Approaching Carolina by Wallace Stevens — Read

The book of moonlight is not written yet / Nor half begun, but, when it is, leave room / For Crispin, fagot in the lunar fire, / Who, in the hubbub of his pilgrimage / Through sweating changes, never could forget / That wakefulness or meditating sleep, / In which the sulky strophes willingly / Bore up, in time, the somnolent, deep songs. / Leave room, therefore, in that unwritten book / For the legendary moonlight that once burned / In Crispin's mind above a continent. / America was always north to him, / A northern west or western north, but north, / And thereby polar, polar-purple, chilled / And lank, rising and slumping from a sea / Of hardy foam, receding flatly, spread / In endless ledges, glittering, submerged / And cold in a boreal mistiness of the moon. / The spring came there in clinking pannicles / Of half-dissolving frost, the summer came, / If ever, whisked and wet, not ripening, / Before the winter's vacancy returned. / The myrtle, if the myrtle ever bloomed, / Was like a glacial pink upon the air. / The green palmettoes in crepuscular ice / Clipped frigidly blue-black meridians, / Morose chiaroscuro, gauntly drawn.

How many poems he denied himself / In his observant progress, lesser things / Than the relentless contact he desired; / How many sea-masks he ignored; what sounds / He shut out from his tempering ear; what thoughts, / Like jades affecting the sequestered bride; / And what descants, he sent to banishment! / Perhaps the Arctic moonlight really gave / The liaison, the blissful liaison, / Between himself and his environment, / Which was, and is, chief motive, first delight, / For him, and not for him alone. It seemed / Illusive, faint, more mist than moon, perverse, / Wrong as a divagation to Peking, / To him that postulated as his theme / The vulgar, as his theme and hymn and flight, / A passionately niggling nightingale. / Moonlight was an evasion, or, if not, / A minor meeting, facile, delicate.