Wallace Stevens Quotes

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

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.

"A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts"

The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur — There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
And August the most peaceful month.

To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
Without that monument of cat,
The cat forgotten in the moon;

And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;

Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;
And east rushes west and west rushes down,
No matter. The grass is full

And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,
The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A self that touches all edges,

You become a self that fills the four corners of night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you are humped high, humped up,

You are humped higher and higher, black as stone — You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.

This will make widows wince. But fictive things Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

The exceeding brightness of this early sun
Makes me conceive how dark I have become.

The number of ways of passing between the traditional two fixed points of man’s life, that is to say, of passing from the self to God, is fixed only by the limitations of space, which is limitless. The eternal philosopher is the eternal pilgrim on that road. It is difficult to take him seriously when he relies on the evidence of the teeth, the throat and the bowels. Yet in the one poem that is unimpeachably divine, the poem of the ascent into heaven, it is possible to say that there can be no faults, since it is precisely the faults of life this poem enables us to leave behind. If the idea of God is the ultimate poetic idea, then the idea of the ascent into heaven is only a little below it.

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 and A wait within that certainty, a rest In the swags of pine-trees bordering the lake. Perhaps there are times of inherent excellence

Upon the bank, she stood
In the cool
Of spent emotions.
She felt, among the leaves,
The dew
Of old devotions.

She walked upon the grass,
Still quavering.
The winds were like her maids,
On timid feet,
Fetching her woven scarves,
Yet wavering.

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

It was enough for her that she remembered.

Of the Surface of Things

In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;
But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four
Hills and a cloud.

She walked upon the grass, Still quavering. The winds were like her maids, On timid feet, Fetching her woven scarves, Yet wavering.

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

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

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