major american writers: wallace stevens

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Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Week 14 | 5/5/16

Poet(s) of the Week: Mary Oliver and Billy CollinsMajor Poem: The Rock 445

Questions are Remarks 394; Long and Sluggish Lines 442; AQuiet Normal Life 443; Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour 444; The Planet on the Table 450; The River of Rivers in Connecticut 451; Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself 451; A Clear Day and No Memories 475; Of Mere Being 476; First Warmth 597; As You Leave the Room 597

Major American Writers: Wallace StevensPoet(s) of the Week: Mary Oliver (1935) and Billy Collins (1941- ) (Presentation TBA)

Major American Writers: Wallace StevensPoet(s) of the Week: Mary Oliver (1935- )

Mary Oliver (1935- )Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

The JourneyOne day you finally knewwhat you had to do, and began,though the voices around youkept shoutingtheir bad advice--though the whole housebegan to trembleand you felt the old tugat your ankles."Mend my life!"each voice cried.But you didn't stop.Mary Oliver (1935- )Major American Writers: Wallace StevensYou knew what you had to do,though the wind priedwith its stiff fingersat the very foundations,though their melancholywas terrible.It was already lateenough, and a wild night,and the road full of fallenbranches and stones.But little by little,as you left their voices behind,the stars began to burnthrough the sheets of clouds,and there was a new voicewhich you slowlyrecognized as your own,that kept you companyas you strode deeper and deeperinto the world,determined to dothe only thing you could do--determined to savethe only life you could save.Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.You do not have to walk on your kneesfor a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.You only have to let the soft animal of your bodylove what it loves.Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.Meanwhile the world goes on.Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rainare moving across the landscapes,over the prairies and the deep trees,the mountains and the rivers.Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,are heading home again.Mary Oliver (1935- )Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,the world offers itself to your imagination,calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--over and over announcing your placein the family of things.Picking Blueberries, Austerlitz, New York,1957

Once, in summerin the blueberries, I fell asleep, and wokewhen a deer stumbled against me.

I guessshe was so busy with her own happinessshe had grown carelessand was just wandering along

listeningto the wind as she leaned downto lip up the sweetness.So, there we were Mary Oliver (1935- )Major American Writers: Wallace StevensPicking Blueberries, Austerlitz, New York,1957 (cont.)

with nothing between usbut a few leaves, and windsglossy voiceshouting instructions.

The deerbacked away finallyand flung up her white tailand went floating off toward the trees -

but the moment she did thatwas so wide and so deepit has lasted to this day; I have only to think of her Mary Oliver (1935- )Major American Writers: Wallace StevensPicking Blueberries, Austerlitz, New York,1957 (cont.)

the flower of her amazementand the stalled breath of her curiosity, and even the damp touch of her solicitudebefore she took flight -

to be absent again from this worldand alive, again, in anotherfor thirty yearssleepy and amazed,

rising out of the rough weedslistening and looking.Beautiful girl, where are you? Mary Oliver (1935- )Major American Writers: Wallace StevensI don't know exactly what a prayer is.I do know how to pay attention, how to fall downinto the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,which is what I have been doing all day.Tell me, what else should I have done?Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?Tell me, what is it you plan to dowith your one wild and precious life?Mary Oliver (1935- )Major American Writers: Wallace StevensThe Summer DayWho made the world?Who made the swan, and the black bear?Who made the grasshopper?This grasshopper, I mean--the one who has flung herself out of the grass,the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down,who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.and the meanness gone.And I greeted him and asked himinto the house,and lit the lamp,and looked into his blank eyesin which at lastI saw what a child must love,I saw what love might have donehad we loved in time.Mary Oliver (1935- )Major American Writers: Wallace StevensI did not answer,but slept fitfullybetween his hours of rapping.But finally there came the nightwhen I rose out of my sheetsand stumbled down the hall.The door fell open

and I knew I was savedand could bear him,pathetic and hollow,with even the least of his dreamsfrozen inside him,A VisitorMy father, for example,who was young onceand blue-eyed,returnson the darkest of nightsto the porch and knockswildly at the door,and if I answerI must be preparedfor his waxy face,for his lower lipswollen with bitterness.And so, for a long time,Starlings in WinterHear Garrison Keillor read Starlings in Winter (@2 min 27 sec)

