The Idea of a Colony by Wallace Stevens — Read

Nota: his soil is man's intelligence. / That's better. That's worth crossing seas to find. / Crispin in one laconic phrase laid bare / His cloudy drift and planned a colony. / Exit the mental moonlight, exit lex, / Rex and principium, exit the whole / Shebang. Exeunt omnes. Here was prose / More exquisite than any tumbling verse: / A still new continent in which to dwell. / What was the purpose of his pilgrimage, / Whatever shape it took in Crispin's mind, / If not, when all is said, to drive away / The shadow of his fellows from the skies, / And, from their stale intelligence released, / To make a new intelligence prevail? / Hence the reverberations in the words / Of his first central hymns, the celebrants / Of rankest trivia, tests of the strength / Of his aesthetic, his philosophy, / The more invidious, the more desired. / The florist asking aid from cabbages, / The rich man going bare, the paladin / Afraid, the blind man as astronomer, / The appointed power unwielded from disdain.

His western voyage ended and began. / The torment of fastidious thought grew slack, / Another, still more bellicose, came on. / He, therefore, wrote his prolegomena, / And, being full of the caprice, inscribed / Commingled souvenirs and prophecies. / He made a singular collation. Thus: / The natives of the rain are rainy men. / Although they paint effulgent, azure lakes, / And April hillsides wooded white and pink, / Their azure has a cloudy edge, their white / And pink, the water bright that dogwood bears. / And in their music showering sounds intone. / On what strange froth does the gross Indian dote, / What Eden sapling gum, what honeyed gore, / What pulpy dram distilled of innocence, / That streaking gold should speak in him / Or bask within his images and words? / If these rude instances impeach themselves / By force of rudeness, let the principle / Be plain. For application Crispin strove, / Abhorring Turk as Esquimau, the lute / As the marimba, the magnolia as rose.