Domination of Black

Wallace Stevens * Track #7 On Harmonium

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Album Harmonium

ALBUM

Wallace Stevens

1923

Domination of Black by Wallace Stevens

Performed by

Wallace Stevens

About

This poem, which appeared in Wallace Stevens’s seminal collection Harmonium, was selected as the poet’s own favorite piece for the 1942 anthology America’s 93 Greatest Living Authors Present This Is My Best. In spite of this, it has largely been overlooked by critics. The preeminent Stevens scholar,...

Domination of Black Annotated

At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry -- the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

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