Jessica’s Reviews > Selected Poems of Wallace Stevens > Status Update

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
And is our fortune and honey hived in the trees
And mingling in the colors at a festival.

And the secondary sense of the ear
Swarm, not with secondary sounds, but choirs,
Not evocations but last choirs, last sounds
With nothing else compounded, carried full,
Pure rhetoric of a language without words.

There is nothing more inscribed nor thought nor felt
And this must comfort the heart's core against
Its false disasters- these fathers standing round,
These mothers touching, speaking, being near,
These lovers waiting in the soft dry grass.

Now in midsummer come and all fools slaughtered
And spring’s infuriations over and a long way
To the first autumnal inhalations, young broods
Are in the grass, the roses are heavy with a weight
Of fragrance and the mind lays by its trouble.
...
This is the last day of a certain year
Beyond which there is nothing left of time.
It comes to this and the imagination’s life.

Revolution
Is the affair of logical lunatics

A too, too human god, self-pity's kin
And uncourageous genesis... It seems
As if the health of the world might be enough.

It seems as if the honey of common summer
Might be enough, as if the golden combs
Were part of a sustenance itself enough,

As if hell, so modified, had disappeared,
As if pain, no longer satanic mimicry,
Could be borne, as if we were sure to find our way.

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed,
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be,

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking
From the weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being

Itself
Is time, apart from any past, apart
From any future, the ever-living and being,
The ever-breathing and moving, the constant fire,

The present close, the present realized
Not the symbol but that for which the symbol stands,
The vivid thing in the air that never changes,
Though the air change.

He said I had this that I could love,
As one loves visible and responsive peace,
As one loves one's own being,
As one loves that which is the end
And must be loved, as one loves that
Of which one is a part as in a unity,
A unity that is the life one loves,
So that one lives all the lives that comprise it
As the life of the fatal unity of war.