Imagination is incredibly important to Wallace Stevens. In Elenor Cook's book, A Reader's Guide to Wallace Stevens, he wrote, “Imagination for Stevens is one of the great human powers... He had little time for an imagination that ignored reality.” So, while Stevens stressed the important of imagination in poetry, he wanted this imagination to be clearly attached to reality, or to “adhere to reality” (11). Certainly this can help explain Stevens' place in modernism, for his direct use of images in the poem “Domination of Black” mesh well with Imagist ideals of the “direct treatment of the thing.” Indeed, this poem uses reality to create new images of color, sound, and movement to evoke the cycle of life and death. Even the title color, “black,” seems to suggest a looming, impending death, which is coupled by the cry of the peacocks.
Dorothy Petitt's essay on “Domination of Black” also details the amount of movement and color that Stevens uses to evoke an emotional response, and she also questions the peacocks' cry, saying that the speaker “interprets the cry as being against something, what he doesn't say, although he offers us these four lines of speculation - three, twilight, night, and hemlocks” (348). It is interesting, too, how the speaker goes from “remember[ing] the cry of the peacocks” to actually hearing them (10). The cries of a peacock are certainly jarring in contrast to their beautiful tails, breaking the flow of what would otherwise be simple beautiful images of leaves and a campfire. So, the cries serve to add some dissonance to the poem and further reinforce the idea of life and death. For the beautiful tails of a peacock will not last forever, and neither will the hemlock leaves. On that same note, throughout the poem, things are constantly in comparison to each other, such as the peacocks and the hemlocks: “a peacock's tail at rest actually looks like a hemlock bough, where the evergreen needles lie flat, overlapping each other” (Cook, 35). So, even objects that seem dissimilar have ways of coming together in this poem. The hemlock leaves falling to the ground are meeting their end, just as the peacocks, too, will eventually meet their end – and the peacocks seem to cry out in protest, or perhaps out of sheer helplessness at the inevitability of death. The concept of the cycle of life and death is also evoked by the pairing of the flames and leaves together, because the latter can be used to fuel the former, bringing everything together full circle. Also, Stevens' use of repetition and rhythm also help to reinforce the sense of impending death, as the leaves continue “turning in the wind,” and how even how the planets themselves seem to “gather” and turn in the wind (7, 30). Petitt brought up the good point that the planets are usually depicted as orderly, but in this poem, they “seem to move with the same aimlessness as the leaves turning in the wind” (348). This reinforces a sense of helplessness and confusion at the whims of a chaotic, disorderly universe, and almost gives a nihilistic tone to the poem. One definitely gets the sense of fear that the speaker expresses at the end, because the repeated images of the night and mortality coupled with the flames and crying peacocks seem to be giving a fair warning of what is to come. The constant repetition of the word “turning” as it pertains to the leaves and flames also suggest the passage of time, and the speaker's reflection on his memories seem to attempt to come to terms with the passing of his own life. Overall, the poem speaks to some deep fears about mortality and the quick passage of time in a world that never seems to stop moving in a perpetual cycle of life and death. Wallace Stevens' imaginative use of color, sound, rhythm, and movement all work together to create these images and concepts. |