Or Venice, motionless, gathering time and dust.

There was a crush of strength in a grinding going round,

Under the front of the westward evening star,

The vigor of glory, a glittering in the veins,

As things emerged and moved and were dissolved,

Either in distance, change or nothingness,

The visible transformations of summer night,

An argentine abstraction approaching form

And suddenly denying itself away.

There was an insolid billowing of the solid.

Night’s moonlight lake was neither water nor air.

A Clear Day and No Memories

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 nothingness

And it flows over us without meanings,

As if none of us had ever been here before

And are not now: in this shallow spectacle,

This invisible activity, this sense.

A Mythology Reflects Its Region

A mythology reflects its region. Here

In Connecticut, we never lived in a time

When mythology was possible—But if we had—

That raises the question of the image’s truth.

The image must be of the nature of its creator.

It is the nature of its creator increased,

Heightened. It is he, anew, in a freshened youth

And it is he in the substance of his region,

Wood of his forests and stone out of his fields

Or from under his mountains.

Of Mere Being

The palm at the end of the mind,

Beyond the last thought, rises

In the bronze decor,

A gold-feathered bird

Sings in the palm, without human meaning,

Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason

That makes us happy or unhappy.

The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.

The wind moves slowly in the branches.

The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

NOTES

For an Old Woman in a Wig

ca. 1916 This poem is found only in manuscript, written in pencil with many lines, phrases, and words erased. In many cases new words have been written over the old, so that the original is illegible. For a discussion of this manuscript, see Robert Buttel: Wallace Stevens: The Making of Harmonium (Princeton: Princeton University Press; 1967), pp. 213–16, in which the poem was first published.

Bowl, Cat and Broomstick

ca. 1917 This play has been taken from a typed carbon copy of the manuscript. Although it was performed by the Wisconsin Players at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City in October 1917, it was never published by Stevens, and first appeared in print in Quarterly Review of Literature, Vol. XVI (Summer 1969), pp. 236–47, with an introduction by A. Walton Litz.

Nomad Exquisite

This poem has, until recently, been dated by its first publication in Harmonium (New York: Alfred A. Knopf; 1923). Daryl Hine, editor of Poetry, has discovered that Stevens originally wrote it on the back of a postcard to Harriet Monroe, mailed from Florida on January 15, 1919. On the postcard the last line reads “Fruits, forms, flowers, flakes and fountains.” I am very grateful to Mr. Hine for this new evidence.