[from Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, by Wallace Stevens:]
IX
The poem goes from the poet’s gibberish to
The gibberish of the vulgate and back again.
Does it move to and fro or is it of both
At once? Is it a luminous flittering
Or the concentration of a cloudy day?
Is there a poem that never reaches words
And one that chaffers the time away?
Is the poem both peculiar and general?
There’s a meditation there, in which there seems
To be an evasion, a thing not apprehended or
Not apprehended well. Does the poet
Evade us, as in a senseless element?
Evade, this hot, dependent orator,
The spokesman at our bluntest barriers,
Exponent by a form of speech, the speaker
Of a speech only a little of the tongue?
It is the gibberish of the vulgate that he seeks.
He tries by a peculiar speech to speak
The peculiar potency of the general,
To compound the imagination’s Latin with
The lingua franca et jocundissima.
[...]
[All rights reserved by the author's estate - Please do not copy]
IX
The poem goes from the poet’s gibberish to
The gibberish of the vulgate and back again.
Does it move to and fro or is it of both
At once? Is it a luminous flittering
Or the concentration of a cloudy day?
Is there a poem that never reaches words
And one that chaffers the time away?
Is the poem both peculiar and general?
There’s a meditation there, in which there seems
To be an evasion, a thing not apprehended or
Not apprehended well. Does the poet
Evade us, as in a senseless element?
Evade, this hot, dependent orator,
The spokesman at our bluntest barriers,
Exponent by a form of speech, the speaker
Of a speech only a little of the tongue?
It is the gibberish of the vulgate that he seeks.
He tries by a peculiar speech to speak
The peculiar potency of the general,
To compound the imagination’s Latin with
The lingua franca et jocundissima.
[...]
[All rights reserved by the author's estate - Please do not copy]
No comments:
Post a Comment