The Man with the Blue Guitar

I

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."

II

I cannot bring a world quite round, 

Although I patch it as I can.

I sing a hero'd head, large eye 

And bearded bronze, but not a man,

Although I patch him as I can 

And reach through him almost to man.

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.

III

Ah, but to play man number one, 

To drive the dagger in his heart,

To lay his brain upon the board 

And pick the acrid colors out,

To nail his thought across the door, 

Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,

To strike his living hi and ho, 

To tick it, tock it, turn it true,

To bang it from a savage blue, 

Jangling the metal of the strings...

IV

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.

V

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. Poetry

Exceeding music must take the place 

Of empty heaven and its hymns,

Ourselves in poetry must take their place, 

Even in the chattering of your guitar.

VI

A tune beyond us as we are, 

Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar;

Ourselves in the tune as if in space, 

Yet nothing changed, except the place

Of things as they are and only the place 

As you play them, on the blue guitar,

Placed so, beyond the compass of change, 

Perceived in a final atmosphere;

For a moment final, in the way 

The thinking of art seems final when

The thinking of god is smoky dew. 

The tune is space. The blue guitar

Becomes the place of things as they are, 

A composing of senses of the guitar.

VII

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.

VIII

The vivid, florid, turgid sky, 

The drenching thunder rolling by,

The morning deluged still by night, 

The clouds tumultuously bright

And the feeling heavy in cold chords 

Struggling toward impassioned choirs,

Crying among the clouds, enraged 

By gold antagonists in air--

I know my lazy, leaden twang 

Is like the reason in a storm;

And yet it brings the storm to bear. 

I twang it out and leave it there.

IX

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.

X

Raise reddest columns. Toll a bell 

And clap the hollows full of tin.

Throw papers in the streets, the wills 

Of the dead, majestic in their seals.

And the beautiful trombones--behold 

The approach of him whom none believes,

Whom all believe that all believe, 

A pagan in a varnished car.

Roll a drum upon the blue guitar. 

Lean from the steeple. Cry aloud,

"Here am I, my adversary, that 

Confront you, hoo-ing the slick trombones,

Yet with a petty misery 

At heart, a petty misery,

Ever the prelude to your end, 

The touch that topples men and rock."

XI

Slowly the ivy on the stones 

Becomes the stones. Women become

The cities, children become the fields 

And men in waves become the sea.

It is the chord that flasifies. 

The sea returns upon the men,

The fields entrap the children, brick 

Is a weed and all the flies are caught,

Wingless and withered, but living alive. 

The discord merely magnified.

Deeper within the belly's dark 

Of time, time grows upon the rock.

XII

Tom-tom, c'est moi. the blue guitar 

And I are one. The orchestra

Fills the high hall with shuffling men 

High as the hall. The whirling noise

Of a multitude dwindles, all said, 

To his breath that lies awake at night.

I know that timid breathing. Where 

Do I begin and end? And where,

As I strum the thing, do I pick up 

That which momentously declares

Itself not to be I and yet 

Must be. It could be nothing else.

XIII

The pale intrusions into blue 

Are corrupting pallors...ay di mi,

Blue buds of pitchy blooms. 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...

XIV

First one beam, then another, then 

A thousand are radiant in the sky.

Each is both star and orb; and day 

Is the riches of their atmosphere.

The sea appends its tattery hues. 

The shores are banks of muffling mist.

One says a German chandelier-- 

A candle is enough to light the world.

It makes it clear. Even at noon 

It glistens in essential dark.

At night, it lights the fruit and wine, 

The book and bread, things as they are,

In a chiaroscuro where 

One sits and plays the blue guitar.

XV

Is this picture of Picasso's, this "hoard 

Of destructions," a picture of ourselves,

Now, an image of our society? 

Do I sit, deformed, a naked egg,

Catching at Good-bye, harvest moon, 

Without seeing the harvest or the moon?

Things as they are have been destroyed. 

Have I? Am I a man that is dead

At a table on which the food is cold? 

Is my thought a memory, not alive?

Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood 

And whichever it may be, is it mine?

XVI

The earth is not earth but a stone, 

Not the mother that held men as they fell

But stone, but like a stone, no: not 

The mother, but an oppressor, but like

An oppressor that grudges them their death, 

As it grudges the living that they live.

