Wallace Stevens Quotes

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 words they spoke were voices that she heard. She looked at them and saw them as they were And what she felt fought off the barest phrase.

If sex were all, then every trembling hand
Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.

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

The blue guitar And I are one.

"Sunday Morning

I

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

II

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.

III

Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

IV

She says, "I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when t

People should like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it.

I know that timid breathing. Where Do I begin and end? And where, As I strum the thing, do I pick up That which momentously declares Itself not to be I and yet Must be. It could be nothing else.

We live in an old chaos of the sun, Or an old dependency of day and night, Or island solitude, unsponsored, free, Of that wide water, inescapable. Deer walk upon our mountains, and quail Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness; And, in the isolation of the sky, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Beneath every no lays a passion for yes that had never been broken.

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 men Are one and the sailor and the sea are one.

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

The sun, that brave man, Comes through boughs that lie in wait, That brave man. Green and gloomy eyes In dark forms of the grass Run away. The good stars, Pale helms and spiky spurs, Run away. Fears of my bed, Fears of life and fears of death, Run away. That brave man comes up From below and walks without meditation, That brave man.

The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain

There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.

It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction

How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds

For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:

The exact rock where his inexactness
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged

Where he could lie and gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.

Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in the falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The boughs of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.