Beautiful Words

So, I'm pretty excited because I bought a new book today with all of Wallace Stevens' collected poetry AND prose, and it has gotten me back to that state of mind where I seem to always be hungry for more words. I've been reading some of Shakespeare's sonnets recently and just letting myself be dazzled by their pure loveliness, which in turn led me back to the plays where I come across passages like this:

But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief,
That thou her maid art far more fair than she.
Be not her maid, since she is envious;
Her vestal livery is but sick and green
And none but fools do wear it; cast it off.
It is my lady, O, it is my love!
O, that she knew she were!

While this is arguably one of the most hackneyed sections of Romeo and Juliet, and perhaps in the Shakespearean canon, coming to it after a long absence (from Shakespeare, yes, but particularly this play), I can't help but allow myself to be astonished by the utter perfection of his verse. Just say that first line out loud...think about how it feels in your throat, how the words feel in your mouth, what you feel when you say something so awesome...OK, maybe I'm the nutcase here, but I am certainly moved. Of course, this is only one example of many (and happens to be one of the only ones I can remember by heart); Lear's "Howl, howl, howl, howl! O! you are men of stones:/Had I your tongue and eyes, I'd use them so/That heaven's vaults should crack. She's gone for ever!," Hamlet's "by a sleep to say we end/The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks/That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation/Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;/To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;/For in that sleep of death what dreams may come/When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,/Must give us pause...," The opening lines of Richard III...There is so much that approaches sheer artistic perfection.

I didn't mean to go off on a Shakespeare rant. I guess I got a little carried away. What I intended on quoting was a (relatively) short passage in Stevens' "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" (perhaps the ultimate poem about poetry and what it should do):

The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea...It satisfies
Belief in an immaculate beginning

And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,
To an immaculate end. We move between these points:
From that ever-early candor to its late plural

And the candor of them is the strong exhilaration
Of what we feel from what we think, of thought
Beating in the heart, as if blood newly came,

An elixir, an excitation, a pure power.
The poem, through candor, brings back a power again
That gives a candid kind to everything.

I intended to quote only the first 5 lines, but it's so hard to leave out something like "thought/Beating in the heart". It just blows my mind. The poem refreshes life...what more can I say? I certainly feel refreshed.