Wallace Stevens - To an Old Philosopher in Rome lyrics

On the threshold of heaven
The figures in the street
Become the figures of heaven
The majestic movement
Of men growing small in
The distances of space
Singing, with smaller and
Still smaller sound
Unintelligible absolution and an end

The threshold, Rome
And that more merciful Rome
Beyond, the two alike in the make of the mind
It is as if in a human dignity
Two parallels become one, a perspective
Of which
Men are part both in the inch and in the mile

How easily the blown banners change to wings
Things dark on the horizons of perception
Become accompaniments of fortune, but


Of the fortune of the spirit, beyond the eye
Not of it's sphere, and yet not far beyond

The human end in the
Spirit's greatest reach
The extreme of the known in
The presence of the extreme
Of the unknown the newsboys' muttering
Becomes another murmuring the smell
Of medicine, a fragrantness not to be spoiled

The bed, the books, the
Chair, the moving nuns
The candle as it evades the sight, these are
The sources of happiness in
The shape of Rome
A shape within the ancient circles of shapes
And these beneath the shadow of a shape
In a confusion on bed and books, a portent
On the chair, a moving
Transparence on the nuns
A light on the candle
Tearing against the wick
To join a hovering excellence, to escape
From fire and be part only of that which

Fire is the symbol: the celestial possible
Speak to your pillow as if it was yourself
Be orator but with an accurate tongue
And without eloquence, O, half-asleep
Of the pity that is the
Memorial of this room

So that we feel, in this illumined large
The veritable small, so that each of us
Beholds himself in you, and hears his voice
In yours, master and commiserable man
Intent on your particles of nether do

Your dozing in the depths of wakefulness
In the warmth of your bed, at
The edge of your chair, alive
Yet living in two worlds, impenitent
As to one, and, as to one, most penitent
Impatient for the grandeur that you need

In so much misery and yet finding it
Only in misery, the afflatus of ruin
Profound poetry of the poor and of the dead
As in the last drop of the deepest blood
As it falls from the heart and
Lies there to be seen

Even as the blood of an empire, it might be
For a citizen of heaven though still of Rome
It is poverty's speech that seeks
Us out the most
It is older than the oldest speech of Rome
This is the tragic accent of the scene

And you it is you that
Speak it, without speech
The loftiest syllable among loftiest things
The one invulnerable man among
Crude captains, the naked majesty
If you like, of bird-nest arches and
Of rain-stained-vaults

The sounds drift in the
Buildings are remembered
The life of the city never lets go
Nor do you ever want it to it is part
Of the life in your room
Its domes are the architecture of your bed
The bells keep on repeating solemn names

In choruses and choirs of choruses
Unwilling that mercy should be a mystery
Of silence, that any solitude of sense
Should give you more than
Their peculiar chords
And reverberations clinging to whisper still

It is a kind of total grandeur at the end
With every visible thing enlarged and yet
No more than a bed, a chair and moving nuns
The immensest theatre, and pillared porch
The book and candle in your ambered room

Total grandeur of a total edifice
Chosen by an inquisitor of structures
For himself he stops upon this threshold
As if the design of all his words takes form
And frame from thinking and is realized