Harmonium

Harmonium

by Wallace Stevens
Harmonium

Harmonium

by Wallace Stevens

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Overview

"There are in Harmonium six or eight of the most beautiful poems an American has written. The poems see, feel, and think with equal success." — Randall Jarrell, Poetry and The Age
An executive with a Connecticut-based insurance company, Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) wrote poetry in the evenings and during his daily commute. Harmonium, his first collection of verse, was published when he was 44 years old. Although largely overlooked upon its 1923 debut, the compilation is recognized today as an important contribution to Modernism, offering a diverse range of satirical and philosophical lyrical works that explore the nature of reality and the power of the imagination. They include some of Stevens's most famous and frequently studied works, including "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," "The Emperor of Ice-Cream," and "Peter Quince at the Clavier." 

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780486839387
Publisher: Dover Publications
Publication date: 04/17/2019
Series: Dover Thrift Editions: Poetry
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 128
File size: 1 MB

About the Author

An executive with a Connecticut-based insurance company, modernist poet Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) published his first poems at the age of 44 and wrote many of his major works when he was well into his 50s. A poet of ideas, he explored the nature of reality and the power of the imagination. In 1955 he received a Pulitzer Prize for his Collected Poems.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

EARTHY ANECDOTE


Every time the bucks went clattering Over Oklahoma A firecat bristled in the way.

Wherever they went,
They went clattering,
Until they swerved In a swift, circular line To the right,
Because of the firecat.

Or until they swerved In a swift, circular line To the left,
Because of the firecat.

The bucks clattered. The firecat went leaping, To the right, to the left,
And Bristled in the way.

Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes And slept.


INVECTIVE AGAINST SWANS

The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks And far beyond the discords of the wind.

A bronze rain from the sun descending marks The death of summer, which that time endures

Like one who scrawls a listless testament Of golden quirks and Paphian caricatures,

Bequeathing your white feathers to the moon And giving your bland motions to the air.

Behold, already on the long parades The crows anoint the statues with their dirt.

And the soul, O ganders, being lonely, flies Beyond your chilly chariots, to the skies.


IN THE CAROLINAS

The lilacs wither in the Carolinas.
Already the butterflies flutter above the cabins.
Already the new-born children interpret love In the voices of mothers.

Timeless mother,
How is it that your aspic nipples For once vent honey?

The pine-tree sweetens my body. The white iris beautifies me.


THE PALTRY NUDE STARTS ON A SPRING VOYAGE

But not on a shell, she starts,
Archaic, for the sea.
But on the first-found weed She scuds the glitters,
Noiselessly, like one more wave.

She too is discontent And would have purple stuff upon her arms,
Tired of the salty harbors,
Eager for the brine and bellowing Of the high interiors of the sea.

The wind speeds her,
Blowing upon her hands And watery back.
She touches the clouds, where she goes In the circle of her traverse of the sea.

Yet this is meagre play In the scurry and water-shine,
As her heels foam —
Not as when the goldener nude Of a later day

Will go, like the centre of sea-green pomp,
In an intenser calm,
Scullion of fate,
Across the spick torrent, ceaselessly,
Upon her irretrievable way.


THE PLOT AGAINST THE GIANT

First Girl

When this yokel comes maundering,
Whetting his hacker,
I shall run before him,
Diffusing the civilest odors Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.
It will check him.


Second Girl

I shall run before him,
Arching cloths besprinkled with colors As small as fish-eggs.

The threads Will abash him.


Third Girl

Oh, la ... le pauvre! I shall run before him,
With a curious puffing.
He will bend his ear then.
I shall whisper Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.
It will undo him.


INFANTA MARINA

Her terrace was the sand And the palms and the twilight.

She made of the motions of her wrist The grandiose gestures Of her thought.

The rumpling of the plumes Of this creature of the evening Came to be sleights of sails Over the sea.

And thus she roamed In the roamings of her fan,

Partaking of the sea,
And of the evening,
As they flowed around And uttered their subsiding sound.


DOMINATION OF BLACK

At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails Were like the leaves themselves Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks Down to the ground.
I heard them cry — the peacocks. Was it a cry against the twilight Or against the leaves themselves Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?
Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered Like the leaves themselves Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks.
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.


THE SNOW MAN

One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.


THE ORDINA RY WOMEN

Then from their poverty they rose,
From dry catarrhs, and to guitars They flitted Through the palace walls.

They flung monotony behind,
Turned from their want, and, nonchalant,
They crowded The nocturnal halls.