Mary Oliver (1935- )Major American Writers: Wallace StevensStarlings in Winter

Chunky and noisy,but with stars in their black feathers, they spring from the telephone wireand instantly

they are acrobatsin the freezing wind.And now, in the theater of air,they swing over buildings,

dipping and rising;they float like one stippled starthat opens,becomes for a moment fragmented,


then closes again;and you watchand you trybut you simply can't imagine

how they do itwith no articulated instruction, no pause,only the silent confirmationthat they are this notable thing,

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spinover and over again,full of gorgeous life.Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,


even in the leafless winter,even in the ashy city.I am thinking nowof grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots trying to leave the ground,I feel my heartpumping hard, I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.I want to be light and frolicsome.I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,as though I had wings.

Mary Oliver (1935- )Major American Writers: Wallace StevensAcross the wide waterssomething comesfloatinga slimand delicate

ship, filledwith white flowersand it moveson its miraculous muscles

as though time didnt existas though bringing such giftsto the dry shorewas a happinessThe SwanMary Oliver (1935- )Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

almost beyond bearing.And now it turns its dark eyes,it rearrangesthe clouds of its wings,

it trailsan elaborate webbed foot,the color of charcoal.Soon it will be here.

Oh, what shall I dowhen the poppy-colored beak rests in my hand?Said Mrs. Blake of the poetThe Swan

Mary Oliver (1935- )Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

I miss my husbands companyhe is so oftenin paradise.Of course! The path to heaven

doesnt lie down in flat miles.Its in the imaginationwith which you perceivethis world,

and the gestureswith which you honor it.Oh, what will I do, what will I say, whenthosewhite wingstouch the shore? The SwanMary Oliver (1935- )Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

From When Death Comes

When its over, I want to say: all my lifeI was a bride married to amazement.I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When its over, I dont want to wonderif I have made of my life something particular, and real.I dont want to find myself sighing and frightened,or full of argument.

I dont want to end up simply having visited this world.Major American Writers: Wallace StevensMary Oliver (1935- )Major American Writers: Wallace StevensPoet of the Week: Billy Collins (1941- ) (Presentation TBA)

Billy Collins Gives a TED TalkWatch here.

Billy Collins (1941- )Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

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Billy Collins (1941- )Major American Writers: Wallace StevensI ask them to take a poemand hold it up to the lightlike a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poemand watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's roomand feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterskiacross the surface of a poemwaving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to dois tie the poem to a chair with ropeand torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hoseto find out what it really means. Billy CollinsIntroduction to Poetry

from The Apple that Astonished Paris (Fayetteville, Ark: University of Arkansas Press, 1996).


NostalgiaBilly Collins

Remember the 1340's? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,and at night we would play a game called "Find the Cow."Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.Billy Collins (1941- )Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Nostalgia (2)Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnetmarathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flagsof rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Strugglewhile your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.These days language seems transparent a badly broken code.Billy Collins (1941- )Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Nostalgia (3)The 1790's will never come again. Childhood was big.People would take walks to the very tops of hillsand write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.Billy Collins (1941- )Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Nostalgia (4)I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let merecapture the serenity of last month when we pickedberries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.Billy Collins (1941- )Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Nostalgia (5)Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of beesand the Latin names of flowers, watching the early lightflash off the slanted windows of the greenhouseand silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.Billy Collins (1941- )Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Nostalgia (6)As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,letting my memory rush over them like waterrushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.I was even thinking a little about the future, that placewhere people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,a dance whose name we can only guess.Billy Collins (1941- )Major American Writers: Wallace StevensOsso BucoBilly Collins