To live in war, to live at war, 

To chop the sullen psaltery,

To improve the sewers in Jerusalem, 

To electrify the nimbuses--

Place honey on the altars and die, 

You lovers that are bitter at heart.

XVII

The person has a mould. But not 

Its animal. The angelic ones

Speak of the soul, the mind. It is 

An animal The blue guitar--

On that its claws propound, its fangs 

Articulate its desert days.

The blue guitar a mould? That shell? 

Well, after all, the north wind blows

A horn, on which its victory 

Is a worm composing on a straw.

XVIII

A dream (to call it a dream) in which 

I can believe, in face of the object,

A dream no longer a dream, a thing, 

Of things as they are, as the blue guitar

After long strumming on certain nights 

Gives the touch of the senses, not of the hand,

But the very senses as they touch 

The wind-gloss. Or as daylight comes,

Like light in a mirroring of cliffs, 

Rising upward from a sea of ex.

XIX

That I may reduce the monster to 

Myself, and then may be myself

In face of the monster, be more than part 

Of it, more than the monstrous player of

One of its monstrous lutes, not be 

Alone, but reduce the monster and be,

Two things, the two together as one, 

And play of the monster and of myself,

Or better not of myself at all, 

But of that as its intelligence,

Being the lion in the lute 

Before the lion locked in stone.

XX

What is there in life except one's ideas. 

Good air, good friend, what is there in life?

Is it ideas that I believe? 

Good air, my only friend, believe,

Believe would be a brother full 

Of love, believe would be a friend

Friendlier than my only friend, 

Good air. Poor pale, poor pale guitar...

XXI

A substitute for all the gods: 

This self, not that gold self aloft,

Alone, one's shadow magnified, 

Lord of the body, looking down,

As now and called most high, 

The shadow of Chocorua

In an immenser heaven, aloft, 

Alone, lord of the land and lord

Of the men that live in the land, high lord. 

One's self and the mountains of one's land,

Without shadows, without magnificence, 

The flesh, the bone, the dirt, the stone.

XXII

Poetry is the subject of the poem, 

From this the poem issues and

To this returns. Between the two, 

Between issue and return, there is

An absence in reality, 

Things as they are. Or so we say.

But are these separate? Is it 

An absence for the poem, which acquires

Its true appearances there, sun's green, 

Cloud's red, earth feeling, sky that thinks?

From these it takes. Perhaps it gives, 

In the universal intercourse.

XXIII

A few final solutions, like a duet 

With the undertaker: a voice in the clouds,

Another on earth, the one a voice 

Of ether, the other smelling of drink.

The voice of ether prevailing, the swell 

Of the undertaker's song in the snow

Apostrophizing wreaths, the voice 

In the clouds serene and final, next

The grunted breath serene and final, 

The imagined and the real, thought

And the truth, Dichtung und Wahrheit, all 

Confusion solved, as in a refrain

One keeps on playing year by year, 

Concerning the nature of things as they are.

XXIV

A poem like a missal found 

In the mud, a missal for that young man,

That scholar hungriest for that book, 

The very book, or, less, a page

Or, at the least, a phrase, that phrase, 

A hawk of life, that latined phrase:

To know; a missal for brooding-sight. 

To meet that hawk's eye and to flinch

Not a the eye but at the joy of it. 

I play. But this is what I think.

XXV

He held the world upon his nose 

And this-a-way he gave a fling.

His robes and symbols, ai-yi-yi-- 

And that-a-way he twirled the thing.

Sombre as fir-trees, liquid cats 

Moved in the grass without a sound.

They did not know the grass went round. 

The cats had cats and the grass turned gray

And the world had worlds, ai, this-a-way: 

The grass turned green and the grass turned gray.

And the nose is eternal, that-a-way. 

Things as they were, things as they are,

Things as they will be by and by... 

A fat thumb beats out ai-yi-yi.

XXVI

The world washed in his imagination, 

The world was a shore, whether sound or form

Or light, the relic of farewells, 

Rock, of valedictory echoings,

To which his imagination returned, 

From which it sped, a bar in space,

Sand heaped in the clouds, giant that fought 

Against the murderous alphabet:

The swarm of thoughts, the swarm of dreams 

Of inaccessible Utopia.

