Wallace Stevens - Blue Quotes

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The wind in which the dead leaves blow.
Here I inhale profounder strength
And as I am, I speak and move
And things are as I think they are
And say they are on the blue guitar.

Wallace Stevens
So that's life, then: things are they are?
It picks its way on the blue guitar.
A million people on one string?
And all their manner in the thing,
And all their manner, right and wrong,
And all their manner, weak and strong?
And that's life, then: things as they are,
This buzzing of the blue guitar.

Wallace Stevens
Just as my fingers on these keys Make music, so the self-same sounds On my spirit make a music, too. Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,
Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music.

Wallace Stevens
Be content —
Expansions, diffusions — content to be
The unspotted imbecile revery,
The heraldic center of the world
Of blue, blue sleek with a hundred chins,
The amorist Adjective aflame...

Wallace Stevens
And the color, the overcast blue
Of the air, in which the blue guitar
Is a form, described but difficult,
And I am merely a shadow hunched
Above the arrowy, still string,
The maker of a thing yet to be made;
The color like a thought that grows
Out of a mood, the tragic robe
Of the actor, half his gesture, half
His speech, the dress of his meaning, silk
Sodden with his melancholy words,
The weather of his stage, himself.

Wallace Stevens
The blue woman, linked and lacquered, at her window
Did not desire that feathery argentines
Should be cold silver, neither that frothy clouds Should foam, be foamy waves, should move like them

Wallace Stevens
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."

Wallace Stevens
The bees came booming as if they had never gone,
As if hyacinths had never gone. We say
This changes and that changes. Thus the constant Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths
Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause
In a universe of inconstancy. This means Night-blue is an inconstant thing. The seraph
Is satyr in Saturn, according to his thoughts.

Wallace Stevens
It is the sun that shares our works.
The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.
When shall I come to say of the sun,
It is a sea; it shares nothing;
The sun no longer shares our works
And the earth is alive with creeping men,
Mechanical beetles never quite warm?
And shall I then stand in the sun, as now
I stand in the moon, and call it good,
The immaculate, the merciful good,
Detached from us, from things as they are?
Not to be part of the sun? To stand
Remote and call it merciful?
The strings are cold on the blue guitar.

Wallace Stevens
If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,
Say that it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

Wallace Stevens
On a blue island in a sky-wide water
The wild orange trees continued to bloom and to bear,
Long after the planter's death.

Wallace Stevens
They said, 'You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are.' / The man replied, 'Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.'

Wallace Stevens
The heavy trees,
The grunting, shuffling branches, the robust,
The nocturnal, the antique, the blue-green pines
Deepen the feelings to inhuman depths.

Wallace Stevens
The old brown hen and the old blue sky,
Between the two we live and die
The broken cartwheel on the hill.

Wallace Stevens