Wallace Stevens Quotes
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Death is the mother of beauty
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The difficultest rigor is forthwith, On the image of what we see, to catch from that Irrational moment its unreasoning, As when the sun comes rising, when the sea Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall Of heaven-haven. These are not things transformed. Yet we are shaken by them as if they were. We reason about them with a later reason.
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Light the first light of evening, as in a room In which we rest and, for small reason, think The world imagined is the ultimate good.
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Yet voluble of dumb violence. You look Across the roofs as sigil and as ward And in your centre mark them and are cowed . . .
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The sea returns upon the men, The fields entrap the children, brick Is a weed and all the flies are caught, Wingless and withered, but living alive. The discord merely magnified. Deeper within the belly's dark Of time, time grows upon the rock.
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There is a month, a year, there is a time In which majesty is a mirror of the self: I have not but I am and as I am, I am.
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I like my philosophy smothered in beauty and not the opposite.
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I play. But this is what I think.
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What is divinity if it can comeOnly in silent shadows and in dreams?
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Of these beginnings, gay and green, propose The suitable amours. Time will write them down.
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One of the limits of reality Presents itself in Oley when the hay, Baked through long days, is piled in mows. It is A land too ripe for enigmas, too serene.… Things stop in that direction and since they stop The direction stops and we accept what is As good. The utmost must be good and is…
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A thing final in itself and, therefore, good: One of the vast repetitions final in Themselves and, therefore, good, the going round And round and round, the merely going round, Until merely going round is a final good, The way wine comes at a table in a wood.
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O thin men of Haddam, Why do you imagine golden birds? Do you not see how the blackbird Walks around the feet Of the women about you?
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Among twenty snowy mountains, The only moving thing Was the eye of the blackbird.
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It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee.
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Struggling toward impassioned choirs, Crying among the clouds, enraged By gold antagonists in air - I know my lazy, leaden twang Is like the reason in a storm; And yet it brings the storm to bear. I twang it out and leave it there.
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Music falls on the silence like a sense, A passion that we feel, not understand.
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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?
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What chieftain, walking by himself, crying Most miserable, most victorious,Does not see these separate figures one by one, And yet see only one, in his old coat, His slouching pantaloons, beyond the town,Looking for what was, where it used to be?
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Upon the bank, she stood In the cool Of spent emotions. She felt, among the leaves, The dew Of old devotions.
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A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.
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A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.
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Our own time, and by this I mean the last two or three generations, including our own, can be summed up in a way that brings into unity an immense number of details by saying of it that it is a time in which the search for the supreme truth has been a search in reality or through reality or even a search for some supremely acceptable fiction.
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So poisonousAre the ravishments of truth, so fatal to The truth itself, the first idea becomes The hermit in a poet’s metaphors,Who comes and goes and comes and goes all day.