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| − | Wallace Stevens, "The Man with the Blue Guitar" (excerpts)
| + | à venir |
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| − | I
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| − | The man bent over his guitar,
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| − | A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
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| − | | |
| − | They said, "You have a blue guitar,
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| − | You do not play things as they are."
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| − | | |
| − | The man replied, "Things as they are
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| − | Are changed upon the blue guitar."
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| − | | |
| − | And they said then, "But play, you must,
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| − | A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
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| − | A tune upon the blue guitar
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| − | Of things exactly as they are."
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| − | II
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| − | I cannot bring a world quite round,
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| − | Although I patch it as I can.
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| − | | |
| − | I sing a hero's head, large eye
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| − | And bearded bronze, but not a man,
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| − | | |
| − | Although I patch him as I can
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| − | And reach through him almost to man.
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| − | | |
| − | If to serenade almost to man
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| − | Is to miss, by that, things as they are,
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| − | | |
| − | Say it is the serenade
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| − | Of a man that plays a blue guitar.
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| − | III
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| − | Ah, but to play man number one,
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| − | To drive the dagger in his heart,
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| − | To lay his brain upon the board
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| − | And pick the acrid colors out,
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| − | To nail his thought across the door,
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| − | Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,
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| − | To strike his living hi and ho,
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| − | To tick it, tock it, turn it true,
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| − | To bang from it a savage blue,
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| − | Jangling the metal of the strings…
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| − | IV
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| − | So that's life, then: things as they are?
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| − | It picks its way on the blue guitar.
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| − | A million people on one string?
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| − | And all their manner in the thing,
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| − | | |
| − | And all their manner, right and wrong,
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| − | And all their manner, weak and strong?
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| − | | |
| − | The feelings crazily, craftily call,
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| − | Like a buzzing of flies in autumn air,
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| − | And that's life, then: things as they are,
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| − | This buzzing of the blue guitar.
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| − | | |
| − | V
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| − | Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry,
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| − | Of the torches wisping in the underground,
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| − | Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light.
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| − | There are no shadows in our sun,
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| − | Day is desire and night is sleep.
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| − | There are no shadows anywhere.
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| − | The earth, for us, is flat and bare.
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| − | There are no shadows. Poetry
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| − | Exceeding music must take the place
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| − | Of empty heaven and its hymns,
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| − | Ourselves in poetry must take their place,
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| − | Even in the chattering of your guitar.
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| − | | |
| − | VI
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| − | A tune beyond us as we are,
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| − | Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar;
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| − | Ourselves in the tune as if in space,
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| − | Yet nothing changed, except the place
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| − | Of things as they are and only the place
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| − | As you play them, on the blue guitar,
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| − | Placed, so, beyond the compass of change,
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| − | Perceived in a final atmosphere;
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| − | For a moment final, in the way
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| − | The thinking of art seems final when
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| − | The thinking of god is smoky dew.
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| − | The tune is space. The blue guitar
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| − | Becomes the place of things as they are,
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| − | A composing of senses of the guitar.
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| − | VII
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| − | It is the sun that shares our works.
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| − | The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.
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| − | When shall I come to say of the sun,
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| − | It is a sea; it shares nothing;
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| − | The sun no longer shares our works
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| − | And the earth is alive with creeping men,
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| − | Mechanical beetles never quite warm?
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| − | And shall I then stand in the sun, as now
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| − | I stand in the moon, and call it good,
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| − | The immaculate, the merciful good,
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| − | Detached from us, from things as they are?
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| − | Not to be part of the sun? To stand
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| − | | |
| − | Remote and call it merciful?
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| − | The strings are cold on the blue guitar.
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| − | VIII
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| − | The vivid, florid, turgid sky,
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| − | The drenching thunder rolling by,
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| − | The morning deluged still by night,
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| − | The clouds tumultuously bright
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| − | And the feeling heavy in cold chords
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| − | Struggling toward impassioned choirs,
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| − | Crying among the clouds, enraged
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| − | By gold antagonists in air--
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| − | I know my lazy, leaden twang
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| − | Is like the reason in a storm;
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| − | And yet it brings the storm to bear.
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| − | I twang it out and leave it there.
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| − | IX
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| − | And the color, the overcast blue
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| − | Of the air, in which the blue guitar
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| − | Is a form, described but difficult,
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| − | And I am merely a shadow hunched
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| − | Above the arrowy, still strings,
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| − | The maker of a thing yet to be made;
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| − | The color like a thought that grows
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| − | Out of a mood, the tragic robe
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| − | Of the actor, half his gesture, half
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| − | His speech, the dress of his meaning, silk
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| − | Sodden with his melancholy words,
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| − | The weather of his stage, himself.
