The 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 reason I love the poem is because it is short and to the point, Wallace Stevens connects the emptiness of the house to the bareness of the people who live inside them. Throughout the poem Steven emphasizes this through repetition and comparison. He also uses metaphysical and dim artistic images. The first part of the poem (up until the eleventh line) is filled with very sad diction with words such as “haunted” and “night” and “strange”, the tone is grim and slow and simple. He begins with describing the actual house, saying that it is haunted with white night gowns… perhaps we can deduce that there are ghosts inside of it, but that is only the literal translation… he compares the humans inside of it to have ghost like qualities. This Implying that humans are cold, dead, and empty. The idea of humans being ghosts is pushed even further where we are described in white night gowns… which are ghost like in appearance. The white could stand for the fact that humans leave dull and boring life. This lack of color (liveliness) is stressed even more by repeating words like “none” and “not”. He then describes the night gowns as not being green or “purple with green rings”… stating that “None of them are strange, with socks of lace”. He highlights that they lack color, that the people lack color and strangeness. Stevens then introduces an old sailor to contrast his life with the life of the plain human, he shows how their dreams contrast. He exclaims that the people of the house will not dream about baboons and periwinkles, that they contain no excitement or oddness. This contrast with the sailor who “dreams of catching tigers in red weather”, the sailor dreams of colors and an odd situation… the red weather which is an unusual description of the environment contrasts with the white night gowns. His dream also depicts him to be a man of adventure and experience, this is different from the people who spent most of their time inside the house, this includes their dreams as well, in describing this house and the people that live inside of it Stevens sheds light on the hollow empty lives most humans live, but he does not do this without giving hope for the future, he does this by introducing a character whose boat beats against the current. He opens the poem with a relatively grim and dreary tone but he ends it on a high note.

Many people believe that the poem is much more simple by saying that the clothes you wear to bed is what your dreams will come from, but I believe it is much more deep and clever. I believe in the first translation because I agree with it… we are all fairly bland people, not in action or character but in experience. Lets do more.