Poems by Wallace Stevens

american poetry

A

• A High-Toned Old Christian Woman

  Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
  Take the moral law and make a nave of it
  And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,

• Anecdote of the Jar

  I placed a jar in Tennessee,
  And round it was, upon a hill.
  It made the slovenly wilderness
  Surround that hill.
  

B

• Bantams in Pine-woods

  Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan
  Of tan with henna hackles, halt!
  Damned universal cock, as if the sun

C

• 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.
  

D

• Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock

  The houses are haunted
  By white night-gowns.
  None are green,
  Or purple with green rings,
  Or green with yellow rings,

• Domination Of Black

  At night, by the fire,
  The colors of the bushes
  And of the fallen leaves,
  Repeating themselves,
  Turned in the room,

F

• Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

  Light the first light of evening
  In which we rest and, for small reason, think
  The world imagined is the ultimate good.
  

G

• Gray Room

  Although you sit in a room that is gray,
  Except for the silver
  Of the straw-paper,
  And pick
  At your pale white gown;

L

• Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly

  Among the more irritating minor ideas
  Of Mr. Homburg during his visits home
  To Concord, at the edge of things, was this:
  

M

• Madame la Fleurie

  Weight him down, O side-stars, with the great weightings of
  the end.

• Metaphors of a Magnifico

  Twenty men crossing a bridge,
  Into a village,
  Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,
  Into twenty villages,
  Or one man

N

• Nomad Exquisite

  As the immense dew of Florida
  Brings forth
  The big-finned palm
  And green vine angering for life,
  As the immense dew of Florida

• Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself

  At the earliest ending of winter,
  In March, a scrawny cry from outside
  Seemed like a sound in his mind.
  

O

• Of Modern Poetry

  The poem of the mind in the act of finding
  What will suffice. It has not always had

P

• Peter Quince at the Clavier

  I
  Just as my fingers on these keys
  Make music, so the self-same sounds
  On my spirit make a music, too.

• Poem Written at Morning

  A sunny day's complete Poussiniana
  Divide it from itself. It is this or that
  And it is not.
  By metaphor you paint

S

• Six Significant Landscapes

  I
  An old man sits
  In the shadow of a pine tree
  In China.
  He sees larkspur,
  Blue and white,
  At the edge of the shadow,

• Sunday Morning

  1
  Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
  Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
  And the green freedom of a cockatoo

T

• Tattoo

  The light is like a spider.
  It crawls over the water.
  It crawls over the edges of the snow.
  It crawls under your eyelids

• The Emperor of Ice-Cream

  Call the roller of big cigars,
  The muscular one, and bid him whip
  In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

• The High-Toned Old Christian Woman

  Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
  Take the moral law and make a nave of it
  And from the nave build haunted heaven.Thus,

• The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm

  The house was quiet and the world was calm.
  The reader became the book; and summer night
  

• The Idea of Order at Key West

  She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
  The water never formed to mind or voice,
  Like a body wholly body, fluttering

• The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad

  The time of year has grown indifferent.
  Mildew of summer and the deepening snow
  Are both alike in the routine I know:

• The Planet On The Table

  Ariel was glad he had written his poems.
  They were of a remembered time
  Or of something seen that he liked.
  

• The Plot Against the Giant

  First Girl
  When this yokel comes maundering,
  Whetting his hacker,
  I shall run before him,
  Diffusing the civilest odors

• The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain

  There it was, word for word,
  The poem that took the place of a mountain.
  He breathed its oxygen,

• The River of Rivers in Connecticut

  There is a great river this side of Stygia
  Before one comes to the first black cataracts

• All poems of Wallace Stevens beginning with the letter T

V

• Valley Candle

  My candle burned alone in an immense valley.
  Beams of the huge night converged upon it,
  Until the wind blew.