The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician

The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician  It comes about that the drifting of these curtains  Is full of long motions, as the ponderous  Deflections of distance; or as clouds  Inseparable from their afternoons;  Or the changing of light, the dropping  Of the silence, wide sleep and solitude  Of night, at which all motion  Is beyond us, as the firmament,  Up-rising and down-falling, bares  The last largeness, bold to see.

"The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in October 1919, and is therefore in the public domain in the United States, according to Librivox.

Commentary

An imagelike the one in "Curtains" is the "crisp lettuce" that Stevens sought in a poem. The motions of curtains are associated with motions seen of an afternoon and the motions of transition to evening. These associations charge the scene with an air of mystery, leading the reader to a splendid vision of the firmament.

The poem is spare and says little, yet it shows a great deal about a perspective that could seem empty without the imagination's activity, which invests it with depth and ineffability. See Gubbinal and The Snow Manfor other experiments in perspective. Buttel is struck by "Stevens' fondness for the word 'motions', as an abstract word for the flux of the physical world as well as for the sympathetic movement of the mind." He also remarks that Stevens makes us experience the motion from afternoon to night "as a felt ambience".

See also

Poems by Wallace Stevens

• Anecdote of Canna
• Anecdote of the Jar
• Anecdote of Men by the Thousands
• Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks
• Banal Sojourn
• The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws
• Colloquy with a Polish Aunt
• The Cuban Doctor
• The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician
• The Emperor of Ice Cream
• Fabliau of Florida
• Gubbinal
• A High-Toned Old Christian Woman
• Homunculus et la Belle Etoile
• Of the Surface of Things
• Peter Quince at the Clavier
• The Place of the Solitaires
• Ploughing on Sunday
• The Snow Man
• Stars at Tallapoosa
• Sunday Morning
• Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
• The Weeping Burgher

References

• Buttel, Robert. Wallace Stevens: The Making of Harmonium. 1967:Princeton University Press.
• Stevens, Holly. Letters of Wallace Stevens. 1966: University of California Press.

External links

Audio / video

• Librivox: Collected Public Domain Poems of Wallace Stevens, Volume 1. Free.