In 1923 Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) published “Harmonium,” his first book of poetry. And now, a hundred years later, it’s worth returning to that volume, trying to understand what the poet was seeking and what he achieved in his work. The Sun has already looked at “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” joining “The Snow Man” as the most widely anthologized poems from the book.

But today’s Poem of the Day, “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,” may be even more central to Stevens’s poetic development — even more central to his life, for that matter, and the creation of the persona he presents in his poems.

The poem mentions a curious “you” in the second line as it describes the self as an imperial presence, descending “in purple,” with unknown “ointment sprinkled on my beard,” unexpected “hymns that buzzed beside my ears,” and an undetermined sea that swept the self into a vision of itself as an ancient emperor.  The philosophical turn is the imagined discovery that the self creates itself. “I was the world in which I walked, . . . / And there I found myself more truly and more strange.”

Present through all this is Stevens’s surface gloss of hedonistic sensualism. But beneath that, there lurks a solipsistic philosophy — and beneath that there lurks a moralistic sense of his Puritan American forebears. Wallace Stevens is somehow simultaneously among our most sensual poets, our most philosophical poets, and our sternest poets.

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.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.