I
Force is my lot and not pink-clustered
Roma ni Avignon ni Leyden,
And cold my element. Death is my
Master and, without light, I dwell. There
The snow hangs heavily on the rocks, brought
By a wind that seeks out shelter from snow. Thus
Each man spoke in winter. Yet each man spoke of
The brightness of arms, said Roma wasted
In its own dirt, said Avignon was
Peace in a time of peace, said Leyden
Was always the other mind. The brightness
Of arms, the will opposed to cold, fate
In its cavern, wings subtler than any mercy,
These were the psalters of their sibyls.

from Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (1957), p. 273

Notes: In "A Poem of War" (PBS NewsHour 3/30/1999),
U.S. Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky quotes this first stanza
of Wallace Stevens's "Examination of the Hero in a Time of War".

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NOTES TOWARD A SUPREME FICTION

To Henry Church

And for what, except for you, do I feel love?
Do I press the extremest book of the wisest man
Close to me, hidden in me day and night?
In the uncertain light of single, certain truth,
Equal in living changingness to the light
In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest,
For a moment in the central of our being,
The vivid transparence that you bring is peace.

Dedication from Notes toward a Supreme Fiction
Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (1957), p. 380

******************************************

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.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow...
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache...
The sun was coming from the outside.

That scrawny cry— It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.

Listen to: Wallace Stevens reading of above poem
(Harvard University Press recording 10/8/54)

from Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (1957), p. 534

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955),
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
Alfred Knopf, NY, 1957, pp. 273, 380, 534