6 Wallace Stevens Quotes on Silence

Wallace Stevens quotes on silence

30. A breath upon her hand Muted the night. She turned - A cymbal crashed, Amid roaring horns.

40. This is old song That will not declare itself...

50. Among twenty snowy mountains, The only moving thing Was the eye of the blackbird.

104. Yet voluble of dumb violence. You look Across the roofs as sigil and as ward And in your centre mark them and are cowed . . .

127. The right, uplifted foreleg of the horse Suggested that, at the final funeral, The music halted and the horse stood still.

179. If there must be a god in the house, must be, Saying things in the room and on the stair, Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor, Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghost Or Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly. He must be incapable of speaking, closed, As those are: as light, for all its motion, is; As color, even the closest to us, is; As shapes, though they portend us, are. It is the human that is the alien, The human that has no cousin in the moon. It is the human that demands his speech From beasts or from the incommunicable mass. If there must be a god in the house, let him be one That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness A vermillioned nothingness, any stick of the mass Of which we are too distantly a part.