Transport to summer

Citation preview

- 1 Transport I ij .to ~ ij " ~ Summer ~ BY

~

..

Wallace Stevens ~ th.

' £i ~ ~ ~ ~

~ New poems by the author of Harmonium,

Ideas of Order, The Man with the Bl~f Guitar~ and Parts of a World

I)

CONTENTS God is Good. It is a Beautiful Night Certain Phenomena of Sound The Motive for Metaphor Gigantomachia Dutch Graves in Bucks County No Possum, No Sop, No Taters So-And-So Reclining on Her Couch Chocorua to Its Neighbor Poesie Abrutie The Lack of Repose Somnambulisma Crude Foyer Repetitions of a Young Captain The Creations of Sound Holiday in Reality Esthetique du Mai The Bed of Old John Zeller Less and Less Human, 0 Savage Spirit Wild Ducks, People and Distances The Pure Good of Theory All the Preludes to Felicity Description of a Platonic Person Fire-Monsters in the Milky Brain Dry Birds are Fluttering in Blue Leaves A Word with Jose Rodr1guez-Feo V

3 4 6

7 8 12

14 16

24 :25

26

27 28 34

3S 38 54 55 56 57 57

58 59

60 62

Paisant Chronicle Sketch of the Ultimate Politician Flyer's Fall Jouga Debris of Life and Mind Description without Place Two Tales of Liadoff Analysis of a Theme Late Hymn from the Myrrh-Mountain Man Carrying Thing Pieces A Completely New Set of Objects Adult Epigram Two Versions of the Same Poem Men Made Out of Words Thinking of a Relation between the Images of Metaphors Chaos in Motion and Not in Motion The House was Quiet and the World was Calm Continual Conversation with a Silent Man A Woman Sings a Song for a Soldier Come Home The Pediment of Appearance Burghers of Petty Death Human Arrangement The Good Man Has No Shape The Red Fern From the Packet of Anacharsis Vl

63 64 65 65 66 68 77 79 80 81

82 83

84 85 87 88 89 90 91 92 9;3 94 95 96 97 97

The Dove in the Belly Mountains Covered with Cats The Prejudice against the Past Extraordinary References Attempt to Discover Life A Lot of People Bathing in a Stream Credences of Summer A Pastoral Nun The Pastor Caballero Notes toward a Supreme Fiction It Must be Abstract It Must Change It Must Give Pleasure

98 99 JOO IOI

102 103 IOS

n3 u3 n5 n7 127 1 37

NOTE "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction," is the earliest of the poems contained in this book. Otherwise the poems are arranged in the order in which they were written. Some of them have not been published before. Others have appeared in: Accent; American Prefaces; Arizona Quarterly; Briarclifj Quarterly; Chimera; Contemporary Poetry; Furioso; Harper's Bazaar; Harvard Wake; Horizon; Kenyon Review; Maryland Quarterly; New Poems 1943; New Republic; Origenes; Pacific; Poetry: A Magazine of Verse; Quarterly Review of Literature; Sewanee Review; View; viVa; Voices; Yale Poetry Review. The author offers his grateful acknowledgments to these publications.

TRANSPORT TO SUMMER

GOD IS GOOD. IT IS A BEAUTIFUL NIGHT Look round, brown moon, brown bird, as you rise to fly, Look round at the head and zither On the ground. Look round you as you start to rise, brown moon, At the book and shoe, the rotted rose At the door. This was the place to which you came last night, Flew close to, flew to without rising away. Now, again, In your light, the head is speaking. It reads the book. It becomes the scholar again, seeking celestial Rendezvous,

Picking thin music on the rustiest string, Squeezing the reddest fragrance from the stump Of summer. The venerable song foils from your fiery wmgs. The song of the great space of your age pierces The fresh night.

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CERTAIN PHENOMENA OF SOUND

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The cricket in the telephone is still. A geranium withers on the window-sill. Cat's milk is dry in the saucer. Sunday song Comes from the beating of the locust's wings,

That do not beat by pain, but calendar, Nor meditate the world as it goes round.

Someone has left for a ride in a balloon Or in a bubble examines the bubble of air. The room is emptier than nothingness. Yet a spider spins in the left shoe under the bedAnd old John Rocket dozes on his pillow. It is safe to sleep to a sound that time brings back.

u So you're home again, Redwood Roamer, and ready To feast . . Slic~ the mango, N aaman, and dress it

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With white wine, sug:1r and lime juice. Then bring it, After we've drunk the Moselle, to the thickest shade Of the garden. \Ve must prepare to hear the Roamer's Story . . . The sound of that slick sonata, Finding its way from the house, makes music seem To be a nature, a place in which itself Is that which produces everything else, in which The Roamer is a voice taller than the redwoods, Engaged in the most prolific narrative, A sound producing the things that are spoken.

III

Eulalia, I lounged on the hospital porch, On the east, sister and nun, and opened wide A parasol, which I had found, against The sun. The interior of a parasol, It is a kind of blank in which one sees. So seeing, I beheld you walking, white, Gold-shined by sun, perceiving as I saw That of that light Eulalia was the name. Then I, Semiramide, dark-syllabled, Contrasting our two names, considered speech.

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You were created of your name, the word Is that of which you were the personage. There is no life except in the word of it. I write Semiramide and in the script I am and have a being and play a part. You are that white Eulalia of the name.

THE MOTIVE FOR METAPHOR You like it under the trees in autumn, Because everything is half dead. The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves And repeats words without meaning.

In the same way, you were happy in spring, With the half colors of quarter-things, The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds, The single bird, the obscure moonThe obscure moon lighting an obscure world Of things that would never be quite expressed, Where you yourself were never quite yourself And did not want nor have to be, Desiring the exhilarations of changes: The motive for metaphor, shrinking from

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The weight of primary noon, The A B C of being, The ruddy temper, the hammer 0£ red and blue, the hard soundSteel against intimation-the sharp flash, The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.

GIGANTOMACHIA They could not carry much, as soldiers. There was no past in their forgetting, No self in the mass: the braver being, The body that could never be wounded, The life that never would end, no matter Who died, the being that was an abstraction, A giant's heart in the veins, all courage. But to strip off the complacent trifles, To expel the ever-present seductions, To reject the script for its lack-tragic, To confront with plainest eye the changes, That was to look on what war magnified. It was increased, enlarged, made simple, Made single, made one. This was not denial.

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Each man himself became a giant, Tipped out with largeness, bearing the heavy And the high, receiving out of others, As from an inhuman elevation And origin, an inhuman person, A mask, a spirit, an accoutrement. For soldiers, the new moon stretches twenty feet