The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

  VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 1990

  Copyright © 1923, 1931, 1935, 1937, 1942, 1943, 1944, 1945, 1946, 1947, 1948, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1954 by Wallace Stevens

  Copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in 1954.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stevens, Wallace, 1879-1955.

  The collected poems of Wallace Stevens.

  Originally published: New York Knopf, 1954.

  I. Title.

  PS3537.T4753 1982 811′.52 82-4735

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79187-0 AACR2

  v3.1

  PHOTOGRAPH BY SYLVIA SALMI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  HARMONIUM

  Earthy Anecdote

  Invective against Swans

  In the Carolinas

  The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage

  The Plot against the Giant

  Infanta Marina

  Domination of Black

  The Snow Man

  The Ordinary Women

  The Load of Sugar-Cane

  Le Monocle de Mon Oncle

  Nuances of a Theme by Williams

  Metaphors of a Magnifico

  Ploughing on Sunday

  Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et Les Unze Mille Vierges

  Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores

  Fabliau of Florida

  The Doctor of Geneva

  Another Weeping Woman

  Homunculus et La Belle Étoile

  The Comedian as the Letter C

  I. The World without Imagination

  II. Concerning the Thunderstorms of Yucatan

  III. Approaching Carolina

  IV. The Idea of a Colony

  V. A Nice Shady Home

  VI. And Daughters with Curls

  From the Misery of Don Joost

  O Florida, Venereal Soil

  Last Looks at the Lilacs

  The Worms at Heaven’s Gate

  The Jack-Rabbit

  Valley Candle

  Anecdote of Men by the Thousand

  The Apostrophe to Vincentine

  Floral Decorations for Bananas

  Anecdote of Canna

  On the Manner of Addressing Clouds

  Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb

  Of the Surface of Things

  Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks

  A High-Toned Old Christian Woman

  The Place of the Solitaires

  The Weeping Burgher

  The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician

  Banal Sojourn

  Depression before Spring

  The Emperor of Ice-Cream

  The Cuban Doctor

  Tea at the Palaz of Hoon

  Disillusionment of Ten O’clock

  Sunday Morning

  The Virgin Carrying a Lantern

  Stars at Tallapoosa

  Explanation

  Six Significant Landscapes

  Bantams in Pine-Woods

  Anecdote of the Jar

  Palace of the Babies

  Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat

  Snakes. Men Eat Hogs

  Jasmine’s Beautiful Thoughts underneath the Willow

  Cortège for Rosenbloom

  Tattoo

  The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws

  Life Is Motion

  The Wind Shifts

  Colloquy with a Polish Aunt

  Gubbinal

  Two Figures in Dense Violet Night

  Theory

  To the One of Fictive Music

  Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion

  Peter Quince at the Clavier

  Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

  Nomad Exquisite

  The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad

  The Death of a Soldier

  Negation

  The Surprises of the Superhuman

  Sea Surface Full of Clouds

  The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade

  New England Verses

  Lunar Paraphrase

  Anatomy of Monotony

  The Public Square

  Sonatina to Hans Christian

  In the Clear Season of Grapes

  Two at Norfolk

  Indian River

  Tea

  To the Roaring Wind

  IDEAS OF ORDER

  Farewell to Florida

  Ghosts as Cocoons

  Sailing after Lunch

  Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz

  Dance of the Macabre Mice

  Meditation Celestial & Terrestrial

  Lions in Sweden

  How to Live. What to Do

  Some Friends from Pascagoula

  Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu

  The Idea of Order at Key West

  The American Sublime

  Mozart, 1935

  Snow and Stars

  The Sun This March

  Botanist on Alp (No. 1)

  Botanist on Alp (No. 2)

  Evening without Angels

  The Brave Man

  A Fading of the Sun

  Gray Stones and Gray Pigeons

  Winter Bells

  Academic Discourse at Havana

  Nudity at the Capital

  Nudity in the Colonies

  Re-statement of Romance

  The Reader

  Mud Master

  Anglais Mort à Florence

  The Pleasures of Merely Circulating

  Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery

  A Postcard from the Volcano

  Autumn Refrain

  A Fish-Scale Sunrise

  Gallant Château

  Delightful Evening

  THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR

  The Man with the Blue Guitar

  A Thought Revolved

  I. The Mechanical Optimist

  II. Mystic Garden & Middling Beast

  III. Romanesque Affabulation

  IV. The Leader

  The Men That are Falling

  PARTS OF A WORLD

  Parochial Theme

  Poetry Is a Destructive Force

  The Poems of Our Climate

  Prelude to Objects

  Study of Two Pears

  The Glass of Water

  Add This to Rhetoric

  Dry Loaf

  Idiom of the Hero

  The Man on the Dump

  On the Road Home

  The Latest Freed Man

  United Dames of America

  Country Words

  The Dwarf

  A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts

  Loneliness in Jersey City

  Anything Is Beautiful if You Say It Is

  A Weak Mind in the Mountains

  The Bagatelles the Madrigals

  Girl in a Nightgown

  Connoisseur of Chaos

  The Blue Buildings in the Summer Air

  Dezembrum

  Poem Written at Morning

  Thunder by the Musician

  The Common Life

  The Sense of the Sleight-of-hand Man

  The Candle a Saint

  A Dish of Peaches in Russia

  Arcades of Philadelphia the Past

  Of Hartford in a Purple Light

  Cuisine Bourgeoise

  Forces, the Will & the Weather

  On an Old Horn

  Bouquet of Belle Scavoi
r

  Variations on a Summer Day

  Yellow Afternoon

  Martial Cadenza

  Man and Bottle

  Of Modern Poetry

  Arrival at the Waldorf

  Landscape with Boat

  On the Adequacy of Landscape

  Les Plus Belles Pages

  Poem with Rhythms

  Woman Looking at a Vase of Flowers

  The Well Dressed Man with a Beard

  Of Bright & Blue Birds & the Gala Sun

  Mrs. Alfred Uruguay

  Asides on the Oboe

  Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas

  Montrachet-le-Jardin

  The News and the Weather

  Metamorphosis

  Contrary Theses (I)

