Tea at the Palaz of Hoon by Wallace Stevens

Tea at the Palaz of Hoon
by Wallace Stevens

Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.


*This poem is found in public domain.

Wallace Stevens, born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on October 2, 1879, attended Harvard University and practiced law in New York City until 1916. His first book of poems, Harmonium, was published in 1923. It exhibited the influence of both the English Romantics and the French Symbolists.