The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens

moonlight is not yellow but a white
    That silences the ever-faithful town.
    How pale and how possessed a night it is,
    How full of exhalations of the sea…
    All this is older than its oldest hymn,
    Has no more meaning than tomorrow’s bread.
    But let the poet on his balcony
    Speak and the sleepers in their sleep shall move,
    Waken, and watch the moonlight on their floors.
    This may be benediction, sepulcher,
    And epitaph. It may, however, be
    An incantation that the moon defines
    By mere example opulently clear.
    And the old casino likewise may define
    An infinite incantation of our selves
    In the grand decadence of the perished swans.
NUDITY AT THE CAPITAL
    But nakedness, woolen massa, concerns an innermost atom.
    If that remains concealed, what does the bottom matter?
NUDITY IN THE COLONIES
    Black man, bright nouveautés leave one, at best, pseudonymous.
    Thus one is most disclosed when one is most anonymous.
RE-STATEMENT OF ROMANCE
    The night knows nothing of the chants of night
    It is what it is as I am what I am:
    And in perceiving this I best perceive myself
    And you. Only we two may interchange
    Each in the other what each has to give.
    Only we two are one, not you and night,
    Nor night and I, but you and I, alone,
    So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,
    So far beyond the casual solitudes,
    That night is only the background of our selves,
    Supremely true each to its separate self,
    In the pale light that each upon the other throws.
THE READER
    All night I sat reading a book,
    Sat reading as if in a book
    Of sombre pages.
    It was autumn and falling stars
    Covered the shrivelled forms
    Crouched in the moonlight.
    No lamp was burning as I read,
    A voice was mumbling, “Everything
    Falls back to coldness,
    Even the musky muscadines,
    The melons, the vermilion pears
    Of the leafless garden.”
    The sombre pages bore no print
    Except the trace of burning stars
    In the frosty heaven.
MUD MASTER
    The muddy rivers of spring
    Are snarling
    Under muddy skies.
    The mind is muddy.
    As yet, for the mind, new banks
    Of bulging green
    Are not;
    Sky-sides of gold
    Are not.
    The mind snarls.
    Blackest of pickanines,
    There is a master of mud.
    The shaft of light
    Falling, far off, from sky to land,
    That is he—
    The peach-bud maker,
    The mud master,
    The master of the mind.
ANGLAIS MORT À FLORENCE
    A little less returned for him each spring.
    Music began to fail him. Brahms, although
    His dark familiar, often walked apart.
    His spirit grew uncertain of delight,
    Certain of its uncertainty, in which
    That dark companion left him unconsoled
    For a self returning mostly memory.
    Only last year he said that the naked moon
    Was not the moon he used to see, to feel
    (In the pale coherences of moon and mood
    When he was young), naked and alien,
    More leanly shining from a lankier sky.
    Its ruddy pallor had grown cadaverous.
    He used his reason, exercised his will,
    Turning in time to Brahms as alternate
    In speech. He was that music and himself.
    They were particles of order, a single majesty:
    But he remembered the time when he stood alone.
    He stood at last by God’s help and the police;
    But he remembered the time when he stood alone.
    He yielded himself to that single majesty;
    But he remembered the time when he stood alone,
    When to be and delight to be seemed to be one,
    Before the colors deepened and grew small.
THE PLEASURES OF MERELY CIRCULATING
    The garden flew round with the angel,
    The angel flew round with the clouds,
    And the clouds flew round and the clouds flew round
    And the clouds flew round with the clouds.
    Is there any secret in skulls,
    The cattle skulls in the woods?
    Do the drummers in black hoods
    Rumble anything out of their drums?
    Mrs. Anderson’s Swedish baby
    Might well have been German or Spanish,
    Yet that things go round and again go round
    Has rather a classical sound.
LIKE DECORATIONS IN A NIGGER CEMETERY
    [for Arthur Powell]
    I
    In the far South the sun of autumn is passing
    Like Walt Whitman walking