I love the sound of the bone against the plateand the fortress-like look of itlying before me in a moat of risotto,the meat soft as the leg of an angelwho has lived a purely airborne existence.And best of all, the secret marrow,the invaded privacy of the animalprized out with a knife and swallowed downwith cold, exhilarating wine.

the dishBilly Collins (1941- )Major American Writers: Wallace StevensOsso Buco (2)

I am swaying now in the hour after dinner,a citizen tilted back on his chair,a creature with a full stomach--something you don't hear much about in poetry,that sanctuary of hunger and deprivation.you know: the driving rain, the boots by the door,small birds searching for berries in winter.

Billy Collins (1941- )Major American Writers: Wallace StevensOsso Buco (3)

But tonight, the lion of contentmenthas placed a warm heavy paw on my chest,and I can only close my eyes and listento the drums of woe throbbing in the distanceand the sound of my wife's laughteron the telephone in the next room,the woman who cooked the savory osso buco,who pointed to show the butcher the ones she wanted.She who talks to her faraway friendwhile I linger here at the tablewith a hot, companionable cup of tea,feeling like one of the friendly natives,a reliable guide, maybe even the chief's favorite son.


Somewhere, a man is crawling up a rocky hillsideon bleeding knees and palms, an Irish penitentcarrying the stone of the world in his stomach;and elsewhere people of all nations stareat one another across a long, empty table.


But here, the candles give off their warm glow,the same light that Shakespeare and Izaac Walton wrote by,the light that lit and shadowed the faces of history.Only now it plays on the blue plates,the crumpled napkins, the crossed knife and fork.


In a while, one of us will go up to bedand the other will follow.Then we will slip below the surface of the nightinto miles of water, drifting down and downto the dark, soundless bottomuntil the weight of dreams pulls us lower still,below the shale and layered rock,beneath the strata of hunger and pleasure,into the broken bones of the earth itself,into the marrow of the only place we know.


Questions About AngelsBilly Collins

Of all the questions you might want to askabout angels, the only one you ever hearis how many can dance on the head of a pin.

No curiosity about how they pass the eternal timebesides circling the Throne chanting in Latinor delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earthor guiding a boy and girl across a rickety wooden bridge.

Do they fly through God's body and come out singing?Do they swing like children from the hingesof the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards?Do they sit alone in little gardens changing colors?Billy Collins (1941- )Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Questions About Angels (2)What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes,their diet of unfiltered divine light?What goes on inside their luminous heads? Is there a wallthese tall presences can look over and see hell?

If an angel fell off a cloud, would he leave a holein a river and would the hole float along endlesslyfilled with the silent letters of every angelic word?

If an angel delivered the mail, would he arrivein a blinding rush of wings or would he just assumethe appearance of the regular mailman andwhistle up the driveway reading the postcards?Billy Collins (1941- )Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Questions About Angels (3)No, the medieval theologians control the court.The only question you ever hear is aboutthe little dance floor on the head of a pinwhere halos are meant to converge and drift invisibly.

It is designed to make us think in millions,billions, to make us run out of numbers and collapseinto infinity, but perhaps the answer is simply one:one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,a small jazz combo working in the background.

She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautifuleyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans overto glance at his watch because she has been dancingforever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.Billy Collins (1941- )Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Building with Its Face Blown OffBilly Collins

How suddenly the privateIs revealed in a bombed-out city,How the blue and white striped wallpaper

Of a second story bedroom is nowExposed to the lightly falling snowAs if the room had answered the explosion

Wearing only its striped pajamas.Some neighbors and soldiersPoke around in the rubble below

A picture taken on Dec. 18, 1995 shows a general view of "Battalion boulevard" in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was completely destroyed during the confrontations between Bosnian and Croatian Forces in 1993.Billy Collins (1941- )Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Building with Its Face Blown Off (2)And stare up at the hanging staircase,The portrait of a grandfather,A door dangling from a single hinge.

