Wallace Stevens

"We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues."

"Abysmal instruments make sounds like pips Of the sweeping meanings that we add to them."

"Yet voluble of dumb violence. You look Across the roofs as sigil and as ward And in your centre mark them and are cowed . . ."

"Not to be realized because not to Be seen, not to be loved nor hated because Not to be realized."

"Without a name and nothing to be desired, If only imagined but imagined well."

"My house has changed a little in the sun. The fragrance of the magnolias come close, False flick, false form, but falseness close to kin."

"It must be visible or invisible, Invisible or visible or both: A seeing and unseeing in the eye.The weather and the giant of the weather, Say the weather, the mere weather, the mere air: An abstraction blooded, as a man by thought."

"Perhaps The truth depends on a walk around a lake,A composing as the body tires, a stop To see hepatica, a stop to watch A definition growing certain andA wait within that certainty, a rest In the swags of pine-trees bordering the lake. Perhaps there are times of inherent excellence"

"As a man and woman meet and love forthwith. Perhaps there are moments of awakening, Extreme, fortuitous, personal, in whichWe more than awaken, sit on the edge of sleep, As on an elevation, and behold The academies like structures in a mist."

"The first idea is an imagined thing."

"Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis, Incipit and a form to speak the word And every latent double in the word, Beau linguist."

"He might take habit, whether from wave or phrase,Or power of the wave, or deepened speech, Or a leaner being, moving in on him, Of greater aptitude and apprehension,As if the waves at last were never broken, As if the language suddenly, with ease, Said things it had laboriously spoken."

"The romantic intoning, the declaimed clairvoyance Are parts of apotheosis, appropriate And of its nature, the idiom thereof."

"Apotheosis is not The origin of the major man. He comes,p>Compact in invincible foils, from reason, Lighted at midnight by the studious eye, Swaddled in revery, the object ofThe hum of thoughts evaded in the mind..."

"My dame, sing for this person accurate songs."

"He is and may be but oh! He is, he is, This foundling of the infected past, so bright, So moving in the manner of his hand. Yet look not at his colored eyes. Give him No names. Dismiss him from your images. The hot of him is purest in the heart."

"The major abstraction is the idea of man And major man is its exponent, abler In the abstract than in his singular, More fecund as principle than particle"

"In being more than an exception, part,Though an heroic part, of the commonal. The major abstraction is the commonal, The inanimate, difficult visage."

"What chieftain, walking by himself, crying Most miserable, most victorious,Does not see these separate figures one by one, And yet see only one, in his old coat, His slouching pantaloons, beyond the town,Looking for what was, where it used to be?"

"It is of him, ephebe, to make, to confect The final elegance, not to console Nor sanctify, but plainly to propound."

"The old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets Inhaled the appointed odor, while the doves Rose up like phantoms from chronologies."

"The bees came booming as if they had never gone, As if hyacinths had never gone. We say This changes and that changes. Thus the constant Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause In a universe of inconstancy. This meansNight-blue is an inconstant thing. The seraph Is satyr in Saturn, according to his thoughts."

"The President ordains the bee to be Immortal. The President ordains."

"The President has apples on the table And barefoot servants round him, who adjust The curtains to a metaphysical "t""

"Should there be a question of returning or Of death in memory’s dream? Is spring a sleep?This warmth is for lovers at last accomplishing Their love, this beginning, not resuming, this Booming and booming of the new-come bee."

"The right, uplifted foreleg of the horse Suggested that, at the final funeral, The music halted and the horse stood still."

"Nothing had happened because nothing had changed. Yet the General was rubbish in the end."

"Two things of opposite natures seem to depend On one another, as a man depends On a woman, day on night, the imaginedOn the real. This is the origin of change. Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace And forth the particulars of rapture come."

"Music falls on the silence like a sense, A passion that we feel, not understand."

"In solitude the trumpets of solitude Are not of another solitude resounding; A little string speaks for a crowd of voices."

"The partaker partakes of that which changes him. The child that touches takes character from the thing, The body, it touches. The captain and his menAre one and the sailor and the sea are one."

"On a blue island in a sky-wide water The wild orange trees continued to bloom and to bear, Long after the planter’s death."

"An unaffected man in a negative light Could not have borne his labor nor have died Sighing that he should leave the banjo’s twang."

"Bethou me, said sparrow, to the crackled blade, And you, and you, bethou me as you blow, When in my coppice you behold me be."

"There was such idiot minstrelsy in rain, So many clappers going without bells, That these bethous compose a heavenly gong. One voice repeating, one tireless chorister, The phrases of a single phrase, ke-ke, A single text, granite monotony"

"Eye without lid, mind without any dream —These are of minstrels lacking minstrelsy, Of an earth in which the first leaf is the tale Of leaves, in which the sparrow is a birdOf stone, that never changes. Bethou him, you And you, bethou him and bethou. It is A sound like any other. It will end."

"Tonight the lilacs magnify The easy passion, the ever-ready love Of the lover that lies within us and we breatheAn odor evoking nothing, absolute. We encounter in the dead middle of the night The purple odor, the abundant bloom."

"The fluctuations of certainty, the change Of degrees of perception in the scholar’s dark."

"I am the spouse. She took her necklace off And laid it in the sand. As I am, I am The spouse. She opened her stone-studded belt. I am the spouse, divested of bright gold, The spouse beyond emerald or amethyst, Beyond the burning body that I bear. I am the woman stripped more nakedly Than nakedness, standing before an inflexible Order, saying I am the contemplated spouse."

"Clothe me entire in the final filament, So that I tremble with such love so known And myself am precious for your perfecting."

"A fictive covering Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind."

"The poem goes form the poet’s gibberish to The gibberish of the vulgate and back again."

"Is there a poem that never reaches words And one that chaffers the time away? Is the poem both peculiar and general? There’s a meditation there, in which there seemsTo be an evasion, a thing not apprehended or Not apprehended well. Does the poet Evade us, as in a senseless element?"

"He tries by a peculiar speech to speak The peculiar potency of the general"

"Like a page of music, like an upper air, Like a momentary color, in which swans Were seraphs, were saints, were changing essences. The west wind was the music, the motion, the force To which the swans curveted, a will to change, A will to make iris frettings on the blank."

"The casual is not Enough. The freshness of transformation isThe freshness of a world. It is our own, It is ourselves, the freshness of ourselves, And that necessity and that presentationAre rubbings of a glass in which we peer."

"Of these beginnings, gay and green, propose The suitable amours. Time will write them down."

"To speak of joy and to sing of it, borne on The shoulders of joyous men, to feel the heart That is the common, the bravest fundament, This is a facile exercise"

"The difficultest rigor is forthwith, On the image of what we see, to catch from that Irrational moment its unreasoning, As when the sun comes rising, when the sea Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall Of heaven-haven. These are not things transformed. Yet we are shaken by them as if they were. We reason about them with a later reason."

"The blue woman, linked and lacquered, at her window Did not desire that feathery argentines Should be cold silver, neither that frothy clouds Should foam, be foamy waves, should move like them"