The Man with the Blue Guitar by Wallace Stevens (Excerpts)

One

The man bent over his guitar,

The man bent over his guitar,

A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

 

They said, "You have a blue guitar,

You do not play things as they are."

 

The man replied, "Things as they are

Are changed upon the blue guitar."

 

And they said to him, "But play, you must,

A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

 

A tune upon the blue guitar,

Of things exactly as they are."

 

Two

I cannot bring a world quite round,

Although I patch it as I can.

 

I sing a hero's head, large eye

And bearded bronze, but not a man,

 

Although I patch him as I can

And reach through him almost to man.

 

If a serenade almost to man

Is to miss, by that, things as they are,

 

Say that it is the serenade

Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

 

Three

A tune beyond us as we are,

Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar;

 

Ourselves in tune as if in space,

Yet nothing changed, except the place

 

Of things as they are and only the place

As you play them on the blue guitar,

 

Placed, so, beyond the compass of change,

Perceived in a final atmosphere;

 

For a moment final, in the way

The thinking of art seems final when

 

The thinking of god is smoky dew.

The tune is space. The blue guitar

 

Becomes the place of things as they are,

A composing of senses of the guitar.

 

Four

Tom-tom c'est moi. The blue guitar

And I are one. The orchestra

 

Fills the high hall with shuffling men

High as the hall. The whirling noise

 

Of a multitude dwindles, all said,

To his breath that lies awake at night.

 

I know that timid breathing. Where

Do I begin and end? And where,

 

As I strum the thing, do I pick up

That which momentarily declares

 

Itself not to be I and yet

Must be. It could be nothing else.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11cudNL72vs&feature=related