Quotes from Wallace Stevens

It 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, rolling

Rationalists, wearing square hats, Think, in square rooms, Looking at the floor, Looking at the ceiling. They confine themselves To right-angled triangles. If they tried rhomboids, Cones, waving lines, ellipses— As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon— Rationalists would wear sombreros.

After the final no there comes a yes.

The dry eucalyptus seeks god in the rainy cloud. Professor Eucalyptus of New Haven seeks him In New Haven.

I was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds.

The man bent over his guitar, A shearsman of sorts. The day was green. They said, "You have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they are." The man replied, "Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar." And they said then, "But play, you must, A tune beyond us, yet ourselves, A tune upon the blue guitar Of things exactly as they are.

Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.

The truth is that there comes a time When we can mourn no more over music That is so much motionless sound

Tras el ultimo "NO" viene un "sí". Y de ese sí depende el porvenir del mundo.

Youngish artists have a way of being melancholy. It may be that this is merely a symptom of the distress they feel at the absence of definition. They have no very distinct outline either of themselves or of the abstractions that bedevil them. They are, in short, likely to be a bit baffled.

From Secret Man The man of autumn, Behind its melancholy mask, Will laugh in the brown grass, Will shout from the tower's rim.

Poets are never lonely even when they pretend to be.

The salt hung on his spirit like a frost, The dead brine melted in him like a dew Of winter, until nothing of himself Remained, except some starker, barer self In a starker, barer world, in which the sun Was not the sun because it never shone With bland complaisance...

Reality is the beginning not the end, Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega, Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals.

Consider the odd morphology of regret.

Sombre as fir trees, liquid cats Moved in the grass without a sound. They did not know the grass went round. The cats had cats and the grass turned gray And the world had worlds, ai, this-a-way: The grass turned green and the grass turned gray.

Freedom is like a man who kills himself Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife Grows sharp in blood. The armies kill themselves, And in their blood an ancient evil dies— The action of incorrigible tragedy.

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

Who, then, are they, seated here? Is the table a mirror in which they sit and look? Are they men eating reflections of themselves?

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.

It is good death That puts an end to evil death and dies.

The law of chaos is the law of ideas, Of improvisations and seasons of belief. Ideas are men. The mass of meaning and The mass of men are one. Chaos is not The mass of meaning. It is three or four Ideas, or, say, five men or, possibly, six. In the end, these philosophic assassins pull Revolvers and shoot each other. One remains. The mass of meaning becomes composed again.

The greatest poverty is not to live In a physical world, to feel that one's desire Is too difficult to tell from despair.

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.