Poems that you love

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A High-Toned Old Christian Woman
By Wallace Stevens
Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began. Allow,
Therefore, that in the planetary scene
Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,
Proud of such novelties of the sublime,
Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

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Silence

There is a noise within the brow
That pulses undiminished now
In accents measured by the blood.
It breaks upon my solitude—
A hammer on the crystal walls
Of sense at rapid intervals.
It is the unmelodic ring
Before the breaking of a string,
The wheels of circumstance that grind
So terribly within the mind,
The spirit crying in a cage
To build a complement to rage,
Confusion’s core set deep within
A furious, dissembling din.

If I should ever seek relief
From that monotony of grief,
The tight nerves leading to the throat
Would not release one riven note:
What shakes my skull to disrepair
Shall never touch another ear.