An Ordinary Evening in New Haven, Part IV

Two carbon typescripts in the editor’s possession have “writer’s” as the penultimate word in line 13, rather than “winter’s.” It has not been changed here, as it undoubtedly was a stenographic error.

The Old Lutheran Bells at Home

In pencil, on the reverse of his manuscript, Stevens wrote:

As they teeter and totter in the caterwaul

As the sextons jangle and dangle and kick their feet

As they teeter and totter in the belfry [illegible word, may be “earth”]

To an Old Philosopher in Rome

The second stanza, in a carbon typescript in the editor’s possession, reads:

The threshold, Rome, and that more merciful Rome

Beyond, the two alike in the make of the mind

Of a common maker, not divine, as if

In a human dignity two parallels

Become a single thing, a perspective, of which

Men are part both in the inch and in the mile.

The first line of the eighth stanza reads:

So that we feel, in this augustest large

The Sail of Ulysses

A carbon typescript in the editor’s possession is glossed as follows in the right-hand margin:

The Sail of Ulysses, Part VII

The original typescript has the word “things” ending line 9. It has been added here, although it was erased on the carbon typescript and does not appear in Collected Poems.

Of Mere Being

As printed in Opus Posthumous (New York: Alfred A. Knopf; 1957), the last word of the third line is “distance.” “Decor” is the word appearing in the original typescript, and has been restored here.

INDEX OF FIRST LINES

A. A violent order is disorder; and

A black figure dances in a black field.

A crinkled paper makes a brilliant sound.

A few things for themselves,

A lady dying of diabetes

A light snow, like frost, has fallen during the night.

A little less returned for him each spring.

A long time you have been making the trip

A mythology reflects its region. Here

A sunny day’s complete Poussiniana

A young man seated at his table

Above the forest of the parakeets,

After the final no there comes a yes

After the leaves have fallen, we return

All night I sat reading a book,

Although you sit in a room that is gray,

Among the more irritating minor ideas

Among the old men that you know,

Among twenty snowy mountains,

An anti-master-man, floribund ascetic.

An old man sits

And for what, except for you, do I feel love?