Free The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens Page A

pillars,
    That was seen through arches)
    To the central composition,
    The essential theme.
    What composition is there in all this:
    Stockholm slender in a slender light,
    An Adriatic
riva
rising,
    Statues and stars,
    Without a theme?
    The pillars are prostrate, the arches are haggard,
    The hotel is boarded and bare.
    Yet the panorama of despair
    Cannot be the specialty
    Of this ecstatic air.
BOTANIST ON ALP (NO. 2)
    The crosses on the convent roofs
    Gleam sharply as the sun comes up.
    What’s down below is in the past
    Like last night’s crickets, far below.
    And what’s above is in the past
    As sure as all the angels are.
    Why should the future leap the clouds
    The bays of heaven, brighted, blued?
    Chant, O ye faithful, in your paths
    The poem of long celestial death;
    For who could tolerate the earth
    Without that poem, or without
    An earthier one, tum, tum-ti-tum,
    As of those crosses, glittering,
    And merely of their glittering,
    A mirror of a mere delight?
EVENING WITHOUT ANGELS
    the great interests of man: air and light, the joy of having a body, the voluptuousness of looking
.
    MARIO ROSSI
    Why seraphim like lutanists arranged
    Above the trees? And why the poet as
    Eternal
chef d’orchestre?
                                            Air is air,
    Its vacancy glitters round us everywhere.
    Its sounds are not angelic syllables
    But our unfashioned spirits realized
    More sharply in more furious selves.
                                            And light
    That fosters seraphim and is to them
    Coiffeur of haloes, fecund jeweller—
    Was the sun concoct for angels or for men?
    Sad men made angels of the sun, and of
    The moon they made their own attendant ghosts,
    Which led them back to angels, after death.
    Let this be clear that we are men of sun
    And men of day and never of pointed night,
    Men that repeat antiquest sounds of air
    In an accord of repetitions. Yet,
    If we repeat, it is because the wind
    Encircling us, speaks always with our speech.
    Light, too, encrusts us making visible
    The motions of the mind and giving form
    To moodiest nothings, as, desire for day
    Accomplished in the immensely flashing East,
    Desire for rest, in that descending sea
    Of dark, which in its very darkening
    Is rest and silence spreading into sleep.
    …Evening, when the measure skips a beat
    And then another, one by one, and all
    To a seething minor swiftly modulate.
    Bare night is best. Bare earth is best. Bare, bare,
    Except for our own houses, huddled low
    Beneath the arches and their spangled air,
    Beneath the rhapsodies of fire and fire,
    Where the voice that is in us makes a true response,
    Where the voice that is great within us rises up,
    As we stand gazing at the rounded moon.
THE BRAVE MAN
    The sun, that brave man,
    Comes through boughs that lie in wait,
    That brave man.
    Green and gloomy eyes
    In dark forms of the grass
    Run away.
    The good stars,
    Pale helms and spiky spurs,
    Run away.
    Fears of my bed,
    Fears of life and fears of death,
    Run away.
    That brave man comes up
    From below and walks without meditation,
    That brave man.
A FADING OF THE SUN
    Who can think of the sun costuming clouds
    When all people are shaken
    Or of night endazzled, proud,
    When people awaken
    And cry and cry for help?
    The warm antiquity of self,
    Everyone, grows suddenly cold.
    The tea is bad, bread sad.
    How can the world so old be so mad
    That the people die?
    If joy shall be without a book
    It lies, themselves within themselves,
    If they will look
    Within themselves
    And cry and cry for help?
    Within as pillars of the sun,
    Supports of night. The tea,
    The wine is good. The bread,
    The meat is sweet.
    And they will not die.
GRAY STONES AND GRAY PIGEONS
    The archbishop is away. The church is gray.
    He has left his robes folded in camphor
    And, dressed in black, he walks
    Among fireflies.
    The bony buttresses, the bony spires
    Arranged under the stony clouds
    Stand in