Hymn From A Watermelon Pavilion is a poem from Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens 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 a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar",...

's first book of poetry, Harmonium

Harmonium (poetry collection)

Harmonium is a book of poetry by U.S. poet Wallace Stevens. His first book, it was published in 1923 by Knopf in an edition of 1500 copies. He was in middle age at that time, forty-four years old. The collection comprises 85 poems, ranging in length from just a few lines to several hundred...

. It was first published in 1917, so it is in the public domain.

Hymn From A Watermelon Pavilion  You dweller in the dark cabin,  To whom the watermelon is always purple,  Whose garden is wind and moon,  Of the two dreams, night and day,  What lover, what dreamer, would choose  The one obscured by sleep?  Here is the plantain by your door  And the best cock of red feather  That crew before the clocks.  A feme may come, leaf-green,  Whose coming may give revel  Beyond revelries of sleep,  Yes, and the blackbird spread its tail,  So that the sun may speckle,  While it creaks hail.  You dweller in the dark cabin,  Rise, since rising will not waken,  And hail, cry hail, cry hail.

The dweller in the dark cabin may be understood to be the specifically poetical dreamer, like the old sailor in Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock

Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock

"Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1915, and it is in the public domain....

. Stevens enjoins him not to sleep in his dream, but rather to explore its riches. If the sleeper rises to do so, he will not waken, for he is still in the dream. The poem should be compared to Anecdote of Canna

Anecdote of Canna

"Anecdote of Canna" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium .In the poem's legerdemain the cryptic middle stanza conceals the sleight of hand. Poor X wakes in his sleep and consequently his eye clings to the canna forever. The cleverness of the poem links it to "The Worms...

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Doggett interprets the poem differently, without imputing a dream world explored by the poet. The dweller is the self, and the dark cabin is the body. The dweller's "sense of reality is obscured as though in a dream, but beside [his] cabin is the vivid actual plantain of green reality and the sun."

Buttel comments on the poem's title. "How appropriate," he writes, "for Stevens' theme to infuse, by such imaginative conjoinings [American watermelon, French pavilion], the earthy, vigorous reality of America with the grace of French words. By such means he was able to be richly aesthetic without sacrificing vitality."