And the bathroom looks amost embarrassedBy its uncovered ochre walls,The twisted mess of its plumbing,

The sink sinking to its knees,The ripped shower curtain,The torn goldfish trailing bubbles.

Its like a dollhouse viewAs if a child on its knees could reach inAnd pick up the bureau, straighten a picture.Billy Collins (1941- )Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Building with Its Face Blown Off (3)Or it might be a room on a stageIn a play with no characters,No dialogue or audience,

No beginning, middle and end--Just the broken furniture in the street,A shoe among the cinder blocks,

A light snow still fallingOn a distant steeple, and peopleCrossing a bridge that still stands.

And beyond that--crows in a tree,The statue of a leader on a horse,And clouds that look like smoke,Billy Collins (1941- )Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Building with Its Face Blown Off (4)And even farther on, in another countryOn a blanket under a shade tree,A man pouring wine into two glasses

And a woman sliding outThe wooden pegs of a wicker hamperFilled with bread, cheese, and several kinds of olives.Billy Collins (1941- )Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

LitanyBilly Collins

You are the bread and the knife,The crystal goblet and the wine...-Jacques Crickillon

You are the bread and the knife,the crystal goblet and the wine.You are the dew on the morning grassand the burning wheel of the sun.You are the white apron of the baker,and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,the plums on the counter,or the house of cards.And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.1:a prayer in a Christian church service in which the people at the service respond to lines spoken by the person who is leading the service2:a long list of complaints, problems, etc.He has alitanyof grievances against his former employer.The team blamed its losses on alitany of injuries.Billy Collins (1941- )Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Litany (2)It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,but you are not even closeto being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will showthat you are neither the boots in the cornernor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,the evening paper blowing down an alleyand the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.Billy Collins (1941- )Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Litany (3)I am also the moon in the treesand the blind woman's tea cup.But don't worry, I'm not the bread and the knife.You are still the bread and the knife.You will always be the bread and the knife,not to mention the crystal goblet and--somehow--the wine.a 3 year old recites "Litany"

Billy Collins (1941- )Major American Writers: Wallace StevensMajor American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Questions Are Remarks (394)

In the weed of summer comes the green sprout why.The sun aches and ails and then returns hallooUpon the horizon amid adult enfantillages.

Its fire fails to pierce the vision that beholds it,Fails to destroy the antique acceptances,Except that the grandson sees it as it is,

Peter the voyant, who says, Mother, what is that The object that rises with so much rhetoric,But not for him. His question is complete.

It is the question of what he is capable.It is the extreme, the expert aetat. 2.He will never ride the red horse she describes.His question is complete because it containsHis utmost statement. It is his own array,His own pageant and procession and display,

As far as nothingness permits Hear him.He does not say, Mother, my mother, who are you,The way the drowsy, infant, old men do.Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Long and Sluggish Lines (442)

It makes so little difference, at so much moreThan seventy, where one looks, one has been there before.Wood-smoke rises through the trees, is caught in an upper flowOf air and whirled away. But it has been often so.The trees have a look as if they bore sad namesAnd kept saying over and over one same, same thing,In a kind of uproar, because an opposite, a contradiction,Has enraged them and made them want to talk it down.What opposite? Could it be that yellow patch, the sideOf a house, that makes one think the house is laughing;Or theseescentissant pre-personae: first fly,A comic infanta among the tragic drapings,Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Long and Sluggish LinesBabyishness of forsythia, a snatch of belief,The spook and makings of the nude magnolia?... Wanderer, this is the pre-history of February.The life of the poem in the mind has not yet begun.You were not born yet when the trees were crystalNor are you now, in this wakefulness inside a sleep.Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

AQuiet Normal Life (443)

