128 CHARLOTTE WARD

Still another influence could be seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes, which
Stevens was admiring at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1912, according
to a letter written to his wife (176). The Baroque gusto of those paintings
includes unusual fruits in lavish display, often with flowers. Paul Dow, a fellow
worker at the Hartford Insurance Company where Stevens spent most of his
life, recalls how he would spend his lunch hour walking into the center of
town for exotic fruit and Cuban cigars. Frank Jones, another co-worker,
described the basis of their mutual trust as a common liking for "France,
and mangoes, and papayas."29 Real pieces of the Caribbean opened up an
entire world of vicarious escape.
 The short poem "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" has been interpreted as
the aesthete's longing for loud colors.30 While living alone as a young man in
New York, Stevens would go up to the roof on hot summer nights and spy white
nightgowns at the windows of adjacent buildings. In those days he was reading
the Canadian poets Bliss Carmen and Richard Hovey, Songs of Vagabondia
(Boston: Copeland and Day, 1985), which he gave to his fiance as a Christmas
present in 1907.31 Lines he particularly liked were, "The far off orange groves/
Where Floridean oceans break,/ Tropical tiger seas." (11.19-21). Stevens' poem
reads:

 The houses are haunted
 By white night-gowns.
 None are green,
 Or purple with green rings
 Or green with yellow rings,
 Or yellow with blue rings.
 None of them are strange,

 People are not going
 To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
 Only, here and there, an old sailor,
 Drunk and asleep in his boots,
 Catches tigers
 In red weather. (11.1-7, 10-15)

 Stevens must be thinking of the colorfully striped loincloth of the magician
in Rousseau's painting The Dream, who is accompanied by baboons and
flowers of periwinkle color. This exotic landscape is by no means distasteful-
the lonely drudgery of his office existence is.

29 Peter Brazeau, ed., Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered (NY: Random
House, 1983) 50, 128.
30 Bates 104.
31 Joan Richardson, Wallace Stevens: The Early Years 1879-1923 (NY: Beech Tree)
276.