The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician
The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician - context Summary
Published in 1923
This short lyric appears in Wallace Stevens’ 1923 collection Harmonium. It frames a domestic image—the drifting curtains—as a vehicle for metaphysical meditation, collapsing ordinary motion into vast, cosmic rhythms. The poem situates perception within changing light and solitude, using the room’s quiet to suggest expansive, almost astronomical movement. Its placement in Harmonium aligns it with Stevens’ broader interest in imagination reshaping reality.
Read Complete Analyses"It comes about that the drifiting of these curtains Is full of long motions: as the poderous Deflations of distance: or as clouds Inseperable from their afternoons; Or the changing of light, the dropping Of the silence, wide sleep and solitude Of night, in which all motion Is beyond us, as the firmament, Up-rising and down-falling, bares The last largeness, bold to see.
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