The lacquered loges huddled there Mumbled zay-zay and a-zay, a-zay.
The moonlight Fubbed the girandoles.

And the cold dresses that they wore,
In the vapid haze of the window-bays,
Were tranquil As they leaned and looked

From the window-sills at the alphabets,
At beta b and gamma g,
To study The canting curlicues

Of heaven and of the heavenly script.
And there they read of marriage-bed.
Ti-lill-o!
And they read right long.

The gaunt guitarists on the strings Rumbled a-day and a-day, a-day.
The moonlight Rose on the beachy floors.

How explicit the coiffures became,
The diamond point, the sapphire point,
The sequins Of the civil fans!

Insinuations of desire,
Puissant speech, alike in each,
Cried quittance To the wickless halls.

Then from their poverty they rose,
From dry guitars, and to catarrhs They flitted Through the palace walls.


THE LOAD OF SUGARCANE

The going of the glade-boat Is like water flowing;

Like water flowing Through the green saw-grass,
Under the rainbows;

Under the rainbows That are like birds,
Turning, bedizened,

While the wind still whistles As kildeer do,

When they rise At the red turban Of the boatman.


LE MONOCLE DE MON ONCLE

I

'Mother of heaven, regina of the clouds,
O sceptre of the sun, crown of the moon,
There is not nothing, no, no, never nothing,
Like the clashed edges of two words that kill.'
And so I mocked her in magnificent measure.
Or was it that I mocked myself alone?

I wish that I might be a thinking stone.
The sea of spuming thought foists up again The radiant bubble that she was. And then A deep up-pouring from some saltier well Within me, bursts its watery syllable.


II

A red bird flies across the golden floor.
It is a red bird that seeks out his choir Among the choirs of wind and wet and wing.
A torrent will fall from him when he finds.

Shall I uncrumple this much-crumpled thing?
I am a man of fortune greeting heirs;
For it has come that thus I greet the spring.
These choirs of welcome choir for me farewell.
No spring can follow past meridian.

Yet you persist with anecdotal bliss To make believe a starry
connaissance.


III

Is it for nothing, then, that old Chinese Sat tittivating by their mountain pools Or in the Yangtse studied out their beards?
I shall not play the flat historic scale.

You know how Utamaro's beauties sought The end of love in their all-speaking braids.
You know the mountainous coiffures of Bath.
Alas! Have all the barbers lived in vain That not one curl in nature has survived? Why,
without pity on these studious ghosts, Do you come dripping in your hair from sleep?


IV

This luscious and impeccable fruit of life Falls, it appears, of its own weight to earth.

When you were Eve, its acrid juice was sweet,
Untasted, in its heavenly, orchard air.

An apple serves as well as any skull To be the book in which to read a round,
And is as excellent, in that it is composed Of what, like skulls, comes rotting back to ground.
But it excels in this, that as the fruit Of love, it is a book too mad to read Before one merely reads to pass the time.


V

In the high west there burns a furious star.
It is for fiery boys that star was set And for sweet-smelling virgins close to them.
The measure of the intensity of love Is measure, also, of the verve of earth.
For me, the firefly's quick, electric stroke Ticks tediously the time of one more year.
And you? Remember how the crickets came Out of their mother grass, like little kin, In the pale nights, when your first imagery Found inklings of your bond to all that dust.


VI

If men at forty will be painting lakes The ephemeral blues must merge for them in one,
The basic slate, the universal hue.

There is a substance in us that prevails.
But in our amours amorists discern Such fluctuations that their scrivening Is breathless to attend each quirky turn.

When amorists grow bald, then amours shrink Into the compass and curriculum Of introspective exiles, lecturing.
It is a theme for Hyacinth alone.


VII

The mules that angels ride come slowly down The blazing passes, from beyond the sun.
Descensions of their tinkling bells arrive.
These muleteers are dainty of their way.
Meantime, centurions guffaw and beat Their shrilling tankards on the table-boards.
This parable, in sense, amounts to this:
The honey of heaven may or may not come,
But that of earth both comes and goes at once.
Suppose these couriers brought amid their train A damsel heightened by eternal bloom.


VIII

Like a dull scholar, I behold, in love, An ancient aspect touching a new mind.
It comes, it blooms, it bears its fruit and dies.
This trivial trope reveals a way of truth.
Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.
Two golden gourds distended on our vines,
We hang like warty squashes, streaked and rayed,
Into the autumn weather, splashed with frost,
Distorted by hale fatness, turned grotesque.
The laughing sky will see the two of us Washed into rinds by rotting winter rains.