His place, as he sat and as he thought, was notIn anything that he constructed, so frail,So barely lit, so shadowed over and naught,As, for example, a world in which, like snow,He became an inhabitant, obedientTo gallant notions on the part of cold.It was here. This was the setting and the timeOf year. Here in his house and in his room,In his chair, the most tranquil thought grew peakedAnd the oldest and warmest heart was cutBy gallant notions on the part of night-Both late and alone, above the crickets' chords,Babbling, each one, the uniqueness of its sound.There was no fury in transcendent forms.But his actual candle blazed with artifice.Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour (444)

Light the first light of evening, as in a roomIn which we rest and, for small reason, thinkThe world imagined is the ultimate good. This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,Out of all the indifferences, into one thing: Within a single thing, a single shawlWrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,A light, a power, the miraculous influence. Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.We say God and the imagination are one...How high that highest candle lights the dark. Out of this same light, out of the central mind,We make a dwelling in the evening air,In which being there together is enough.Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

The Planet on the Table (450)

Ariel was glad he had written his poems.They were of a remembered timeOr of something seen that he liked.Other makings of the sunWere waste and welterAnd the ripe shrub writhed.His self and the sun were oneAnd his poems, although makings of his self,Were no less makings of the sun.It was not important that they survive.What mattered was that they should bearSome lineament or character,Some affluence, if only half-perceived,In the poverty of their words,Of the planet of which they were part.Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

The River of Rivers in Connecticut (451)

There is a great river this side of StygiaBefore one comes to the first black cataractsAnd trees that lack the intelligence of trees.In that river, far this side of Stygia,The mere flowing of the water is a gayety,Flashing and flashing in the sun. On its banks,No shadow walks. The river is fateful,Like the last one. But there is no ferryman.He could not bend against its propelling force.It is not to be seen beneath the appearancesThat tell of it. The steeple at FarmingtonStands glistening and Haddam shines and sways.Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

The River of Rivers in Connecticut

It is the third commonness with light and air,A curriculum, a vigor, a local abstraction . . .Call it, one more, a river, an unnamed flowing,Space-filled, reflecting the seasons, the folk-loreOf each of the senses; call it, again and again,The river that flows nowhere, like a sea.Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself (451)

At the earliest ending of winter,In March, a scrawny cry from outsideSeemed like a sound in his mind.He knew that he heard it,A bird's cry, at daylight or before,In the early March wind.The sun was rising at six,No longer a battered panache above snow...It would have been outside.It was not from the vast ventriloquismOf sleep's faded papier-mache...The sun was coming from the outside.Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself

That scrawny cry--It wasA chorister whose c preceded the choir.It was part of the colossal sun,Surrounded by its choral rings,Still far away. It was likeA new knowledge of reality.Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

A Clear Day and No Memories (475)

No soldiers in the scenery,No thoughts of people now dead,As they were fifty years ago,Young and living in a live air,Young and walking in the sunshine,Bending in blue dresses to touch something,Today the mind is not part of the weather.Today the air is clear of everything.It has no knowledge except of nothingnessAnd it flows over us without meanings,As if none of us had ever been here beforeAnd are not now: in this shallow spectacle,This invisible activity, this sense.Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Of Mere Being (476)

The palm at the end of the mind,Beyond the last thought, risesIn the bronze dcor,A gold-feathered birdSings in the palm, without human meaning,Without human feeling, a foreign song.You know then that is not the reasonThat makes us happy or unhappy.The bird sings. Its feather shines.The palm stands at the edge of space.The wind moves slowly in the branches.The birds fire-fangled feathers dangle down.Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

First Warmth (597)

I wonder, have I lived a skeletons life,As a questioner about reality,A countryman of all the bones of the world?Now, here, the warmth I had forgotten becomesPart of the major reality, part ofAn appreciation of a reality;And thus an elevation, as if I livedWith something I could touch, touch every way.Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

As You Leave the Room (597)

