Phases - Analysis

Brief impression and tone

The poem presents a shifting, dreamlike sequence that moves between a placid urban scene and violent classical echoes. Its tone alternates between detached observation, bitter irony, and exalted reverie: the opening is cool and slightly melancholic, the middle becomes grotesque and accusatory, and the closing returns to a solemn, almost ceremonial admiration of death. These mood changes create a sense of phases or metamorphoses in perception and feeling.

Context that illuminates the poem

Wallace Stevens wrote often about imagination, reality, and the framing role of perception; knowing this helps read the Parisian details and classical allusions as reflections on how experience is aestheticized or spiritualized. The poem’s references to Agamemnon and formal, sometimes archaic diction suggest an engagement with myth and poetic tradition rather than straightforward narrative reportage.

Main theme: Reality transfigured by imagination

The poem treats ordinary scenes—a square in Paris, a cab-horse, rain—as elements that can be transformed by perception. Images like the parrot that will "serenade" the parade and "Arabesques of candle beams" show sensation reworked into artful patterning. The recurring movement from plain detail to ornate metaphor suggests that imagination phases reality into aesthetic experience.

Main theme: Death, sacrifice, and the taste of glory

Classical sacrifice and heroic death recur: Agamemnon’s name, the "salty taste of glory," and the "salty, sacrificial taste" frame death as a source of meaning or nobility. The speaker contrasts this sacrificial grandeur with urban "Work and waste" and "Sorrow," implying that ritualized or mythic death confers a dignity that modern life cannot provide. The tone here is ambivalent—both admiring and critical of the yearning for such nobility.

Main theme: Irony and the grotesque

Section II abruptly introduces a violent, grotesque image—"an eyeball in the mud" and "Flat and pale and gory"—which undercuts any purely romantic reading of glory. Hopkins appears as a fragmentary allusion that intensifies the aestheticized horror. The poem thus holds admiration for sacrificial meaning alongside an awareness of its physical horror, creating ironic tension.

Recurring symbols and vivid images

The Paris square functions as a motif of ordinary life under observation; the rain and the cab-horse connote dully elegiac weather. Bird imagery—the parrot, "Birds of intermitted bliss"—suggests mimicry and intermittent joy, while "Arabesques of candle beams" and vines with fruit juxtapose decorative light with vegetal fecundity. The classical symbol Agamemnon embodies public, ritualized death; its repetition raises the question whether the poem celebrates or questions the appeal of such mythic resolution.

Concluding synthesis

Phases traces how perception cycles between bland urbanity, mythic longing, and the grotesque realities of sacrifice, asking whether imagined nobility redeems modern life. By layering concrete Parisian detail, ornate imagery, and stark classical violence, Stevens probes the costs and consolations of aestheticizing suffering and suggests that our desire for heroic meaning is both potent and problematic.