I just finished The Collected Poems by Wallace Stevens, which includes all his personal selections from Harmonium, Ideas of Order, The Man with the Blue Guitar & Other Poems, Parts of a World, Transport to Summer, The Auroras of Autumn and The Rock.
When the full collection is read as such, one doesn't just read the poems but also, obscurely, the man behind--the poet as a young man, an aging man, an old man, and a man looking at death as he always did at life. Here I give you a list of all the bits and pieces that resonated with me, a chain that's like fast forwarding, for those curious about the end. Indeed, wouldn't you like to know the last words of the last poem, which he likely wrote in March and then, a few months later, in the heat of early August, died?
For your gifts, Mr. Stevens, of endless poems within your poems, thank you.
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The spruces rough in the distant glitter ... For me, the firefly's quick, electric stroke / Ticks tediously the time of one more year ... Shine alone, shine nakedly, shine like bronze, / that reflects neither my face nor any inner part / of my being, shine like fire, that mirrors nothing ... And roamed there all the stupid afternoon ...
By such long-rolling opulent cataracts, ... Crispin was washed away by magnitude ... When the sky is blue. The blue infected will ...My candle burned alone in an immense valley ... I figured you as nude between / Monotonous earth and dark blue sky ... You are to be accompanied by more / Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon ...
From my balcony, I survey the yellow air, ... And the beauty / Of the moonlight / Falling there, / Falling / As sleep falls / In the innocent air ... But fictive things / Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince ... It is with a strange malice / That I distort the world / Among the people burning in me still ... My hands such sharp, imagined things ...
When radiance came running down, slim through the bareness ... I was the world in which I walked ... Only, here and there, an old sailor, / Drunk and asleep in his boots, / Catches tigers / In red weather ... As a calm darkens among water-lights ... Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow ... She says, "I am content when weakened birds, / Before they fly, test the reality / Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings ...
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, / Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams ... Their boisterous devotion to the sun, / Not as a god, but as a god might be, ... Downward to darkness, on extended wings ... The mind herein attains simplicity ... Use dusky words and dusky images. / Darken your speech ...
Say that the palms are clear in a total blue, ... That the moon shines ... As the immense dew of Florida ... The malady of the quotidian ... Perhaps, if winter once could penetrate ... Hinted autumnal farewells of academic death ... Was last with its porcelain leer ... That slight transcendence to the dirty sail, ... And then rush brightly through the summer air ...
To be one's singular self ... what spirit / Have I except it comes from the sun? ... Whose spirit is? we said, because we knew ... Oh! Blessed rage for order ... In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds ... Of a turning spirit in an earlier self ... So far beyond the casual solitudes ... Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun ...
The stillness that comes to me out of this, beneath / The stillness of everything gone, and being still, / Being and sitting still, something resides ... Of wormy metaphors ... Day is desire and night is sleep ... Deeper within the belly's dark / Of time, time grows upon the rock ... Place honey on the altars and die, / You lovers that are bitter at heart ...
To meet that hawk's eye and to flinch / Not at the eye but at the joy of it ... liquid cats / Moved in the grass without a sound ... The sea is in the falling snow ... Here I inhale profounder strength ... But do not use the rotted names ... The moments when we choose to play / The imagined pine, the imagined jay ...
And crickets are loud again in the grass ... These are the forest ... That's what misery is, / Nothing to have at heart ... Clear water in a brilliant bowl ... Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds ... if the sun, / Stormer, is the color of a self ... Between that disgust and this ... You see the moon rise in the empty sky ...
It was at that time, that the silence was largest ... For a moment on rising, at the edge of the bed, to be ... It was everything bulging and blazing and big in itself ... Underneath a willow there / I stood and sang and filled the air ... Of a cloud on sand, a shape on the side of a hill ... The chandeliers, their morning glazes spread / In opal blobs along the walls and floor ...
Green were the curls upon that head ... To be convulsed, to have remained the hands ... Yet the sound of that ... Such floods of white ... The room is quiet where they are ... There they sit, holding their eyes in their hands ... A long time the ocean has come with you, / Shaking the water off, like a poodle ...
On the irised hunks, the stone bouquet ... Miserable that it was not she ... It is cold to be forever young ... Those bearing balsam, its field fragrance ... It was not yet the hour to be dauntlessly leaping ... To lie on one's bed in the dark ... It was like sudden time in a world without time ... An anti-master-man, floribund ascetic ... And light behind the body of night...