IX

In verses wild with motion, full of din,
Loudened by cries, by clashes, quick and sure As the deadly thought of men accomplishing Their curious fates in war, come, celebrate The faith of forty, ward of Cupido.
Most venerable heart, the lustiest conceit Is not too lusty for your broadening.
I quiz all sounds, all thoughts, all everything For the music and manner of the paladins To make oblation fit. Where shall I find Bravura adequate to this great hymn?


X

The fops of fancy in their poems leave Memorabilia of the mystic spouts,
Spontaneously watering their gritty soils.
I am a yeoman, as such fellows go.
I know no magic trees, no balmy boughs,
No silver-ruddy, gold-vermilion fruits.
But, after all, I know a tree that bears A semblance to the thing I have in mind.
It stands gigantic, with a certain tip To which all birds come sometime in their time.
But when they go that tip still tips the tree.


XI

If sex were all, then every trembling hand Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.
But note the unconscionable treachery of fate,
That makes us weep, laugh, grunt and groan, and shout Doleful heroics, pinching gestures forth From madness or delight, without regard To that first, foremost law. Anguishing hour!
Last night, we sat beside a pool of pink,
Clippered with lilies scudding the bright chromes,
Keen to the point of starlight, while a frog Boomed from his very belly odious chords.


XII

A blue pigeon it is, that circles the blue sky,
On side-long 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.


NUANCES OF A THEME BY WILLIAMS

It's a strange courage you give me, ancient star:

Shine alone in the sunrise toward which you lend no part!



I

Shine alone, shine nakedly, shine like bronze,
that reflects neither my face nor any inner part of my being, shine like fire, that mirrors nothing.


II

Lend no part to any humanity that suffuses you in its own light.
Be not chimera of morning, Halfman,
half-star.
Be not an intelligence,
Like a widow's bird Or an old horse.


METAPHORS OF A MAGNIFICO

Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,
Into twenty villages,
Or one man Crossing a single bridge into a village.

This is old song That will not declare itself ...

Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are Twenty men crossing a bridge Into a village.

That will not declare itself Yet is certain as meaning ...
The boots of the men clump On the boards of the bridge.
The first white wall of the village Rises through fruit-trees.
Of what was it I was thinking?

So the meaning escapes.

The first white wall of the village ...
The fruit-trees ...


PLOUGHING ON SUNDAY

The white cock's tail Tosses in the wind.
The turkey-cock's tail Glitters in the sun.

Water in the fields.
The wind pours down.
The feathers flare And bluster in the wind.

Remus, blow your horn!
I'm ploughing on Sunday,
Ploughing North America.
Blow your horn!

Tum-ti-tum,
Ti-tum-tum-tum!
The turkey-cock's tail Spreads to the sun.

The white cock's tail Streams to the moon.
Water in the fields.
The wind pours down.


CY EST POURTRAICTE, MADAME STE URSULE, ET LES UNZE MILLE VIERGES

Ursula, in a garden, found A bed of radishes.
She kneeled upon the ground And gathered them,
With flowers around,
Blue, gold, pink, and green.

She dressed in red and gold brocade And in the grass an offering made Of radishes and flowers.

She said, 'My dear,
Upon your altars,
I have placed The marguerite and coquelicot,
And roses Frail as April snow;
But here,' she said,
'Where none can see,
I make an offering, in the grass,
Of radishes and flowers.'
And then she wept

For fear the Lord would not accept.
The good Lord in His garden sought New leaf and shadowy tinct,
And they were all His thought.

He 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 writ In any book.


HIBISCUS ON THE SLEEPING SHORES

I say now, Fernando, that on that day The mind roamed as a moth roams,
Among the blooms beyond the open sand;

And that whatever noise the motion of the waves Made on the sea-weeds and the covered stones Disturbed not even the most idle ear.

Then it was that that monstered moth Which had lain folded against the blue And the colored purple of the lazy sea,

And which had drowsed along the bony shores,
Shut to the blather that the water made,
Rose up besprent and sought the flaming red

Dabbled with yellow pollen —
red as red As the flag above the old café —
And roamed there all the stupid afternoon.


FABLIAU OF FLORIDA

Barque of phosphor On the palmy beach,

Move outward into heaven,
Into the alabasters And night blues.

Foam and cloud are one.
Sultry moon-monsters Are dissolving.

Fill your black hull With white moonlight.

There will never be an end To this droning of the surf.


