Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955)
American poet and businessman.
The poem goes form the poet’s gibberish to
The gibberish of the vulgate and back again.
There is always an analogy between nature and the imagination, and possibly poetry is merely the strange rhetoric of that parallel.
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?
Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
The death of one god is the death of all.
Music falls on the silence like a sense,
A passion that we feel, not understand.
You remain the more than natural figure. You
Become the soft-footed phantom, the irrational
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
Place honey on the altars and die,
You lovers that are bitter at heart.
Is it he or is it I that experience this?
Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings
Of those white elders; but, escaping,
Left only Death's ironic scraping.
Now, in its immortality, it plays
On the clear viol of her memory,
And makes a constant sacrament of praise.
We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.
Just as my fingers on these keys Make music, so the self-same sounds On my spirit make a music, too. Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,
Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music.
Behold
The approach of him whom none believes,
Whom all believe that all believe,
A pagan in a varnished car.
I am the spouse. She took her necklace off
And laid it in the sand. As I am, I am
The spouse. She opened her stone-studded belt.
The operation of the imagination in life is more significant than its operation in or in relation to works of art... in life what is important is the truth as it is, while in arts and letters what is important is truth as we see it.