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

a fixed light.
    The bishop rests.
    He is away. The church is gray.
    This is his holiday.
    The sexton moves with a sexton’s stare
    In the air.
    A dithery gold falls everywhere.
    It wets the pigeons,
    It goes and the birds go,
    Turn dry,
    Birds that never fly
    Except when the bishop passes by,
    Globed in today and tomorrow,
    Dressed in his colored robes.
WINTER BELLS
    The Jew did not go to his synagogue
    To be flogged.
    But it was solemn,
    That church without bells.
    He preferred the brightness of bells,
    The
mille fiori
of vestments,
    The voice of centuries
    On the priestly gramophones.
    It was the custom
    For his rage against chaos
    To abate on the way to church,
    In regulations of his spirit.
    How good life is, on the basis of propriety,
    To be followed by a platter of capon!
    Yet he kept promising himself
    To go to Florida one of these days,
    And in one of the little arrondissements
    Of the sea there,
    To give this further thought.
ACADEMIC DISCOURSE AT HAVANA
    I
    Canaries in the morning, orchestras
    In the afternoon, balloons at night. That is
    A difference, at least, from nightingales,
    Jehovah and the great sea-worm. The air
    Is not so elemental nor the earth
    So near.
                   But the sustenance of the wilderness
    Does not sustain us in the metropoles.
    II
    Life is an old casino in a park.
    The bills of the swans are flat upon the ground.
    A most desolate wind has chilled Rouge-Fatima
    And a grand decadence settles down like cold.
    III
    The swans … Before the bills of the swans fell flat
    Upon the ground, and before the chronicle
    Of affected homage foxed so many books,
    They warded the blank waters of the lakes
    And island canopies which were entailed
    To that casino. Long before the rain
    Swept through its boarded windows and the leaves
    Filled its encrusted fountains, they arrayed
    The twilights of the mythy goober khan.
    The centuries of excellence to be
    Rose out of promise and became the sooth
    Of trombones floating in the trees.
                             The toil
    Of thought evoked a peace eccentric to
    The eye and tinkling to the ear. Gruff drums
    Could beat, yet not alarm the populace.
    The indolent progressions of the swans
    Made earth come right; a peanut parody
    For peanut people.
                             And serener myth
    Conceiving from its perfect plenitude,
    Lusty as June, more fruitful than the weeks
    Of ripest summer, always lingering
    To touch again the hottest bloom, to strike
    Once more the longest resonance, to cap
    The clearest woman with apt weed, to mount
    The thickest man on thickest stallion-back,
    This urgent, competent, serener myth
    Passed like a circus.
                             Politic man ordained
    Imagination as the fateful sin.
    Grandmother and her basketful of pears
    Must be the crux for our compendia.
    That’s world enough, and more, if one includes
    Her daughters to the peached and ivory wench
    For whom the towers are built. The burgher’s breast,
    And not a delicate ether star-impaled,
    Must be the place for prodigy, unless
    Prodigious things are tricks. The world is not
    The bauble of the sleepless nor a word
    That should import a universal pith
    To Cuba. Jot these milky matters down.
    They nourish Jupiters. Their casual pap
    Will drop like sweetness in the empty nights
    When too great rhapsody is left annulled
    And liquorish prayer provokes new sweats: so, so:
    Life is an old casino in a wood.
    IV
    Is the function of the poet here mere sound,
    Subtler than the ornatest prophecy,
    To stuff the ear? It causes him to make
    His infinite repetition and alloys
    Of pick of ebon, pick of halcyon.
    It weights him with nice logic for the prim.
    As part of nature he is part of us.
    His rarities are ours: may they be fit
    And reconcile us to our selves in those
    True reconcilings, dark, pacific words,
    And the adroiter harmonies of their fall.
    Close the cantina. Hood the chandelier.
    The