A Nice Shady Home by Wallace Stevens — Read

Crispin as hermit, pure and capable, / Dwelt in the land. Perhaps if discontent / Had kept him still the pricking realist, / Choosing his element from droll confect / Of was and is and shall or ought to be, / Beyond Bordeaux, beyond Havana, far / Beyond carked Yucatan, he might have come / To colonize his polar planterdom / And jig his chits upon a cloudy knee. / But his emprize to that idea soon sped. / Crispin dwelt in the land and dwelling there / Slid from his continent by slow recess / To things within his actual eye, alert / To the difficulty of rebellious thought / When the sky is blue. The blue infected will. / It may be that the yarrow in his fields / Sealed pensive purple under its concern. / But day by day, now this thing and now that / Confined him, while it cosseted, condoned, / Little by little, as if the suzerain soil / Abashed him by carouse to humble yet / Attach. It seemed haphazard denouement. / He first, as realist, admitted that / Whoever hunts a matinal continent / May, after all, stop short before a plum / And be content and still be realist. / The words of things entangle and confuse. / The plum survives its poems. It may hang / In the sunshine placidly, colored by ground / Obliquities of those who pass beneath, / Harlequined and mazily dewed and mauved / In bloom. Yet it survives in its own form, / Beyond these changes, good, fat, guzzly fruit. / So Crispin hasped on the surviving form, / For him, of shall or ought to be in is.

Was he to bray this in profoundest brass / Arointing his dreams with fugal requiems? / Was he to company vastest things defunct / With a blubber of tom-toms harrowing the sky? / Scrawl a tragedian's testament? Prolong / His active force in an inactive dirge, / Which, let the tall musicians call and call, / Should merely call him dead? Pronounce amen / Through choirs infolded to the outmost clouds? / Because he built a cabin who once planned / Loquacious columns by the ructive sea? / Because he turned to salad-beds again? / Jovial Crispin, in calamitous crape? / Should he lay by the personal and make / Of his own fate an instance of all fate? / What is one man among so many men? / What are so many men in such a world? / Can one man think one thing and think it long? / Can one man be one thing and be it long? / The very man despising honest quilts / Lies quilted to his poll in his despite. / For realists, what is is what should be.