"Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" is a poem from

Wallace Stevens Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance compa ...

's first book of poetry, ''

Harmonium The pump organ or reed organ is a type of organ that uses free reeds to generate sound, with air passing over vibrating thin metal strips mounted in a frame. Types include the pressure-based harmonium, the suction reed organ (which employs a va ...

''. First published in 1915, it is in the public domain.Buttel, p. 159

Interpretation

The poem allows the reader to linger over the possibility of colors, strangeness and unusual dreams. Imagination that is absent from a mundane orderly life is represented by a dandified aesthete and an adventurous and exciting life by a drunken sailor dreaming of catching

tiger The tiger (''Panthera tigris'') is a large Felidae, cat and a member of the genus ''Panthera'' native to Asia. It has a powerful, muscular body with a large head and paws, a long tail and orange fur with black, mostly vertical stripes. It is ...

s in red weather. The poem's message is fairly simple. Stevens believed that poetry and literature in general had the ability to excite and inspire. He believed that the imagination was an overlooked tool with the innate capability of distinguishing a mundane life (i.e. the lives of those who wore 'white night gowns' to bed) from an exciting and fulfilling one. Essentially, he believed that the only limit on a person's life was a weak imagination. The poem itself shows that imagination has its own order, so the representation should be kept distinct from its subject. This follows one of the main facets necessary for modernist literature to function: that the object or idea being represented exists in and for itself. 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.

Notes

References

* Buttel, R. ''Wallace Stevens: The Making of Harmonium''. 1967: Princeton University Press. 1915 poems American poems Poetry by Wallace Stevens Modernist poems {{Poetry-stub