The Poetry Of Wallace Stevens

A blue pigeon it is, that circles the blue sky,

On sidelong wing, around and round and round.

A white pigeon it is, that flutters to the ground,

Grown tired of flight. Like a dark rabbi, I

Observed, when young, the nature of mankind,

In lordly study. Every day, I found

Man proved a gobbet in my mincing world.

Like a rose rabbi, later, I pursued,

And still pursue, the origin and course

Of love, but until now I never knew

That fluttering things have so distinct a shade.

No spring can follow past meridian.

Yet you persist with anecdotal bliss

To make believe a starry connaissance.

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

The magnificent cause of being,

The imagination, the one reality

In this imagined world

Leaves you

With him for whom no phantasy moves,

And you are pierced by a death.

Another Weeping Woman

Pour the unhappiness out

From your too bitter heart,

Which grieving will not sweeten.

Poison grows in this dark.

It is in the water of tears

Its black blooms rise.

Is there no change of death in paradise?

Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs

Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,

Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,

With rivers like our own that seek for seas

They never find, the same receding shores