Wallace Stevens Quotes

A thing final in itself and, therefore, good: One of the vast repetitions final in Themselves and, therefore, good, the going round<p> And round and round, the merely going round, Until merely going round is a final good, The way wine comes at a table in a wood.

I can Do all that angels can. I enjoy like them, Like men besides, like men in light secluded,<p> Enjoying angels.

These external regions, what do we fill them with Except reflections

There is a month, a year, there is a time In which majesty is a mirror of the self: I have not but I am and as I am, I am.

Is it he or is it I that experience this?

What am I to believe? If the angel in his cloud, Serenely gazing at the violent abyss, Plucks on his strings to pluck abysmal glory,<p> Leaps downward through evening’s revelations, and On his spredden wings, needs nothing but deep space, Forgets the gold centre, the golden destiny,<p>Grows warm in the motionless motion of his flight, Am I that imagine this angel less-satisfied? Are the wings his, the lapis-haunted air?

But to impose is not To discover. To discover an order as of A season, to discover summer and know it, To discover winter and know it well, to find Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all, Out of nothing to have come on major weather, It is possible, possible, possible. It must Be possible. It must be that in time The real will from its crude compoundings come,<p>Seeming at first, a beast disgorged, unlike, Warmed by a desperate milk. To find the real, To be stripped of every fiction except one, The fiction of an absolute — Angel, Be silent in your luminous cloud and hear The luminous melody of proper sound.

He imposes orders as he thinks of them, As the fox and snake do. It is a brave affair.

Straight to the utmost crown of night he flew. The nothingness was a nakedness, a point Beyond which thought could not progress as thought. He had to choose. But it was not a choice Between excluding things. It was not a choice Between, but of. He chose to include the things That in each other are included, the whole, The complicate, the amassing harmony.

The nothingness was a nakedness, a point,</p>Beyond which fact could not progress as fact. Thereon the learning of the man conceived Once more night’s pale illuminations, gold Beneath, far underneath, the surface of His eye and audible in the mountain of His ear, the very material of his mind.

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.

They married well because the marriage-place Was what they loved. It was neither heaven nor hell. They were love’s characters come face to face.

Each must the other take as sign, short sign To stop the whirlwind, balk the elements.

This was their ceremonial hymn: Anon We loved but would no marriage make. Anon The one refused the other one to take,<p> Foreswore the sipping of the marriage wine.

We reason of these things with later reason And we make of what we see, what we see clearly And have seen, a place dependent on ourselves.