The Palm at the End of the Mind
VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 1990
Copyright© 1967, 1969, 1971 by Holly Stevens
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in 1971.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stevens, Wallace, 1879–1955.
The palm at the end of the mind: selected poems and a play / by Wallace Stevens: edited by Holly Stevens.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-79185-6
I. Stevens, Holly. II. Title.
[PS3537.T4753A6 1990]
811’.52-dc19 75-136350
“Bowl, Cat and Broomstick,” a play, was originally published in the Quarterly Review of Literature, July 30, 1969, Princeton, New Jersey.
v3.1
“The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor …”
—“Of Mere Being”
PREFACE
The poems included in this selection have been chosen to represent my father not only at his best but also in the full range of his imagination. They have been arranged in chronological order, determined from manuscript evidence, correspondence, or date of publication. It should be noted, however, that poems dated only by publication must have been written earlier; when date of acceptance by a magazine is known, it helps to limit the gap, but is not definitive. The present order can therefore be debated and, hopefully, improved on in the future as further chronological evidence appears. One exception has been made: “First Warmth” and “As You Leave the Room” are printed together for easy comparison. The first appears to be an early version of the second, which Samuel French Morse dates “1947–55?”. Neither poem was published during Stevens’ lifetime.
Because no manuscript of poems that appeared in earlier books was submitted for Collected Poems, and because certain discrepancies in manuscript and magazine publication versions have not been resolved, minor changes have been made in punctuation, spelling, and line spacing without comment. Where more extensive variations occur, brief explanatory notes appear at the back of this book, although limitations of space preclude a full textual apparatus.
That same limitation has made the final choice difficult, and I am grateful to those scholars and teachers of my father’s poetry whose generous comments and suggestions have been helpful. And to those others who assisted in the preparation of the manuscript, my sincere thanks.
—HOLLY STEVENS
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Preface
Blanche McCarthy
Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et Les Unze Mille Vierges
Tea
Sunday Morning
Peter Quince at the Clavier
The Silver Plough-Boy
Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock
For an Old Woman in a Wig
Domination of Black
Six Significant Landscapes
Inscription for a Monument
The Worms at Heaven’s Gate
In the Carolinas
Indian River
To the Roaring Wind
Valley Candle
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
The Plot against the Giant
Gray Room
Bowl, Cat and Broomstick
The Death of a Soldier
Metaphors of a Magnifico
Depression before Spring
Earthy Anecdote
The Apostrophe to Vincentine
Nuances of a Theme by Williams
Le Monocle de Mon Oncle
Nomad Exquisite
Life Is Motion
Banal Sojourn
Anecdote of the Jar
Fabliau of Florida
Ploughing on Sunday
The Place of the Solitaires
The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage
Infanta Marina
Cortège for Rosenbloom
The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad
The Doctor of Geneva
Gubbinal
The Snow Man
Tea at the Palaz of Hoon
Another Weeping Woman
On the Manner of Addressing Clouds
Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb
The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws
The Comedian as the Letter C
Bantams in Pine-Woods
The Ordinary Women
A High-Toned Old Christian Woman
O Florida, Venereal Soil
The Emperor of Ice-Cream
Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion
Stars at Tallapoosa
Floral Decoration for Bananas
To the One of Fictive Music
Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks
Two Figures in Dense Violet Light
The Virgin Carrying a Lantern
Academic Discourse at Havana
Sea Surface Full of Clouds
The Sun This March
Lunar Paraphrase
Anatomy of Monotony
Autumn Refrain
The Brave Man
A Fading of the Sun
The Pleasures of Merely Circulating
The Idea of Order at Key West
Lions in Sweden
Evening Without Angels
The Reader
Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery
Re-statement of Romance
Lytton Strachey, Also, Enters into Heaven
Sailing after Lunch
Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu
The American Sublime
Mozart, 1935
Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz
Dance of the Macabre Mice
Anglais Mort à Florence
Some Friends from Pascagoula
Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue
Farewell to Florida
A Postcard from the Volcano
Ghosts as Cocoons
The Men That Are Falling
A Thought Revolved
The Man with the Blue Guitar
