-
The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.
Wallace Stevens -
Donna, donna, dark, Stooping in indigo gown And cloudy constellations, Conceal yourself or disclose Fewest things to the lover - A hand that bears a thick-leaved fruit, A pungent bloom against your shade.
Wallace Stevens
-
Be content - Expansions, diffusions - content to be The unspotted imbecile revery, The heraldic center of the world Of blue, blue sleek with a hundred chins, The amorist Adjective aflame...
Wallace Stevens -
Life consists Of propositions about life. The human Revery is a solitude in which We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one. The whole race is a poet that writes down The eccentric propositions of its fate.
Wallace Stevens -
I saw how the night came, Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks. I felt afraid. And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.
Wallace Stevens -
It is the sea that whitens the roof. The sea drifts through the winter air. It is the sea that the north wind makes. The sea is in the falling snow. This gloom is the darkness of the sea.
Wallace Stevens -
It was enough for her that she remembered.
Wallace Stevens -
A man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one.
Wallace Stevens
-
That strange flower, the sun, Is just what you say. Have it your way.The world is ugly, And the people are sad..
Wallace Stevens -
Soldier, there is a war between the mind And sky, between thought and day and night. It is For that the poet is always in the sun, Patches the moon together in his room To his Virgilian cadences, up down, Up down. It is a war that never ends.
Wallace Stevens -
Each must the other take as sign, short sign To stop the whirlwind, balk the elements.
Wallace Stevens -
To speak of joy and to sing of it, borne on The shoulders of joyous men, to feel the heart That is the common, the bravest fundament, This is a facile exercise
Wallace Stevens -
The world is a force not a presence.
Wallace Stevens -
The swarm of thoughts, the swarm of dreams Of inaccessible Utopia. A mountainous music always seemed To be falling and to be passing away.
Wallace Stevens
-
The wind in which the dead leaves blow. Here I inhale profounder strength And as I am, I speak and move And things are as I think they are And say they are on the blue guitar.
Wallace Stevens -
It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs.
Wallace Stevens -
Upon the bank, she stood In the cool Of spent emotions. She felt, among the leaves, The dew Of old devotions.
Wallace Stevens -
He tries by a peculiar speech to speak The peculiar potency of the general
Wallace Stevens -
Poetry is an effort of a dissatisfied man to find satisfaction through words.
Wallace Stevens -
In the green water, clear and warm, Susanna lay. She searched The touch of springs, And found Concealed imaginings. She sighed, For so much melody.
Wallace Stevens
-
Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry, Of the torches wisping in the underground, Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light. There are no shadows in our sun, Day is desire and night is sleep. There are no shadows anywhere. The earth, for us, is flat and bare. There are no shadows.
Wallace Stevens -
Perhaps, The man-hero is not the exceptional monster, But he that of repetition is most master.
Wallace Stevens -
The nothingness was a nakedness, a point,Beyond which fact could not progress as fact. Thereon the learning of the man conceived Once more night’s pale illuminations, goldBeneath, far underneath, the surface of His eye and audible in the mountain of His ear, the very material of his mind.
Wallace Stevens -
His petty syllabi, the sounds that stick, Inevitably modulating, in the blood. And war for war, each has its gallant kind. How simply the fictive hero becomes the real; How gladly with proper words the solider dies, If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech.
Wallace Stevens