April soft and cold: Golden ointment rained

A friend commented on my latest post focused on e.e. cummings by saying, "I really like cummings, much much more than W.C. Williams. But Wallace Stevens whips them both."

Well, I couldn’t recall any Stevens right at first, so I hunted him down. I’m not convinced that he’s actually better than cummings (although I agree that he is superior to William Carlos Williams), but then I haven’t lived and breathed him for decades, as I have cummings.

And, you know—for a lawyer and insurance executive, Stevens is pretty good indeed. Here are a couple for you. I really like the imagery of both of them, but “Palaz of Hoon” does blow me away with its bold surrealist strokes.

“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 in 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. 

“Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”

Not less because in purple I descended

The western day through what you called

The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?

What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?

What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,

And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.

I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw

Or heard or felt came not but from myself;

And there I found myself more truly and more strange.