Wallace Stevens Poems

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
...

Ariel was glad he had written his poems.
They were of a remembered time
Or of something seen that he liked.
...

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,
...

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
...

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.
...

Among the more irritating minor ideas
Of Mr. Homburg during his visits home
To Concord, at the edge of things, was this:
...

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

Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,
Into twenty villages,
...

The light is like a spider.
It crawls over the water.
It crawls over the edges of the snow.
It crawls under your eyelids
...

As the immense dew of Florida
Brings forth
The big-finned palm
And green vine angering for life,
...