Wallace Stevens

Poem Written at Morning

Poem Written at Morning - meaning Summary

Perception Shaped by Metaphor

Stevens explores how perception and language create the world through metaphor. Ordinary objects and sensations are not simply seen but reconfigured by imaginative comparison, so a pineapple becomes a crafted, almost artificial image shaped by taste and sight. The poem insists experience, not detached truth, assembles the ‘‘total thing’’ from sensory fragments. It foregrounds how the mind’s metaphors organize and transform reality into poetic vision.

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A sunny day's complete Poussiniana Divide it from itself. It is this or that And it is not. By metaphor you paint A thing. Thus, the pineapple was a leather fruit, A fruit for pewter, thorned and palmed and blue, To be served by men of ice. The senses paint By metaphor. The juice was fragranter Than wettest cinnamon. It was cribled pears Dripping a morning sap. The truth must be That you do not see, you experience, you feel, That the buxom eye brings merely its element To the total thing, a shapeless giant forced Upward. Green were the curls upon that head.

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