A mountainous music always seemed 

To be falling and to be passing away.

XXVII

It is the sea that whitens the roof. 

The sea drifts through the winter air.

It is the sea that the north wind makes. 

The sea is in the falling snow.

This gloom is the darkness of the sea. 

Geographers and philosophers,

Regard. But for that salty cup, 

But for the icicles on the eaves--

The sea is a form of ridicule. 

The iceberg settings satirize

The demon that cannot be himself, 

That tours to shift the shifting scene.

XXVIII

I am a native in this world 

And think in it as a native thinks,

Gesu, not native of a mind 

Thinking the thoughts I call my own,

Native, a native in the world 

And like a native think in it.

It could not be a mind, the wave 

In which the watery grasses flow

And yet are fixed as a photograph, 

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.

XXIX

In the cathedral, I sat there, and read, 

Alone, a lean Review and said,

"These degustations in the vaults 

Oppose the past and the festival.

What is beyond the cathedral, outside, 

Balances with nuptial song.

So it is to sit and to balance things 

To and to and to the point of still,

To say of one mask it is like, 

To say of another it is like,

To know that the balance does not quite rest, 

That the mask is strange, however like."

The shapes are wrong and the sounds are false. 

The bells are the bellowing of bulls.

Yet Franciscan don was never more 

Himself than in this fertile glass.

XXX

From this I shall evolve a man. 

This is his essence: the old fantoche

Hanging his shawl upon the wind, 

Like something on the stage, puffed out,

His strutting studied through centuries. 

At last, in spite of his manner, his eye

A-cock at the cross-piece on a pole 

Supporting heavy cables, slung

Through Oxidia, banal suburb, 

One-half of all its installments paid.

Dew-dapper clapper-traps, blazing 

From crusty stacks above machines.

Ecce, Oxidia is the seed 

Dropped out of this amber-ember pod,

Oxidia is the soot of fire, 

Oxidia is Olympia.

XXXI

How long and late the pheasant sleeps... 

The employer and employee contend,

Combat, compose their droll affair. 

The bubbling sun will bubble up,

Spring sparkle and the cock-bird shriek. 

The employer and employee will hear

And continue their affair. The shriek 

Will rack the thickets. There is no place,

Here, for the lark fixed in the mind, 

In the museum of the sky. The cock

Will claw sleep. Mourning is not sun, 

It is this posture of the nerves,

As if a blunted player clutched 

The nuances of the blue guitar.

It must be this rhapsody or none, 

The rhapsody of things as they are.

XXXII

Throw away the lights, the definitions, 

And say of what you see in the dark

That it is this or that it is that, 

But do not use the rotted names.

How should you walk in that space and know 

Nothing of the madness of space,

Nothing of its jocular procreations? 

Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand

Between you and the shapes you take 

When the crust of shape has been destroyed.

You as you are? You are yourself. 

The blue guitar surprises you.

XXXIII

That generation's dream, availed 

In the mud, in Monday's dirty light,

That's it, the only dream they knew, 

Time in its final block, not time

To come, a wrangling of two dreams. 

Here is the bread of time to come,

Here is its actual stone. The bread 

Will be our bread, the stone will be

Our bed and we shall sleep by night. 

We shall forget by day, except

The moments when we choose to play 

The imagined pine, the imagined jay.

~ Wallace Stevens

(The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens)

What Is There Beyond Knowing?

.

.

What is there beyond knowing that keeps

calling to me? I can't

.

turn in any direction

but it's there. I don't mean

.

the leaves' grip and shine or even the thrush's

silk song, but the far-off

.

fires, for example,

of the stars, heaven's slowly turning

.

theater of light, or the wind

playful with its breath;

.

or time that's always rushing forward,

or standing still

.

in the same -- what shall I say --

moment.

.

What I know

I could put into a pack

.

as if it were bread and cheese, and carry it

on one shoulder,

.

important and honorable, but so small!

While everything else continues, unexplained

.

and unexplainable. How wonderful it is

to follow a thought quietly

.

to its logical end.

I have done this a few times.

.

