Tattoo - Analysis

Overall impression

This short lyric by Wallace Stevens reads like a concentrated meditation on perception. Its tone is quietly uncanny: familiar images (light, water, snow, eyes) are rendered slightly alien by the extended spider metaphor. There is a persistent stillness that shifts into an intimate eeriness as the poem moves from external landscape to bodily interior. The mood ends on a contemplative echo, repeating the opening images inside the self.

Context and authorial note

Stevens, an early 20th-century American poet, often explored imagination and reality, and this poem fits that concern by transforming sensory data into a living metaphor. Formal biography or historical events are not necessary to read the poem; it functions largely as a philosophic observation about how perception inscribes the world on us.

Theme: perception as inscription

The dominant theme is that perception does not merely register the world but tattoos it onto the perceiver. The repeated verb crawl and the phrase "It crawls under your eyelids / And spreads its webs there" show the light actively marking inner experience. The image of webs suggests patterning and retention—what you see becomes part of you.

Theme: interpenetration of inner and outer

The poem collapses boundaries between exterior landscape and interior body. Lines like "The webs of your eyes / Are fastened / To the flesh and bones of you" present vision as a physical connection, while "There are filaments of your eyes / On the surface of the water" reverses the usual relation: the body projects outward as much as it receives. This reciprocity makes perception a mutual weaving.

Symbol and image: light as spider and webs

The central symbol—light-as-spider—makes the act of seeing active, deliberate, and slightly predatory. Webs function as memory, pattern, and capture; they hold fragments of snow and water and also adhere to "the flesh and bones." The dual webs ("Its two webs") invite multiple readings: literal two eyes, doubled impressions, or parallel realms of outer scene and inner trace.

Ambiguity and a possible question

The poem leaves open whether the marking is benign or invasive. Is the light tattooing the self with beauty, or is perception an invasive force that binds and limits us? The spider metaphor suggests both attraction and entrapment, prompting readers to ask how free the self remains once visually inscribed.

Concluding insight

Stevens compresses a complex idea into spare imagery: seeing is not passive; it composes and fixes the seen within the seer. The poem’s spare lines and mirrored images create a quiet but persistent sense that the world and the self are mutually woven, leaving the reader with the image of perception as an indelible, web-like mark.