It Must Give Pleasure
To sing jubilas at exact, accustomed times,
To be crested and wear the mane of a multitude And so, as part, to exult with its great throat,
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.
Jerome Begat the tubas and the fire-wind strings,
The golden fingers picking dark-blue air:
For companies of voices moving there,
To find of sound the bleakest ancestor,
To find of light a music issuing Whereon it falls in more than sensual mode.
But 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.
Wallace Stevens
Other author posts
The Planet On The Table
Ariel was glad he had written his poems They were of a remembered Or of something seen that he liked Other makings of the
Continual Conversation With A Silent Man
The old brown hen and the old blue sky, Between the two we live and die—The broken cartwheel on the hill As if, in the presence of the sea, We dried our nets and mended
Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself
At the earliest ending of winter, In March, a scrawny cry from Seemed like a sound in his mind He knew that he heard it,
Study Of Two Pears
I Opusculum paedagogum The pears are not viols, Nudes or bottles They resemble nothing else
