poetry texts, poem archive at plagiarist.com

this poem is good, but confusing

Once I had to write an essay on this poem. We had thirty minutes after our first reading of it, in class.

Anyhow. I wrote something about how the sailor is Wallace Stevens himself, escaping reality, turning to imagination. His theories on the supreme fiction (synthesis of reality and imagination) are important here.

I think the poet is noting how unsatisfying life can seem at 10 o'clock at night, when all that is left of the day for respectable people is to go to sleep. Looking for that last bit of meaning before sleeping, they see only drab suburban accoutrements, nothing like the exotic dream images FROM movies, books, and fantasies they try to turn "real life" into. The only glint of excitment is the dream of a drunk sailor, who is "free" to let imagination take over. I would agree that Stevens imagines himself to be that drunk sailor.

In this poem, I think there is a good chance that Stevens was "coming down" from an opium hallucination, and was depressed because of how acutely aware he was of the reality in which he was living. Opium was probably popular in the twenties and thirties.

after reading this poem, I felt a deep sense of clarity roll over my views on life. In stevens's work, he reveals a subconscience seperation between that of dreams and reality. The "sailor asleep in his boots" represents one who has traveled the world. It shows the restriction of tradition and conformity in the world of the "white night gowns" It is the drunken sailor who dreams of "catching tigers in red weather" It influences the reader as to how they want to live their life.

wallace stevens criticises people without dreams, with their white night gown, with a kind of transparent nudity they are not going to dream baboons and periwinkles, only the poet sailor in his ironical disillusionment of night 10'o clock going to be illusioned by dreaming catching tigers in the red weather. This poem instructs a kind of dionysian frenzy rather than the plain nude life of people without drinks and dreams.

at first glance to the poem it reminds me of the haunted hause by virginia woolf , and white night gowns can be that two goast of a couple in the haunted hause