Wallace Stevens

"O thin men of Haddam, Why do you imagine golden birds? Do you not see how the blackbird Walks around the feet Of the women about you?"

"I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know."

"It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs."

"A few things for themselves, Florida, venereal soil, Disclose to the lover."

"Donna, donna, dark, Stooping in indigo gown And cloudy constellations, Conceal yourself or disclose Fewest things to the lover — A hand that bears a thick-leaved fruit, A pungent bloom against your shade."

"Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns, Meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous, Eliciting the still sustaining pomps Of speech which are like music so profound They seem an exaltation without sound."

"These Are the music of meet resignation; these The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you To magnify, if in that drifting waste You are to be accompanied by more Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon."

"She sang beyond the genius of the sea"

"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."

"The man bent over his guitar, A shearsman of sorts. The day was green. They said, "You have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they are." The man replied, "Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar." And they said then, "But play, you must, A tune beyond us, yet ourselves, A tune upon the blue guitar Of things exactly as they are.""

"If to serenade almost to man Is to miss, by that, things as they are, Say that it is the serenade Of a man that plays a blue guitar."

"So that's life, then: things are they are? It picks its way on the blue guitar. A million people on one string? And all their manner in the thing, And all their manner, right and wrong, And all their manner, weak and strong? And that's life, then: things as they are, This buzzing of the blue guitar."

"Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry, Of the torches wisping in the underground, Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light. There are no shadows in our sun, Day is desire and night is sleep. There are no shadows anywhere. The earth, for us, is flat and bare. There are no shadows."

"The thinking of art seems final when The thinking of god is smoky dew."

"It is the sun that shares our works. The moon shares nothing. It is a sea. When shall I come to say of the sun, It is a sea; it shares nothing; The sun no longer shares our works And the earth is alive with creeping men, Mechanical beetles never quite warm? And shall I then stand in the sun, as now I stand in the moon, and call it good, The immaculate, the merciful good, Detached from us, from things as they are? Not to be part of the sun? To stand Remote and call it merciful? The strings are cold on the blue guitar."

"Struggling toward impassioned choirs, Crying among the clouds, enraged By gold antagonists in air — I know my lazy, leaden twang Is like the reason in a storm; And yet it brings the storm to bear. I twang it out and leave it there."

"And the color, the overcast blue Of the air, in which the blue guitar Is a form, described but difficult, And I am merely a shadow hunched Above the arrowy, still string, The maker of a thing yet to be made; The color like a thought that grows Out of a mood, the tragic robe Of the actor, half his gesture, half His speech, the dress of his meaning, silk Sodden with his melancholy words, The weather of his stage, himself."

"Behold The approach of him whom none believes, Whom all believe that all believe, A pagan in a varnished car."

"Slowly the ivy on the stones Becomes the stones. Women become The cities, children become the fields And men in waves become the sea."

"The sea returns upon the men, The fields entrap the children, brick Is a weed and all the flies are caught, Wingless and withered, but living alive. The discord merely magnified. Deeper within the belly's dark Of time, time grows upon the rock."

"The blue guitar And I are one."

"I know that timid breathing. Where Do I begin and end? And where, As I strum the thing, do I pick up That which momentously declares Itself not to be I and yet Must be. It could be nothing else."

"Be content — Expansions, diffusions — content to be The unspotted imbecile revery, The heraldic center of the world Of blue, blue sleek with a hundred chins, The amorist Adjective aflame..."

"First one beam, then another, then A thousand are radiant in the sky. Each is both star and orb; and day Is the riches of their atmosphere."

"A candle is enough to light the world. It makes it clear. Even at noon It glistens in essential dark. At night, it lights the fruit and wine, The book and bread, things as they are..."

"Things as they are have been destroyed. Have I? Am I a man that is dead At a table on which the food is cold? Is my thought a memory, not alive? Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood And whichever it may be, is it mine?"

"Place honey on the altars and die, You lovers that are bitter at heart."

"That I may reduce the monster to Myself, and then may be myself In face of the monster, be more than part Of it, more than the monstrous player of One of its monstrous lutes, not be Alone, but reduce the monster and be, Two things, the two together as one, And play of the monster and of myself, Or better not of myself at all, But of that as its intelligence, Being the lion in the lute Before the lion locked in stone."

"What is there in life except one's ideas. Good air, good friend, what is there in life? Is it ideas that I believe?"

"A substitute for all the gods: This self, not that gold self aloft, Alone, one's shadow magnified, Lord of the body, looking down, As now and called most high, The shadow of Chocorua In an immenser heaven, aloft, Alone, lord of the land and lord Of the men that live in the land, high lord. One's self and the mountains of one's land, Without shadows, without magnificence, The flesh, the bone, the dirt, the stone."

"Poetry is the subject of the poem, From this the poem issues and To this returns. Between the two, Between issue and return, there is An absence in reality, Things as they are. Or so we say. But are these separate?"

"I play. But this is what I think."

"The swarm of thoughts, the swarm of dreams Of inaccessible Utopia. A mountainous music always seemed To be falling and to be passing away."

"It is the sea that whitens the roof. The sea drifts through the winter air. It is the sea that the north wind makes. The sea is in the falling snow. This gloom is the darkness of the sea."

"I am a native in this world And think in it as a native thinks"

"The wind in which the dead leaves blow. Here I inhale profounder strength And as I am, I speak and move And things are as I think they are And say they are on the blue guitar."

"What is beyond the cathedral, outside, Balances with nuptial song. So it is to sit and to balance things To and to and to the point of still, To say of one mask it is like, To say of another it is like, To know that the balance does not quite rest, That the mask is strange, however like."

"Throw away the lights, the definitions, And say of what you see in the dark That it is this or that it is that, But do not use the rotted names. How should you walk in that space and know Nothing of the madness of space, Nothing of its jocular procreations? Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand Between you and the shapes you take When the crust of shape has been destroyed."

"Here is the bread of time to come, Here is its actual stone. The bread Will be our bread, the stone will be Our bed and we shall sleep by night. We shall forget by day, except The moments when we choose to play The imagined pine, the imagined jay."

"Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea Of this invention, this invented world, The inconceivable idea of the sun.You must become an ignorant man again And see the sun again with an ignorant eye And see it clearly in the idea of it.Never suppose an inventing mind as source Of this idea nor for that mind compose A voluminous master folded in his fire."

"The death of one god is the death of all."

"Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was A name for something that never could be named. There was a project for the sun and is.There is a project for the sun. The sun Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be In the difficulty of what it is to be."

"So poisonousAre the ravishments of truth, so fatal to The truth itself, the first idea becomes The hermit in a poet’s metaphors,Who comes and goes and comes and goes all day."

"The monastic man is an artist.The philosopher Appoints man’s place in music, say, today. But the priest desires. The philosopher desires.And not to have is the beginning of desire. To have what is not is its ancient cycle."

"The poem refreshes life so that we share, For a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies Belief in an immaculate beginningAnd sends us, winged by an unconscious will, To an immaculate end."

"The poem, through candor, brings back a power again That gives a candid kind to everything."

"Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation."

"The first idea was not our own. Adam In Eden was the father of Descartes And eve made air the mirror of herself,Of her sons and of her daughters."

"The clouds preceded us.There was a muddy centre before we breathed. There was a myth before the myth began, Venerable and articulate and complete.From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves And hard it is in spite of blazoned days."

"One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits."