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,

Or yellow with blue rings.

None of them are strange,

With socks of lace

And beaded ceintures.

People are not going

To dream of baboons and periwinkles.

Only, here and there, an old sailor,

Drunk and asleep in his boots,

Catches Tigers

In red weather.

Wallace Stevens

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Wallace Stevens

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Call the roller of big cigars,

The muscular one, and bid him whip

In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

Let the wenches dawdle in such dress

As they are used to wear, and let the boys

Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.

Let be be the finale of seem.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,

Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet

On which she embroidered fantails once

And spread it so as to cover her face.

If her horny feet protrude, they come

To show how cold she is, and dumb.

Let the lamp affix its beam.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Wallace Stevens

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

          I

Among twenty snowy mountains

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

          II

I was of three minds

Like a tree

In which there are three blackbirds.

          III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn wind

It was a small part of the pantomime.

          IV

A man and a woman

Are one.

A man and a woman and a blackbird

Are one.

          V

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflexions

Or the beauty of innuendos,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

          VI

Icicles filled the window

With barbaric glass.

The shadow of the blackbird

Crossed it, to and fro.

The Mood

Traced in the shadow

An indecipherable cause.

          VII

O thin men of Haddam,

Why do you imagine golden birds?

Do you not see how the blackbird

Walks around the feet

Of the women about you?

          VIII

I know noble accents

And lucid, inescapable rythms;

But I know, too,

That the blackbird is involved

In what I know.

          IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,

It marked the edge

Of one of many circles.

          X

At the sight of blackbirds

Flying in a green light

Even the bawds of euphony

Would cry out sharply.

          XI

He rode over Connecticut

In a glass coach.

Once, a fear pierced him,

In that he mistook

The shadow of his equipage

for blackbirds.

          XII

The river is moving.

The blackbird must be flying.

          XIII

It was evening all afternoon.

It was snowing

And it was going to snow.

The blackbird sat

In the cedar limbs.

Wallace Stevens

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.

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.

The jar was round upon the ground

And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.

The jar was gray and bare.

It did not give of bird or bush,

Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Wallace Stevens