In writing “Domination of Black”, Wallace Stevens creates a sensory vortex, forcing the reader to challenge the relationship between perception and reality. By disrupting conventional situational comprehensibility, Stevens forces the reader to look beyond what they are immediately able to recognize in order to get to the innate insubstantiality of “reality”
In creating a mirrored structure Stevens does not allow the reader to escape the sense of being overwhelmed but rather continues throwing them back into the experience. There is no better word to describe this poem other than an experience, in which everything the reader thinks they understand will be flipped. The first and last stanzas end with the same eerie phrase, “And I remembered the cry of the peacocks”(10), and begin with equal number of syllables in the opening line. The last stanza directly mimics …show more content…
If that is the case, Stevens creates yet another juxtaposition between the nothingness as described by the black, and the overwhelming everything described in the poem. Though we may think the dominating factor would be the sensory overload, as we reach the end, we must come to terms with the nothingness that is behind all of the other images. When each substantial thing in the poem is examined, all of it is temporary- living things, structures, forces of nature- and the one permanent thing that dominates beyond all is the innate lack of anything substantial. The poem ends on an action as the speaker “remembered the cry of the peacocks” (36)- a passive action without any substance behind it. The final thought of the poem is, simply put, a thought- that has no form or substance which we might use to classify the thing as being real. The ending “reality” of the poem is a sound, an emotion, a thought. The simple reality we sought out at the start of the poem ends with a purely an unquantifiable
In creating a mirrored structure Stevens does not allow the reader to escape the sense of being overwhelmed but rather continues throwing them back into the experience. There is no better word to describe this poem other than an experience, in which everything the reader thinks they understand will be flipped. The first and last stanzas end with the same eerie phrase, “And I remembered the cry of the peacocks”(10), and begin with equal number of syllables in the opening line. The last stanza directly mimics …show more content…
If that is the case, Stevens creates yet another juxtaposition between the nothingness as described by the black, and the overwhelming everything described in the poem. Though we may think the dominating factor would be the sensory overload, as we reach the end, we must come to terms with the nothingness that is behind all of the other images. When each substantial thing in the poem is examined, all of it is temporary- living things, structures, forces of nature- and the one permanent thing that dominates beyond all is the innate lack of anything substantial. The poem ends on an action as the speaker “remembered the cry of the peacocks” (36)- a passive action without any substance behind it. The final thought of the poem is, simply put, a thought- that has no form or substance which we might use to classify the thing as being real. The ending “reality” of the poem is a sound, an emotion, a thought. The simple reality we sought out at the start of the poem ends with a purely an unquantifiable