  Phosphor Reading by His Own Light

  The Search for Sound Free from Motion

  Jumbo

  Contrary Theses (II)

  The Hand as a Being

  Oak Leaves Are Hands

  Examination of the Hero in a Time of War

  TRANSPORT TO SUMMER

  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

  Esthétique du Mal

  The Bed of Old John Zeller

  Less and Less Human, O 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 José Rodríguez-Feo

  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

  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

  THE AURORAS OF AUTUMN

  The Auroras of Autumn

  Page from a Tale

  Large Red Man Reading

  This Solitude of Cataracts

  In the Element of Antagonisms

  In a Bad Time

  The Beginning

  The Countryman

  The Ultimate Poem Is Abstract

  Bouquet of Roses in Sunlight

  The Owl in the Sarcophagus

  Saint John and the Back-Ache

  Celle Qui Fût Héaulmiette

  Imago

  A Primitive like an Orb

  Metaphor as Degeneration

  The Woman in Sunshine

  Reply to Papini

  The Bouquet

  World without Peculiarity

  Our Stars Come from Ireland

  I. Tom McGreery, in America, Thinks of Himself as a Boy

  II. The Westwardness of Everything

  Puella Parvula

  The Novel

  What We See Is What We Think

  A Golden Woman in a Silver Mirror

  The Old Lutheran Bells at Home

  Questions Are Remarks

  Study of Images I

  Study of Images II

  An Ordinary Evening in New Haven

  Things of August

  Angel Surrounded by Paysans

  THE ROCK

  An Old Man Asleep

  The Irish Cliffs of Moher

  The Plain Sense of Things

  One of the Inhabitants of the West

  Lebensweisheitspielerei

  The Hermitage at the Centre

  The Green Plant

  Madame La Fleurie

  To an Old Philosopher in Rome

  Vacancy in the Park

  The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain

  Two Illustrations That the World Is What You Make It

  The Constant Disquisition of the Wind

  The World Is Larger in Summer

  Prologues to What Is Possible

  Looking across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly

  Song of Fixed Accord

  The World as Meditation

  Long and Sluggish Lines

  A Quiet Normal Life

  Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

  The Rock

  Seventy Years Later

  The Poem as Icon

  Forms of the Rock in a Night-Hymn

  St. Armorer’s Church from the Outside

  Note on Moonlight

  The Planet on the Table

  The River of Rivers in Connecticut

  Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself

  Index of Titles of Poems

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  HARMONIUM

  EARTHY ANECDOTE

  Every time the bucks went clattering

  Over Oklahoma

  A firecat bristled in the way.

  Wherever they went,

  They went clattering,

  Until they swerved

  In a swift, circular line

  To the right,

  Because of the firecat.

  Or until they swerved

  In a swift, circular line

  To the left,

  Because of the firecat.

  The bucks clattered.

  The firecat went leaping,

  To the right, to the left,

  And

  Bristled in the way.

  Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes

  And slept.

  INVECTIVE AGAINST SWANS

  The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks

  And far beyond the discords of the wind.

  A bronze rain from the sun descending marks

  The death of summer, which that time endures

  Like one who scrawls a listless testament

  Of golden quirks and Paphian caricatures,

  Bequeathing your white feathers to the moon

  And giving your bland motions to the air.

  Behold, already on the long parades

  The crows anoint the statues with their dirt.

  And the soul, O ganders, being lonely, flies

  Beyond your chilly chariots, to the skies.

  IN THE CAROLINAS

  The lilacs wither in the Carolinas.

  Already the butterflies flutter a
bove the cabins.

  Already the new-born children interpret love

  In the voices of mothers.

  Timeless mother,

  How is it that your aspic nipples

  For once vent honey?

  The pine-tree sweetens my body

  The white iris beautifies me.

  THE PALTRY NUDE

  STARTS ON A SPRING VOYAGE

  But not on a shell, she starts,

  Archaic, for the sea.

  But on the first-found weed

  She scuds the glitters,

  Noiselessly, like one more wave.

  She too is discontent

  And would have purple stuff upon her arms,

  Tired of the salty harbors,

  Eager for the brine and bellowing

  Of the high interiors of the sea.

  The wind speeds her,

  Blowing upon her hands

  And watery back.

  She touches the clouds, where she goes

  In the circle of her traverse of the sea.

  Yet this is meagre play

  In the scrurry and water-shine,

  As her heels foam—

  Not as when the goldener nude

  Of a later day

  Will go, like the centre of sea-green pomp,

  In an intenser calm,

  Scullion of fate,

  Across the spick torrent, ceaselessly,

  Upon her irretrievable way.

  THE PLOT AGAINST THE GIANT

  First Girl

  When this yokel comes maundering,

  Whetting his hacker,

  I shall run before him,

  Diffusing the civilest odors

  Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.

  It will check him.

  Second Girl

  I shall run before him,

  Arching cloths besprinkled with colors

  As small as fish-eggs.

  The threads

  Will abash him.

  Third Girl

  Oh, la … le pauvre!

  I shall run before him,

  With a curious puffing.

  He will bend his ear then.

  I shall whisper

  Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.

  It will undo him.

  INFANTA MARINA

  Her terrace was the sand

  And the palms and the twilight.

  She made of the motions of her wrist

  The grandiose gestures

  Of her thought.

  The rumpling of the plumes

  Of this creature of the evening

  Came to be sleights of sails