Mellifluous Mondays: Wallace Stevens

"Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" (1915). This seems to me like a poem written against the smug, unimaginative paralysis of suburbia. No one wants to learn; no one wants to travel; no one has anything interesting to say. In Stevens' opinion, even a drunk old sailor has a better life than the wearers of "white night-gowns."

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.