02UndatedI know noble accentsAnd lucid, inescapable rhythms;But I know, too,That the blackbird is involvedIn what I know.Wallace Stevens / quote ↗
03UndatedThe truth is that there comes a time When we can mourn no more over music That is so much motionless soundWallace Stevens / quote ↗
05UndatedIt is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.Wallace Stevens / quote ↗
07UndatedIt matters, because everything we sayOf the past is description without place, a castOf the imagination, made in sound;And because what we say of the future must portend,Be alive with its own seemings, seeming to beLike rubies reddened by rubies reddening.Wallace Stevens / quote ↗
08UndatedBe the voice of night and Florida in my ear.Use dusky words and dusky images.Darken your speech.Speak, even, as if I did not hear you speaking,But spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts,Conceiving words,As the night conceives the sea-sounds in silence,And out of their droning sibilants makesA serenade.Wallace Stevens / quote ↗
09UndatedHe heard her low accord,Half prayer and half ditty,And He felt a subtle quiver,That was not heavenly love,Or pity.This is not writIn any book.Wallace Stevens / quote ↗
10UndatedThe villages slept as the capable man went down,Time swished on the village clocks and dreams were alive,The enormous gongs gave edges to their sounds,As the rider, no chevalere and poorly dressed,Impatient of the bells and midnight forms,Rode over the picket docks, rode down the road,And, capable, created in his mind,Eventual victor, out of the martyr's bones,The ultimate elegance: the imagined land.Wallace Stevens / quote ↗
11UndatedTHE POEMS OF OUR CLIMATEIClear water in a brilliant bowl, Pink and white carnations. The lightIn the room more like a snowy air, Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snowAt the end of winter when afternoons return.Pink and white carnations - one desiresSo much more than that. The day itselfIs simplified: a bowl of white, Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,With nothing more than the carnations there.IISay even that this complete simplicityStripped one of all one's torments, concealedThe evilly compounded, vital IAnd made it fresh in a world of white,A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,Still one would want more, one would need more,More than a world of white and snowy scents.IIIThere would still remain the never-resting mind,So that one would want to escape, come backTo what had been so long composed.The imperfect is our paradise.Note that, in this bitterness, delight,Since the imperfect is so hot in us,Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.Wallace Stevens / quote ↗
12UndatedIt was soldier's went marching over the rocks,and still they came in watery flocks,because it was spring and the birds had to come,No doubt that soldier's had to be marching,and that the drums had to be rolling, rolling, rollingWallace Stevens / quote ↗
13UndatedFor the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds /Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.Wallace Stevens / quote ↗
15UndatedIf there must be a god in the house, must be,Saying things in the rooms and on the stair,Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghostOr Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang outHis stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.Wallace Stevens / quote ↗
16UndatedWeight him, weight, weight him with the sleepiness of themoon.It was only a glass because he looked in it. It was nothing hecould be told.It was a language he spoke, because he must, yet did not know.It was a page he had found in the handbook of heartbreak.Wallace Stevens / quote ↗
17UndatedThere is a perfect rout of characters in every man—and every man is like an actor’s trunk, full of strange creatures, new & old. But an actor and his trunk are two different thingsWallace Stevens / quote ↗
19UndatedThe law of chaos is the law of ideas,Of improvisations and seasons of belief.Ideas are men. The mass of meaning andThe mass of men are one. Chaos is notThe mass of meaning. It is three or fourIdeas, or, say, five men or, possibly, six.In the end, these philosophic assassins pullRevolvers and shoot each other. One remains.The mass of meaning becomes composed again.Wallace Stevens / quote ↗
22UndatedFrom oriole to crow, note the declineIn music. Crow is realist. But, then,Oriole, also, may be realist.Wallace Stevens / quote ↗
23UndatedWe say God and the imagination are one . . .How high that highest candle lights the dark.Wallace Stevens / quote ↗
24UndatedPoetry is a finikin thing of airThat lives uncertainly and not for longYet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.Wallace Stevens / quote ↗