THE DOCTOR OF GENEVA

The doctor of Geneva stamped the sand That lay impounding the Pacific swell,
Patted his stove-pipe hat and tugged his shawl.

Lacustrine man had never been assailed By such long-rolling opulent cataracts,
Unless Racine or Bossuet held the like.

He did not quail. A man so used to plumb The multifarious heavens felt no awe Before these visible, voluble delugings,

Which yet found means to set his simmering mind Spinning and hissing with oracular Notations of the wild, the ruinous waste,

Until the steeples of his city clanked and sprang In an unburgherly apocalypse.
The doctor used his handkerchief and sighed.


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.

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.


HOMUNCULUS ET LA BELLE ETOILE

In the sea, Biscayne, there prinks The young emerald, evening star,
Good light for drunkards, poets, widows,
And ladies soon to be married.

By this light the salty fishes Arch in the sea like tree-branches,
Going in many directions Up and down.

This light conducts The thoughts of drunkards, the feelings Of widows and trembling ladies,
The movements of fishes.

How pleasant an existence it is That this emerald charms philosophers,
Until they become thoughtlessly willing To bathe their hearts in later moonlight,

Knowing that they can bring back thought In the night that is still to be silent,
Reflecting this thing and that,
Before they sleep!

It is better that, as scholars,
They should think hard in the dark cuffs Of voluminous cloaks,
And shave their heads and bodies.

It might well be that their mistress Is no gaunt fugitive phantom.
She might, after all, be a wanton,
Abundantly beautiful, eager,

Fecund,
From whose being by starlight, on sea-coast,
The innermost good of their seeking Might come in the simplest of speech.

It is a good light, then, for those That know the ultimate Plato,
Tranquillizing with this jewel The torments of confusion.

(Continues…)


Excerpted from "Harmonium"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Dover Publications, Inc..
Excerpted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Earthy Anecdote, 1,
Invective Against Swans, 2,
In the Carolinas, 3,
The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage, 4,
The Plot Against the Giant, 5,
Infanta Marina, 6,
Domination of Black, 7,
The Snow Man, 9,
The Ordinary Women, 10,
The Load of Sugar-Cane, 12,
Le Monocle de Mon Oncle, 13,
Nuances of a Theme by Williams, 18,
Metaphors of a Magnifico, 19,
Ploughing on Sunday, 20,
Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule,,
et Les Unze Mille Vierges, 21,
Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores, 23,
Fabliau of Florida, 24,
The Doctor of Geneva, 25,
Another Weeping Woman, 26,
Homunculus et La Belle Etoile, 27,
The Comedian as the Letter C, 29,
From the Misery of Don Joost, 45,
O, Florida, Venereal Soil, 46,
Last Looks at the Lilacs, 48,
The Worms at Heaven's Gate, 49,
The Jack-Rabbit, 50,
Valley Candle, 51,
Anecdote of Men by the Thousand, 52,
The Silver Plough-Boy, 53,
The Apostrophe to Vincentine, 54,
Floral Decorations for Bananas, 56,
Anecdote of Canna, 57,
Of the Manner of Addressing Clouds, 58,
Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb, 59,
Of the Surface of Things, 60,
Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks, 61,
A High-Toned Old Christian Woman, 63,
The Place of the Solitaires, 64,
The Weeping Burgher, 65,
The Curtains in the House of the,
Metaphysician, 66,
Banal Sojourn, 67,
Depression Before Spring, 68,
The Emperor of Ice-Cream, 69,
The Cuban Doctor, 70,
Tea at the Palaz of Hoon, 71,
Exposition of the Contents of a Cab, 72,
Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock, 73,
Sunday Morning, 74,
The Virgin Carrying a Lantern, 78,
Stars at Tallapoosa, 79,
Explanation, 80,
Six Significant Landscapes, 81,
Bantams in Pine-Woods, 84,
Anecdote of the Jar, 85,
Palace of the Babies, 86,
Frogs Eat Butterf lies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs, 87,
Jasmine's Beautiful Thoughts Underneath the Willow, 88,
Cortège for Rosenbloom, 89,
Tattoo, 91,
The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws, 92,
Life Is Motion, 93,
Architecture, 94,
The Wind Shifts, 97,
Colloquy with a Polish Aunt, 98,
Gubbinal, 99,
Two Figures in Dense Violet Night, 100,
Theory, 101,
To the One of Fictive Music, 102,
Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion, 104,
Peter Quince at the Clavier, 105,
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, 108,
Nomad Exquisite, 111,
Tea, 112,
To the Roaring Wind, 113,

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