A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts
United Dames of America
The Dwarf
Loneliness in Jersey City
Anything Is Beautiful if You Say It Is
A Weak Mind in the Mountains
Parochial Theme
Poetry Is a Destructive Force
The Poems of Our Climate
Study of Two Pears
The Glass of Water
Add This to Rhetoric
Dry Loaf
The Man on the Dump
On the Road Home
The Latest Freed Man
Connoisseur of Chaos
The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man
Of Hartford in a Purple Light
Variations on a Summer Day
Man and Bottle
Of Modern Poetry
Arrival at the Waldorf
Landscape with Boat
Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas
Of Bright & Blue Birds & the Gala Sun
Mrs. Alfred Uruguay
Asides on the Oboe
Poem with Rhythms
The Well Dressed Man with a Beard
Montrachet-le-Jardin
Metamorphosis
Phosphor Reading by His Own Light
Jumbo
Poem Written at Morning
Oak Leaves Are Hands
Examination of the Hero in a Time of War
[Prose statement on the poetry of war]
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction
God Is Good. It Is a Beautiful Night
Certain Phenomena of Sound
Dutch Graves in Bucks County
The Motive for Metaphor
Chocorua to Its Neighbor
So-And-So Reclining on Her Couch
No Possum, No Sop, No Taters
The Lack of Repose
Somnambulisma
The Creations of Sound
Esthétique du Mal
The Bed of Old John Zeller
Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit
The Pure Good of Theory
Paisant Chronicle
Flyer’s Fall
Description without Place
Thinking of a Relation between the Images of Metaphors
Chaos in Motion and Not in Motion
The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm
Late Hymn from the Myrrh-Mountain
Man Carrying Thing
Men Made out of Words
A Woman Sings a Song for a Soldier Come Home
The Good Man Has No Shape
From the Packet of Anacharsis
The Dove in the Belly
Mountains Covered with Cats
The Prejudice Against the Past
Credences of Summer
A Pastoral Nun
Two Versions of the Same Poem
Someone Puts a Pineapple Together
Of Ideal Time and Choice
The Ultimate Poem Is Abstract
The Owl in the Sarcophagus
The Auroras of Autumn
A Primitive Like an Orb
Large Red Man Reading
This Solitude of Cataracts
In a Bad Time
Metaphor as Degeneration
Our Stars Come from Ireland
World Without Peculiarity
The Woman in Sunshine
Imago
Saint John and the Back-Ache
Puella Parvula
An Ordinary Evening in New Haven
The Old Lutheran Bells at Home
Questions Are Remarks
Angel Surrounded by Paysans
Things of August
As at a Theatre
The Rock
A Discovery of Thought
The Course of a Particular
Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour
Madame La Fleurie
A Quiet Normal Life
Long and Sluggish Lines
To an Old Philosopher in Rome
The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain
Two Illustrations That the World Is What You Make of It
Prologues to What Is Possible
Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly
The World as Meditation
An Old Man Asleep
The Plain Sense of Things
Lebensweisheitspielerei
The Hermitage at the Centre
The Dove in Spring
The Planet on the Table
The River of Rivers in Connecticut
Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself
The Sail of Ulysses
A Child Asleep in Its Own Life
On the Way to the Bus
First Warmth
As You Leave the Room
Reality Is an Activity of the Most August Imagination
A Clear Day and No Memories
A Mythology Reflects Its Region
Of Mere Being
Notes
Index of First Lines
Index of Titles
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Blanche McCarthy
Look in the terrible mirror of the sky
And not in this dead glass, which can reflect
Only the surfaces—the bending arm,
The leaning shoulder and the searching eye.
Look in the terrible mirror of the sky.
Oh, bend against the invisible; and lean
To symbols of descending night; and search
The glare of revelations going by!
Look in the terrible mirror of the sky.
See how the absent moon waits in a glade
Of your dark self, and how the wings of stars,
Upward, from unimagined coverts, fly.
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.
Tea
When the elephant’s-ear in the park
Shrivelled in frost,
And the leaves on the paths
Ran like rats,
Your lamp-light fell
On shining pillows,
Of sea-shades and sky-shades,
Like umbrellas in Java.
Sunday Morning
I
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.
II
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.
III
Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.
IV
She says, “I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?”
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured
As April’s green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow’s wings.
V
She says, “But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss.”
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.
VI
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
VII
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.
VIII
She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.