You speak. You say: Todays character is notA skeleton out of its cabinet. Nor am I.That poem about the pineapple, the oneAbout the mind as never satisfied,The one about the credible hero, the oneAbout summer, are not what skeletons think about.I wonder, have I lived a skeletons life,As a disbeliever in reality,A countryman of all the bones in the world?Now, here, the snow I had forgotten becomesMajor American Writers: Wallace Stevens

As You Leave the Room

Part of a major reality, part ofAn appreciation of a realityAnd thus an elevation, as if I leftWith something I could touch, touch every way.And yet nothing has been changed except what isUnreal, as if nothing had been changed at all.Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Major Poem: The Rock (445)

I.Seventy Years LaterIt is an illusion that we were ever alive,Lived in the houses of mothers, arranged ourselvesBy our motions in a freedom of airRegard the freedom of seventy years ago.It is no longer air. The houses still stand,Though they are rigid in rigid emptiness.

Even our shadows, their shadows, no longer remain.The lives these lived in the mind are at an end.They never were . . . The sounds of the guitar

Were not and are not. Absurd. The words spokenWere not and are not. It is not to be believed.The meeting at noon at the edge of the eld seems likeMajor American Writers: Wallace Stevens

An invention, an embrace between one desperate clodAnd another in a fantastic consciousness,In a queer assertion of humanity:

A theorem proposed between the twoTwo gures in a nature of the sun,In the suns design of its own happiness,

As if nothingness contained a mtier,A vital assumption, an impermanenceIn its permanent cold, an illusion so desired

That the green leaves came and covered the high rock,That the lilacs came and bloomed, like a blindness cleanedExclaiming bright sight, as it was satised,

ln a birth of sight. The blooming and the muskWere being alive. an incessant being alive,A particular of being, that gross universe.The RockMajor American Writers: Wallace Stevens

II.The Poem as Icon

It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves.We must be cured of it by a cure of the groundOr a cure of ourselves, that is equal to a cure

Of the ground, a cure beyond forgetfulness.And yet the leaves, if they broke into bud,If they broke into bloom. if they bore fruit,

And if we ate the incipient coloringsOf their fresh culls might be a cure of the ground.The ction of the leaves is the icon

Of the poem, the guration of blessedness,And the icon is the man. The pearled chaplet of spring,The magnum wreath of summer, times autumn snood,The RockMajor American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Its copy of the sun, these cover the rock.These leaves are the poem, the icon and the man.These are a cure of the ground and of ourselves,

In the predicate that there is nothing else.They bud and bloom and bear their fruit without changeThey are more than leaves that cover the barren rock.

They bud the whitest eye, the pallidest sprout.New senses in the engenderings of sense,The desire to be at the end of distances,

The body quickened and the mind in root.They bloom as a man loves, as he lives in love.They bear their fruit so that the year is known,

As if its understanding was brown skin,The honey in its pulp, the nal found,The plenty of the year and of the world.The RockMajor American Writers: Wallace Stevens

In this plenty, the poem makes meanings of the rock,Of such mixed motion and such imageryThat its barrenness becomes a thousand things

And so exists no more. This is the cureOf leaves and of the ground and of ourselves.His words are both the icon and the man.

III.Forms of the Rock in a Night-Hymn

The rock is the gray particular of mans life,The stone from which he rises upandho,The step of the bleaker depths of his descents . . . .The rock is the stern particular of the air, The mirror of the planets, one by one, But through mans eye, their silent rhapsodist, The RockMajor American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Turquoise the rock, at odious evening bright With redness that sticks fast to evil dreams;The difficult tightness of hall-risen day. The rock is the habitation of the whole, lts strength and measure, that which is near, point A In at perspective that begins again At B: the origin of the mangos rind. It is the rock where tranquil must adduce Its tranquil sell, the main of things. the mind, The starting point of the human and the end, That in which space itself is contained, the gate To the enclosure, day, the things illuminedBy day, night and that which night illumines,Night and its midnight-minting fragrances,Nights hymn of the rock, as in a vivid sleep.The Rock

major american writers: wallace stevens

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