Wallace Stevens Quotes

A dead shepherd brought tremendous chords from hell<p>And bad the sheep carouse. Or so they said. Children in love with them brought early flowers And scattered them about, no two alike.

Red-in-red repetitions never going Away,a little rusty, a little rouged, A little roughened and ruder, a crown<p>The eye could not escape, a red renown Blowing itself upon the tedious ear.

It was enough for her that she remembered.

The blue woman, linked and lacquered, at her window Did not desire that feathery argentines Should be cold silver, neither that frothy clouds<p> Should foam, be foamy waves, should move like them

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.

To speak of joy and to sing of it, borne on The shoulders of joyous men, to feel the heart That is the common, the bravest fundament,<p> This is a facile exercise

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

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.

Like a page of music, like an upper air, Like a momentary color, in which swans Were seraphs, were saints, were changing essences. <p> The west wind was the music, the motion, the force To which the swans curveted, a will to change, A will to make iris frettings on the blank.

He tries by a peculiar speech to speak<p> The peculiar potency of the general

Is there a poem that never reaches words<p> And one that chaffers the time away? Is the poem both peculiar and general? There’s a meditation there, in which there seems To be an evasion, a thing not apprehended or Not apprehended well. Does the poet Evade us, as in a senseless element?

The poem goes form the poet’s gibberish to The gibberish of the vulgate and back again.

A fictive covering Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind.

Clothe me entire in the final filament, So that I tremble with such love so known And myself am precious for your perfecting.

I am the spouse. She took her necklace off And laid it in the sand. As I am, I am The spouse. She opened her stone-studded belt.<p> I am the spouse, divested of bright gold, The spouse beyond emerald or amethyst, Beyond the burning body that I bear. <p>I am the woman stripped more nakedly Than nakedness, standing before an inflexible Order, saying I am the contemplated spouse.