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| − | X
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| − | Raise reddest columns. Toll a bell
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| − | And clap the hollows full of tin.
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| − | Throw papers in the streets, the wills
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| − | Of the dead, majestic in their seals.
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| − | And the beautiful trombones-behold
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| − | The approach of him whom none believes,
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| − | Whom all believe that all believe,
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| − | A pagan in a varnished care.
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| − | Roll a drum upon the blue guitar.
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| − | Lean from the steeple. Cry aloud,
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| − | "Here am I, my adversary, that
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| − | Confront you, hoo-ing the slick trombones,
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| − | Yet with a petty misery
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| − | At heart, a petty misery,
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| − | Ever the prelude to your end,
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| − | The touch that topples men and rock."
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| − | …
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| − | XV
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| − | Is this picture of Picasso's, this "hoard
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| − | Of destructions", a picture of ourselves,
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| − | Now, an image of our society?
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| − | Do I sit, deformed, a naked egg,
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| − | Catching at Good-bye, harvest moon,
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| − | Without seeing the harvest or the moon?
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| − | Things as they are have been destroyed.
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| − | Have I? Am I a man that is dead
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| − | At a table on which the food is cold?
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| − | Is my thought a memory, not alive?
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| − | | |
| − | Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood
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| − | And whichever it may be, is it mine?
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| − | XXIII
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| − | A few final solutions, like a duet
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| − | With the undertaker: a voice in the clouds,
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| − | Another on earth, the one a voice
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| − | Of ether, the other smelling of drink,
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| − | The voice of ether prevailing, the swell
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| − | Of the undertaker's song in the snow
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| − | Apostrophizing wreaths, the voice
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| − | In the clouds serene and final, next
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| − | The grunted breath scene and final,
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| − | The imagined and the real, thought
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| − | And the truth, Dichtung und Wahrheit, all
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| − | Confusion solved, as in a refrain
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| − | One keeps on playing year by year,
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| − | Concerning the nature of things as they are.
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| − | XXX
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| − | From this I shall evolve a man.
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| − | This is his essence: the old fantoche
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| − | | |
| − | Hanging his shawl upon the wind,
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| − | Like something on the stage, puffed out,
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| − | His strutting studied through centuries.
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| − | At last, in spite of his manner, his eye
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| − | A-cock at the cross-piece on a pole
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| − | Supporting heavy cables, slung
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| − | Through Oxidia, banal suburb,
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| − | One-half of all its installments paid.
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| − | Dew-dapper clapper-traps, blazing
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| − | From crusty stacks above machines.
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| − | Ecce, Oxidia is the seed
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| − | Dropped out of this amber-ember pod,
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| − | Oxidia is the soot of fire,
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| − | Oxidia is Olympia.
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| − | XXXI
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| − | How long and late the pheasant sleeps…
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| − | The employer and employee contend,
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| − | Combat, compose their droll affair.
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| − | The bubbling sun will bubble up,
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| − | Spring sparkle and the cock-bird shriek.
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| − | The employer and employee will hear
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| − | And continue their affair. The shriek
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| − | Will rack the thickets. There is no place,
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| − | Here, for the lark fixed in the mind,
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| − | In the museum of the sky. The cock
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| − | Will claw sleep. Morning is not sun,
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| − | It is this posture of the nerves,
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| − | As if a blunted player clutched
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| − | The nuances of the blue guitar.
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| − | It must be this rhapsody or none,
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| − | The rhapsody of things as they are.
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| − | XXXII
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| − | Throw away the lights, the definitions,
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| − | And say of what you see in the dark
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| − | That it is this or that it is that,
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| − | But do not use the rotted names.
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| − | How should you walk in that space and know
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| − | Nothing of the madness of space,
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| − | Nothing of its jocular procreations?
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| − | Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand
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| − | Between you and the shapes you take
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| − | When the crust of shape has been destroyed.
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| − | You as you are? You are yourself.
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| − | The blue guitar surprises you.
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| − | | |
| − | XXXIII
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| − | That generation's dream, aviled
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| − | In the mud, in Monday's dirty light,
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| − | That's it, the only dream they knew,
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| − | Time in its final block, not time
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| − | To come, a wrangling of two dreams.
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| − | Here is the bread of time to come,
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| − | Here is its actual stone. The bread
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| − | Will be our bread, the stone will be
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| − | Our bed and we shall sleep by night.
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| − | We shall forget by day, except
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| − | The moments when we choose to play
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| − | The imagined pine, the imagined jay.
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