Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955 / Pennsylvania / United States)

I really don't know why but this left a silly smile on my face, and a crying feeling in my heart - it's so great to love (live) the poetry..

I would suggest that this poem is about mortality.

A powerful cluster of images. Stevens is describing an extremely difficult moment; perhaps a confrontation with depression or anxiety or both. He finishes the first sentence—a curious combination of the matter-of-fact and the confused—and he seems to want to go back and proof it for accuracy. He answers his own doubts about that sentence with a “Yes, but.” And he says the hemlocks were striding, and he remembered the cry of the peacocks. From there the mood goes into an uncontrolled downward spiral. He seems to panic.

Peacocks make a very distinctive and plaintive sound, much like a woman or a child crying “help” in the distance. At night it would be exactly the opposite of comforting.

The poet-narrator says their cry becomes “loud as the hemlocks, ” and by the time we reach the last few lines, the sentence “I felt afraid” seems grossly understated. The terror is palpable. And once again, the poet-narrator remembers the cry of the peacocks. He is inconsolable.

We are never certain of what specifically the narrator fears, but it seems to be a vague and pervasive feeling of impending doom. It is a fear stirred by the commonplace (leaves in the wind, the reflection of firelight on the walls) , intensified with a glimpse into the infinite (when the poet-narrator sees “how the planets gathered/ Like the leaves themselves”) and confirmed when the poet-narrator “saw how the night came…striding.” There is no escape, he is trapped.