Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock

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"Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1915, so it is in the public domain.^[1]

Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.

The poem allows the reader to linger over the possibility of colors, of strangeness, and of unusual dreams. Imagination that is absent from a mundane orderly life is represented, not by a dandified aesthete, but instead a drunken sailor dreaming of catching tigers in red weather. The poem itself shows that imagination has its own order, so the representation should be kept distinct from what it represents. On this reading the poem is not an indictment of middle-class values, though that is one interpretive option, but rather the "haunted house" of white night-gowns represents life without imagination. The poem is making the case for strangely accessorized colored nightgowns and the drunken sailor is entirely consistent with the existence of an imaginative bourgeois, like Stevens himself.