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Romantics -- Lisel Mueller

 
(Poem #236)Romantics
 Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann
                           
 The modern biographers worry
 "how far it went," their tender friendship.
 They wonder just what it means
 when he writes he thinks of her constantly,
 his guardian angel, beloved friend.
 The modern biographers ask
 the rude, irrelevant question
 of our age, as if the event
 of two bodies meshing together
 establishes the degree of love,
 forgetting how softly Eros walked
 in the nineteenth-century, how a hand
 held overlong or a gaze anchored
 in someone’s eyes could unseat a heart,
 and nuances of address not known
 in our egalitarian language
 could make the redolent air
 tremble and shimmer with the heat
 of possibility. Each time I hear
 the Intermezzi, sad
 and lavish in their tenderness,
 I imagine the two of them
 sitting in a garden
 among late-blooming roses
 and dark cascades of leaves,
 letting the landscape speak for them,
 leaving us nothing to overhear.
-- Lisel Mueller

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm -- Wallace Stevens

(Poem #235)The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm
 The house was quiet and the world was calm.
 The reader became the book; and summer night
 Was like the conscious being of the book.
 The house was quiet and the world was calm.
 The words were spoken as if there was no book,
 Except that the reader leaned above the page,
 Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
 The scholar to whom the book is true, to whom
 The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
 The house was quiet because it had to be.
 The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
 The access of perfection to the page.
 And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
 In which there is no other meaning, itself
 Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
 Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
-- Wallace Stevens