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never ... That we are joyously ourselves and we think ... And the metal heroes that time granulates ... In the jasmine haunted forests, that we knew ... With this paper, this dust ... Be tranquil in your wounds ... And being would be being himself again ... To believe in the weather ... In the exactest poverty ... In which man is the hero ...
One chemical afternoon in mid-autumn ... What any fury to its noble centre ... up the great sea and downward / And darkly beside the vulcanic / Sea-tower, sea-pinnacles, sea-mountain ... the penetrating, / Pure eye ... / So seeing, I beheld you walking, white ... The single bird, the obscure moon ... Like seeing fallen brightly away ...
luminous flesh / Or shapely fire ... the actual bite ... Last night at the end of night and in the sky ... The figures of the past go cloaked. / ... And go, go slowly, but they go ... is good, is a good ... their dark-spiced branches ... And I taste at the root of the tongue the unreal of what / is real ...
The genius of the body, which is our world ... With the politest helplessness ... Lakes are more reasonable than oceans ... So many selves ... While all the leaves leaked gold ... The eloquences of light's faculties ... in a ruinous storm ... That a bright red woman will be rising ... Stay here. Speak of familiar things awhile ... the deep pool / Of these discolorations ...
The forms that are attentive in thin air ... like a violent pulse in the cloud itself, ... Its immaterial monsters move, ... The bright obvious stands motionless in cold ... like reason's constant ruin, / Sleep deep, good eel, in your perverse marine ... The most massive sopranos are singing ...
It is not speech, the sound we hear ... In sleeping air ...in this full-blown May, ... Its unfamiliar, difficult fern, ... Bloom with his vast accumulation / Stands and regards and repeats the primitive lines ... Though poor, though raggeder than ruin ... These earlier dissipations of the blood / And brain ...
Round them she spilled the roses ... It was like passing a boundary to dive / Into the sun-filled water [and yes, so it was] ... The inconceivable idea of the sun ... stale moonlight ... Beating in the heart, as if blood newly came ... An abstraction blooded, as a man by thought ... This foundling of the infected past, so bright, ... As if hyacinths had never gone ...
How that whole country was a melon ... Of summer, growing fragrant in the night, ... Angel, / Be silent in your luminous cloud and hear ... This is where the serpent lives ... Relentlessly in possession of happiness ... The house is evening, half dissolved ... Almost as the tenderest and the truest part ...
Smeared, smoked, and drunken of thin potencies, ... For a tidal undulation underneath ... So summer comes in the end to these few stains ... speaking quietly there ... A bee for the remembering of happiness ... Whose venom and whose wisdom will be one ... the giant of nothingness ... It is only that this warmth and movement are like / The warmth and movement of a woman ...
A waking, as in images we awake, ... The pearly women that drop / From heaven and float in air, like animals / Of ether, exceed the excelling witches ... Of what is this house composed if not of the sun, ... A great bosom, beard and being, alive with age ... So that this cold, a children's tale of ice, ...
So that morning and evening are like promises kept, ... in the air / Or street or about the corners of a man, ...Or of a town poised at the horizon's dip ... The wateriness of green wet in the sky ... Like interior intonations, ... The secretions of insight ... To feel the satisfactions / Of that transparent air ...
Without rain, there is the sadness of rain ... She has given too much, but not enough. / She is exhausted and a little old ... Yet I am the necessary angel of earth, ... The wet, green grass ... It is difficult even to choose the adjective / For this blank cold ... The great pond, / The plain sense of it ... I am the archangel of evening and praise / This one's star's blaze ...
Each person completely touches us / With what he is and as he is, / In the stale grandeur of annihilation ... lucent children round her in a ring ... the barbarous green ... Weight him, weight, weight him with the sleepiness of the moon ... In that distant chamber, a bearded queen, wicked in her dead light ...
How he had recomposed the pines ... In a Sunday's violent idleness ... There was an ease of mind that was like being alone in a boat at sea, ... like a man lured on by a syllable without any meaning ... The way some first thing coming into Northern trees ... Too wide, too irised, to be more than calm ... Like the last muting of winter as it ends ...
Softly she piped among the suns ... The trees are mended ... His arms would be her necklace / And her belt ... Babyishness of forsythia ... The spook and makings of the nude magnolia ... As, for example, a world in which, like snow, / He became an inhabitant ... We feel the obscurity of an order ...
It is an illusion that we were ever alive, / Lived in the houses of mothers ... That the lilacs came and bloomed, like a blindness cleaned ... as in a vivid sleep ... So, then, this warm, wide, weatherless quietude ... The river that flows nowhere, like a sea ... The sun was coming from outside ...
It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
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