But mostly I just stand in the dark field,

in the middle of the world, breathing

.

in and out. Life so far doesn't have any other name

but breath and light, wind and rain.

.

If there's a temple, I haven't found it yet.

I simply go on drifting, in the heaven of the grass

and the weeds.

.

~ Mary Oliver

(New and Selected Poems Volume Two)

.

EAST COKER (No. 2 of 'Four Quartets')

I

In my beginning is my end. In succession

Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,

Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place

Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.

Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,

Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth

Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,

Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.

Houses live and die: there is a time for building

And a time for living and for generation

And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane

And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots

And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls

Across the open field, leaving the deep lane

Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,

Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,

And the deep lane insists on the direction

Into the village, in the electric heat

Hypnotized. In a warm haze the sultry light

Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.

The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.

Wait for the early owl.

In that open field

If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,

On a summer midnight, you can hear the music

Of the weak pipe and the little drum

And see them dancing around the bonfire

The association of man and woman

In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie—

A dignified and commodiois sacrament.

Two and two, necessarye coniunction,

Holding eche other by the hand or the arm

Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire

Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,

Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter

Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,

Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth

Mirth of those long since under earth

Nourishing the corn. Keeping time,

Keeping the rhythm in their dancing

As in their living in the living seasons

The time of the seasons and the constellations

The time of milking and the time of harvest

The time of the coupling of man and woman

And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.

Eating and drinking. Dung and death.

Dawn points, and another day

Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind

Wrinkles and slides. I am here

Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.

II

What is the late November doing

With the disturbance of the spring

And creatures of the summer heat,

And snowdrops writhing under feet

And hollyhocks that aim too high

Red into grey and tumble down

Late roses filled with early snow?

Thunder rolled by the rolling stars

Simulates triumphal cars

Deployed in constellated wars

Scorpion fights against the Sun

Until the Sun and Moon go down

Comets weep and Leonids fly

Hunt the heavens and the plains

Whirled in a vortex that shall bring

The world to that destructive fire

Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.

That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:

A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,

Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle

With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.

It was not (to start again) what one had expected.

What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,

Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity

And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us

Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,

Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?

The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,

The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets

Useless in the darkness into which they peered

Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,

At best, only a limited value

In the knowledge derived from experience.

The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,

For the pattern is new in every moment

And every moment is a new and shocking

Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived

Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.

In the middle, not only in the middle of the way

But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,

On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,

And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,

Risking enchantment. Do not let me hear

Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,

Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,

Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire

Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

The houses are all gone under the sea.

The dancers are all gone under the hill.

III

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,

The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,

The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,

The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,

Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,

Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,

And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha

And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,

And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.

And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,

Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury.

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you

Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,

The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed

With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,

And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama

And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—

Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations

And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence

And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen

Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;

Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.

The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,

The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy

Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony

Of death and birth.

You say I am repeating

Something I have said before. I shall say it again.

Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,

You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.

In order to arrive at what you do not know

You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

In order to possess what you do not possess

You must go by the way of dispossession.

In order to arrive at what you are not

You must go through the way in which you are not.

And what you do not know is the only thing you know

And what you own is what you do not own

And where you are is where you are not.

IV

The wounded surgeon plies the steel

That questions the distempered part;

Beneath the bleeding hands we feel

The sharp compassion of the healer's art

Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease

If we obey the dying nurse

Whose constant care is not to please

But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,

And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

The whole earth is our hospital

Endowed by the ruined millionaire,

Wherein, if we do well, we shall

Die of the absolute paternal care

That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

The chill ascends from feet to knees,

The fever sings in mental wires.

If to be warmed, then I must freeze

And quake in frigid purgatorial fires

Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

The dripping blood our only drink,

The bloody flesh our only food:

In spite of which we like to think

That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—

Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

V

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—

Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres

Trying to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer

By strength and submission, has already been discovered

Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope

To emulate—but there is no competition—

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older

The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

Of dead and living. Not the intense moment

Isolated, with no before and after,

But a lifetime burning in every moment

And not the lifetime of one man only

But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

There is a time for the evening under starlight,

A time for the evening under lamplight

(The evening with the photograph album).

Love is most nearly itself

When here and now cease to matter.

Old men ought to be explorers

Here or there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

~ T. S. Eliot