Domination Of Black - Analysis

Introduction and overall impression

The poem creates a nocturnal, uncanny atmosphere where natural images—leaves, hemlocks, peacocks, fire, planets—circulate and repeat. The tone is meditative but edged with apprehension; moments of calm description shift into a rising fear by the close. Repetition and circular motion give the poem a dreamlike cadence that moves from observation to an intensified, even fearful, remembrance.

Contextual note

Wallace Stevens wrote often about perception, imagination, and how the mind shapes reality; this poem fits that preoccupation by showing how sight and memory transform ordinary images into a charged, symbolic experience. No specific historical event is required to read the poem; its concerns are largely philosophical and psychological.

Main themes: memory, fear, and the imagination

The poem develops memory through the speaker's repeated phrase "I remembered the cry of the peacocks", which returns at key moments and links present perception to past impression. Fear appears in the final stanza with the plain statement "I felt afraid", but the fear is woven through the poem as uncertainty about whether cries are against twilight, leaves, flames, or hemlocks. The imagination is both creative and destabilizing: visual patterns ("turning in the wind," "turning as the flames") transform interior and exterior reality, so perception itself becomes a source of wonder and unease.

Recurring images and their significance

Leaves, hemlocks, peacocks, fire, and planets recur and mirror one another. Leaves turning in the wind function as a unifying image of circulation and change; they are literal and metaphoric, reappearing in room, boughs, and planets. Hemlocks—described as "heavy" and as a color that "came striding"—convey an imposing, even menacing presence. The peacock cry is ambiguous: sound that might protest the twilight, the leaves, the flames, or the hemlocks, and thus becomes a symbol of resistance or alarm whose object is unclear. The fire and its flames echo the turning movement and intensify color and heat, while the planets gathered outside extend the poem's scale from interior perception to cosmic order, suggesting that the same patterns govern mind and world.

Ambiguity and a possible reading

The poem's repetitions produce ambiguity about relations among images: are the peacocks crying at the hemlocks, the leaves, or the encroaching night? One reading is that the mind projects fear onto nature, so the cry becomes a humanized witness to decline (twilight, falling leaves) and to the encroachment of darkness. Another reading sees the cry as an irreducible emblem of intense perception that both animates and disturbs the speaker. The unanswered questions invite the reader to inhabit the poem's unsettled perception.

Conclusion and final insight

By repeating and transforming a small set of vivid images, Stevens makes perception itself the poem's subject: seeing and remembering loop into fear and wonder. The poem's significance lies in how the imagination unites interior feeling and external nature into a recurring, almost ritual pattern, leaving the reader with the sense that beauty and alarm are inseparable in the act of attention.