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"Tea" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1915 in the journal Rogue. [1]
When the elephant's-ear in the park
Shrivelled in frost,
And the leaves on the paths
Ran like rats,
Your lamp-light fell
On shining pillows,
Of sea-shades and sky-shades
Like umbrellas in Java.
Eleanor Cook observes that "Tea" is one of two "seemingly (but far from) slight poems that close both editions of Harmonium," adding that this "eight-line, one-sentence, free-verse virtuoso performance" offers a very effective implicit leave-taking. [2] (The other poem she is referring to is "To the Roaring Wind", quoted at the bottom of the main Harmonium essay.)
Cook compares "Tea" to Domination of Black, as being representative of "all the troping of leaves through the collection". [3] She suggests that the reference to Java may be significant not only because it was a center of tea-trade, but also because its sophisticated court culture at one time, notable for its subtleties and appreciation of artists, "made it the kind of culture that Stevens especially liked". [4] She also suggests that the poem expresses "Stevens's delicately implicit trope of drinking tea as a metaphor for reading (ingesting a drink from leaves)." [5] She notes that Stevens was a tea-fancier. [6]
Robert Buttel characterizes this poem as light, witty, and rococo, and as displaying compression, concentration, and precision. "The last four lines set the world of civilized order against the outdoor coldness," he writes, "ending on a note of exotic beauty, color, and elegance...." [7] He suggests that the experience or feeling of being civilized is presented symbolically in "Tea". It is one of the two earliest Stevens poems to combine wit and elegance, according to Buttel, the other being "Cy est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et les Unze Mille Vierges", also published in 1915. The two poems are proofs that by 1915 Stevens had mastered the tools in the workshop of nineteenth-century poetry that he had set himself to learn, including imagism, impressionism, and symbolism.
As mentioned in the main Harmonium essay (see the section "The Mind of China"), the poem shows the influence of orientalism on Stevens's work.
Harmonium is a book of poetry by American poet Wallace Stevens. His first book at the age of forty-four, it was published in 1923 by Knopf in an edition of 1500 copies. This collection comprises 85 poems, ranging in length from just a few lines to several hundred. Harmonium was reissued in 1931 with three poems omitted and fourteen new poems added.
"Domination of Black" is a poem in Wallace Stevens' Harmonium, first published in 1916 and later (1942) selected by him as his best poem for the anthology This Is My Best.
"Le Monocle de Mon Oncle" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1918.
"Cy est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et les Unze Mille Vierges" is a poem in Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1915 in the magazine Rogue, so it is in the public domain. Butell characterizes it as one of the first two poems to "successfully combine wit and elegance". They are the earliest poems to be collected later in Harmonium.
"Homunculus et la Belle Etoile" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1919.
"From the Misery of Don Joost" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It is in the public domain, having been published in the journal Poetry in 1921.
"O Florida, Venereal Soil" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in the journal Dial, volume 73, July 1922, and is therefore in the public domain.
"Last Looks at the Lilacs" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1923.
"Floral Decorations for Bananas" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923). It was first published Measure 26 and is therefore under copyright, however it is quoted here as justified by fair use in order to facilitate scholarly commentary.
"Sunday Morning" is a poem from Wallace Stevens' first book of poetry, Harmonium. Published in part in the November 1915 issue of Poetry, then in full in 1923 in Harmonium, it is now in the public domain. The first published version can be read at the Poetry web site: The literary critic Yvor Winters considered "Sunday Morning" "the greatest American poem of the twentieth century and... certainly one of the greatest contemplative poems in English".
"The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was originally published in 1919, so it is in the public domain.
"Banal Sojourn" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was originally published in 1919, therefore it is in the public domain.
"Depression Before Spring" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923). It was first published in 1918 and is therefore in the public domain.
"Stars at Tallapoosa" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1922, so it is in the public domain.
"Bantams in Pine-Woods" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1922 in the poetry journal Dial, along with five other poems, all under the title "Revue". It is in the public domain.
"Anecdote of the Jar" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. First published in 1919, it is in the public domain.
"The Wind Shifts" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1917, so it is in the public domain.
"The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. First published in 1921, it is in the public domain in the United States.
"The Death of a Soldier" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. The poem uses free verse to describe the death of a soldier.
"Indian River" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1917. Absent from the first edition of 1923, it appeared in the second edition of 1931. It is in the public domain.