Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change
Context: 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.
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Harmonium
"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
Harmonium (1923)
“Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.”
Wallace Stevens
book
Harmonium
"The Emperor of Ice Cream"
Harmonium (1923)
Source: The Collected Poems
Context: Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
“Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.”
The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)
Context: 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.
Context: 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.
“Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.”
Source: The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination
“The exceeding brightness of this early sun
Makes me conceive how dark I have become.”
Source: The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play
"The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm"
Transport to Summer (1947)
Context: The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom the book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
“A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.”
Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia
“The mind can never be satisfied.”
"The Well Dressed Man With a Beard"
Harmonium (1923)
Variant: It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
Source: The Collected Poems
Context: Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:
The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,
The aureole above the humming house...
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
Wallace Stevens
book
Harmonium
"The Snow Man"
Harmonium (1923)
Context: p>One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitterOf the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare placeFor the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.</p
“The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully.”
Source: The Collected Poems