational
Place honey on the altars and die,
You lovers that are bitter at heart.
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
There is always an analogy between nature and the imagination, and possibly poetry is merely the strange rhetoric of that parallel.
Music falls on the silence like a sense,
A passion that we feel, not understand.