Wallace Stevens - Sailing After Lunch lyrics
[Wallace Stevens - Sailing After Lunch lyrics]
It is the word pejorative that hurts
My old boat goes round on a crutch
And doesn't get under way
It's the time of the year
And the time of the day
Perhaps it's the lunch that we had
Or the lunch that we should have had
But I am, in any case
A most inappropriate man
In a most unpropitious place
Mon Dieu, hear the poet's prayer
The romantic should be here
The romantic should be there
It ought to be everywhere
But the romantic must never remain
Mon Dieu, and must never again return
This heavy historical sail
Through the mustiest blue of the lake
In a really vertiginous boat
Is wholly the vapidest fake
It is least what one ever sees
It is only the way one feels, to say
Where my spirit is I am
To say the light wind worries the sail
To say the water is swift today
To expunge all people and be a pupil
Of the gorgeous wheel and so to give
That slight transcendence to the dirty sail
By light, the way one feels, sharp white
And then rush brightly through the summer air
My old boat goes round on a crutch
And doesn't get under way
It's the time of the year
And the time of the day
Perhaps it's the lunch that we had
Or the lunch that we should have had
But I am, in any case
A most inappropriate man
In a most unpropitious place
Mon Dieu, hear the poet's prayer
The romantic should be here
The romantic should be there
It ought to be everywhere
But the romantic must never remain
Mon Dieu, and must never again return
This heavy historical sail
Through the mustiest blue of the lake
In a really vertiginous boat
Is wholly the vapidest fake
It is least what one ever sees
It is only the way one feels, to say
Where my spirit is I am
To say the light wind worries the sail
To say the water is swift today
To expunge all people and be a pupil
Of the gorgeous wheel and so to give
That slight transcendence to the dirty sail
By light, the way one feels, sharp white
And then rush brightly through the summer air