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