Wallace Stevens Poems

First Girl
When this yokel comes maundering,
Whetting his hacker,
I shall run before him,
...

I had as lief be embraced by the portier of the hotel
As to get no more from the moonlight
Than your moist hand.
...

There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed its oxygen,
...

“Mother of heaven, regina of the clouds,
O sceptre of the sun, crown of the moon,
There is not nothing, no, no, never nothing,
...

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.
If the rejected things, the things denied,
...

Pour the unhappiness out
From your too bitter heart,
Which grieving will not sweeten.
...

I
Go on, high ship, since now, upon the shore,
The snake has left its skin upon the floor.
Key West sank downward under massive clouds
...

Life contracts and death is expected,
As in season of autumn.
The soldier falls.
...

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven.Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
...

Sister and mother and diviner love,
And of the sisterhood of the living dead
Most near, most clear, and of the clearest bloom,
And of the fragrant mothers the most dear
...