Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion
Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion - context Summary
Published in Harmonium, 1923
Published in Stevens’s first major collection Harmonium (1923), this short lyric belongs to his early phase when he probed imagination versus sensory life. Addressing a nocturnal "dweller," the poem urges a turn from dream-dark interiority toward waking perception, rural imagery, and communal spectacle. Its placement in Harmonium situates it among other experiments in voice, color, and the juxtaposition of dream and day that mark Stevens’s developing poetic concerns.
Read Complete AnalysesYou dweller in the dark cabin, To whom the watermelon is always purple, Whose garden is wind and moon, Of the two dreams, night and day, What lover, what dreamer, would choose The one obscured by sleep? Here is the plantain by your door And the best cock of red feather That crew before the clocks. A feme may come, leaf-green, Whose coming may give revel Beyond revelries of sleep, Yes, and the blackbird spread its tail, So that the sun may speckle, While it creaks hail. You dweller in the dark cabin, Rise, since rising will not waken, And hail, cry hail, cry hail.
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