Wallace Stevens - Sun Quotes

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The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.

Wallace Stevens
It is the mind that is woven, the mind that was jerked
And tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun.

Wallace Stevens
The difficultest rigor is forthwith,
On the image of what we see, to catch from that
Irrational moment its unreasoning,
As when the sun comes rising, when the sea
Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall Of heaven-haven. These are not things transformed.
Yet we are shaken by them as if they were.
We reason about them with a later reason.

Wallace Stevens
Soldier, there is a war between the mind
And sky, between thought and day and night. It is
For that the poet is always in the sun, Patches the moon together in his room
To his Virgilian cadences, up down,
Up down. It is a war that never ends.

Wallace Stevens
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.

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
The exceeding brightness of this early sun Makes me conceive how dark I have become.

Wallace Stevens
Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea
Of this invention, this invented world,
The inconceivable idea of the sun. You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it. Never suppose an inventing mind as source
Of this idea nor for that mind compose
A voluminous master folded in his fire.

Wallace Stevens
The sun, that brave man,
Comes through boughs that lie in wait,
That brave man. Green and gloomy eyes
In dark forms of the grass
Run away. The good stars,
Pale helms and spiky spurs,
Run away. Fears of my bed,
Fears of life and fears of death,
Run away. That brave man comes up
From below and walks without meditation,
That brave man.

Wallace Stevens
Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry,
Of the torches wisping in the underground,
Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light.
There are no shadows in our sun,
Day is desire and night is sleep.
There are no shadows anywhere.
The earth, for us, is flat and bare.
There are no shadows.

Wallace Stevens
I measure myself Against a tall tree I find that I am much taller, For I reach right up to the sun With my eye; And I reach to the shore of the sea With my ear. Nevertheless, I dislike The way the ants crawl In and out of my shadow.

Wallace Stevens
These
Are the music of meet resignation; these
The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you
To magnify, if in that drifting waste
You are to be accompanied by more
Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.

Wallace Stevens
After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.

Wallace Stevens
His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of his self,
Were no less makings of the sun.

Wallace Stevens
That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way. The world is ugly,
And the people are sad..

Wallace Stevens
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or an old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Wallace Stevens
Damned universal cock, as if the sun Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail.

Wallace Stevens
That's what misery is,
Nothing to have at heart.
It is to have or nothing. It is a thing to have,
A lion, an ox in his breast,
To feel it breathing there. Corazon, stout dog,
Young ox, bow-legged bear,
He tastes its blood, not spit. He is like a man
In the body of a violent beast.
Its muscles are his own... The lion sleeps in the sun.
Its nose is on its paws.
It can kill a man.

Wallace Stevens
Let's see the very thing and nothing else.
Let's see it with the hottest fire of sight.
Burn everything not part of it to ash.
Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky
Without evasion by a single metaphor.
Look at it in its essential barrenness
And say this, this is the centre that I seek.

Wallace Stevens
My house has changed a little in the sun.
The fragrance of the magnolias come close,
False flick, false form, but falseness close to kin.

Wallace Stevens
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.

Wallace Stevens
Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was
A name for something that never could be named.
There was a project for the sun and is. There is a project for the sun. The sun
Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be
In the difficulty of what it is to be.

Wallace Stevens
Compare the silent rose of the sun And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell, With this paper, this dust. That states the point.

Wallace Stevens