(no subject)

Could this, too, be an aurora poem then?

My period had come for Prayer -
No other Art - would do -
My Tactics missed a rudiment -
Creator - Was it you?

God grows above - so those who pray
Horizons - must ascend -
And so I stepped upon the North
To see this Curious Friend -

His House was not - no sign had He -
By Chimney - nor by Door
Could I infer his Residence -
Vast Prairies of Air

Unbroken by a Settler -
Were all that I could see -
Infinitude - Had'st Thou no Face
That I might look on Thee?

The Silence condescended -
Creation stopped - for Me -
But awed beyond my errand -
I worshipped - did not "pray" -

(no subject)

Especially since:

Aurora is the effort
Of the Celestial Face
Unconsciousness of Perfectness
To simulate, to Us.

Straightened: an aurora is the effort of the celestial face to simulate its unconsciousness of its perfection to us. Every Emily exhale is an irony, so don't be sure that doesn't mean one of its possible opposites, Godlovers.

But anyway it fits the poem before. The face in the North showed itself to her, but in such a way that her desire to respond to it personally (by praying) rather than with awe (presumably what prayerless worship's like?) is simply destroyed. The aurora is God's proof to us that he does not exist, but that something more astonishing does.

(no subject)

Oh, also noticed last week that this must be Pullman's source for his angels:

Large Red Man Reading

There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases,
As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae.
They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expected more.

There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of life,
Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips among them.
They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality,

They would have wept and been happy, have shivered in the frost
And cried out to feel it again, have run fingers over leaves
And against the most coiled thorn, have seized on what was ugly

And laughed, as he sat there reading, from out of the purple tabulae,
The outlines of being and its expressings, the syllables of its law:
Poesis, poesis, the literal characters, the vatic lines,

Which in those ears and in those thin, those spended hearts,
Took on color, took on shape and the size of things as they are
And spoke the feeling for them, which was what they had lacked.


Stevens was one of the few poets on his favorite books list, I think. And I know Lindsay was--pre-Galatea, I wonder?