Wallace Stevens

The meeting at the edge of the field seems like an invention, an embrace between one desperate clod and another in a fantastic consciousness, in a queer assertion of humanity: a theorem proposed between the two – two figures in a nature of the sun, in the sun’s design in its own happiness, as if nothingness contained a metier, a vital assumption, an impermanence in its permanent cold, an illusion so desired that the leaves came and covered the high rock, that the lilacs came and bloomed like a blindness cleansed, exclaiming bright sight, as it was satisfied, in a birth of sight.

4 thoughts on “Wallace Stevens

  1. shinichi Post author

    From Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose

    Literature Network Forums

    http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?27067-Wallace-Stevens/page6

    From The Rock (collection)

    THE ROCK

    I. Seventy Years Later

    It is an illusion that we were ever alive,
    Lived in the houses of mothers, arranged ourselves
    By our own motions in a freedom of air.

    Regard the freedom of seventy years ago.
    It is no longer air. The houses still stand,
    Though they are rigid in rigid emptiness.

    Even our shadows, their shadows, no longer remain.
    The lives these lived in the mind are at an end.
    They never were…..The sounds of the guitar

    Were not and are not. Absurd. The words spoken
    Were not and are not. It is not to be believed.
    The meeting at noon at the edge of the field seems like
     
    An invention, an embrace between one desperate clod
    And another in fantastic consciousness,
    In a queer assertion of humanity:
     
    A theorem proposed between the two–
    Two figures in a nature of the sun,
    In the sun’s design of its own happiness,
     
    As if nothingness contained a metier,
    A vital assumption, an impermanence
    In its permanent cold, an illusion so desired
     
    That the green leaves came and covered the high rock,
    That the lilacs came and bloomed, like a blindness cleaned,
    Exclaiming bright sight, as it was satisfied,

     
    In a birth of sight. The blooming and the musk
    Were being alive, an incessant being alive,
    A particular of being, that gross universe.

    II. The Poem as Icon

    It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves.
    We must be cured of it by a cure of the ground
    Or a cure of ourselves, that is equal to a cure

    Of the ground, a cure beyond forgetfulness.
    And yet the leaves, if they broke into bud,
    If they broke into bloom, if they bore fruit,

    And if we ate the incipient colorings
    Of their fresh culls might be a cure of the ground.
    The fiction of the leaves is the icon

    Of the poem, the figuration of blessedness,
    And the icon is the man. The pearled chaplet of spring,
    The magnum wreath of summer, time’s autumn snood,

    Its copy of the sun, these cover the rock.
    These leaves are the poem, the icon and the man.
    These are a cure of the ground and of ourselves,

    In the predicate that there is nothing else.
    They bud and bloom and bear their fruit without change.
    They are more than leaves that cover the barren rock.

    They bud the whitest eye, the pallidest sprout,
    New senses in the engenderings of sense,
    The desire to be at the end of distances,

    The body quickened and the mind in root.
    They bloom as a man loves, as he lives in love.
    They bear their fruit so that the year is known,

    As if its understanding was brown skin,
    The honey in its pulp, the final found,
    The plenty of the year and of the world.

    In this plenty, the poem makes meanings of the rock,
    Of such mixed motion and such imagery
    That its barrenness becomes a thousand things

    And so exists no more. This is the cure
    Of leaves and of the ground and of ourselves.
    His words are both the icon and the man.

    {two of three parts}

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  2. shinichi Post author

    (sk)

    … as if nothingness contained a metier, a vital assumption, an impermanence in its permanent cold, an illusion so desired that the leaves came and covered the high rock, that the lilacs came and bloomed like a blindness cleansed, exclaiming bright sight, as it was satisfied …

    こんな綺麗な言葉を紡ぐ人が、他にいるだろうか。

    バーに不機嫌で難しい顔をした Uncle Wallace がいて、酒を飲んでいる。そばに行って「emptiness と nothingness の違いはなんだと思う」なんて言って、いやな顔をさせてみたい。そんな誘惑にかられる。

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