Wallace Stevens

Tea at the Palaz of Hoon

Tea at the Palaz of Hoon - meaning Summary

Self as World and Maker

Stevens presents a speaker who experiences vivid, solitary perception and recognizes that sensations, sounds, and landscapes originate within himself. The poem argues that the self both contains and produces its world: inner impressions become outward phenomena and vice versa. It frames imagination as an active, creative faculty that makes reality feel both familiar and strange, emphasizing personal authorship of meaning rather than passive reception of external truth.

Read Complete Analyses

Not less because in purple I descended The western day through what you called The loneliest air, not less was I myself. What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard? What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears? What was the sea whose tide swept through me there? Out of my mind the golden ointment rained, And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard. I was myself the compass of that sea: I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

default user
PoetryVerse just now

Feel free to be first to leave comment.

8/2200 - 0