"Domination of Black" is a poem in

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 ...

' ''

Harmonium The pump organ is a type of free-reed organ that generates sound as air flows past a vibrating piece of thin metal in a frame. The piece of metal is called a reed. Specific types of pump organ include the reed organ, harmonium, and melodeon. T ...

'', first published in 1916 (and later in 1942), and selected by him as his best poem for the anthology ''This Is My Best''.

Interpretation

The poem can be compared to

imagist Imagism was a movement in early-20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. It is considered to be the first organized literary modernism, modernist literary movement in the English language. ...

paintings of the period such as

Klee Paul Klee (; 18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940) was a Swiss-born German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented wi ...

's "Blaue Nacht

Klee's shades of blue replaced by Stevens' colors of the night. Stevens adds unsettling elements. The poem unfolds like a little horror show. A fire creates flickering images of the colors of bushes and leaves, which themselves turn in the wind. Also the color of heavy hemlocks "came striding", as from the river Styx ("the Stygian hemlocks", in Vendler's phrase). Ambiguous peacocks descend from the hemlocks. Then the poet notices outside his window the planets gathering isomorphically, "Like the leaves themselves", and the night came striding. The threat of darkness (death? suicide?) is palpable: "I felt afraid." See also " Tea (poem), Tea", which, like "Domination of Black", demonstrates "all the troping of leaves through the collection". The composer

Justin Connolly Justin Riveagh Connolly (11 August 1933 – 29 September 2020) was a British composer and teacher. Life Justin Connolly was born on 11 August 1933 in London. He was the son of John D'Arcy-Dawson, a journalist and author, and his wife Bar ...

wrote a piece for solo bass clarinet entitled ''Tesserae F - "Domination of Black"''. In the published programme note, Connolly describes how the poem "re-cycles a number of images - hemlock trees laden with snow, the flames of a winter fireside, the harsh cry of peacocks - with the aim of creating by obsessive variation and repetition a scene in which it is the sound itself which provides the sense and sensation of the poem" adding: "My music has a similar aim." The painter

Joan Mitchell Joan Mitchell (February 12, 1925 – October 30, 1992) was an American artist who worked primarily in painting and printmaking, and also used pastel and made other works on paper. She was an active participant in the New York School of artis ...

named an important work of hers '' Hemlock'' (1956) after what she termed "the dark and blue feeling" of the poem and its multiple references to the hemlock plant.

References

Bibliography

* Vendler, Helen. ''Words Chosen Out of Desire''. 1984: University of Tennessee Press. * Cook, Eleanor. ''A Reader's Guide to Wallace Stevens''. 2007: Princeton University Press. * Connolly, Justin. ''Tesserae F - "Domination of Black"''. 1999: Novello and Co, London {{Wallace Stevens 1916 poems American poems Poetry by Wallace Stevens