Wallace Stevens & Thomas Dewing

This painting is called "A garden, also known as Autumn" and is by Thomas Wilmer Dewing [1851-1938], an incredible American painter. It's up in Boston's Fine Arts Museum, and it's worth the trip. Recalling the ancients, the late neo-classist pre-Rapaelite John William Godward and Pound's Imagists, this painting has a really eerie quality to it. It somehow belongs in a Cocteau movie. 

A poem that always is somehow linked to it in my mind is a classic by Wallace Stevens. In his volume Harmonium, his poem "Domination of Black" is incredible. It's beyond multi-layered, and it's laser focused. It's excellent; for info look here. Read below:

Domination of Black

At night, by the fire,

 The colors of the bushes
 And of the fallen leaves,
 Repeating themselves,
 Turned in the room,
 Like the leaves themselves
 Turning in the wind.
 Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
 Came striding.
 And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

 The colors of their tails
 Were like the leaves themselves
 Turning in the wind,
 In the twilight wind.
 They swept over the room,
 Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
 Down to the ground.
 I heard them cry—the peacocks.
 Was it a cry against the twilight
 Or against the leaves themselves
 Turning in the wind,
 Turning as the flames
 Turned in the fire,
 Turning as the tails of the peacocks
 Turned in the loud fire,
 Loud as the hemlocks
 Full of the cry of the peacocks?
 Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

 Out of the window,
 I saw how the planets gathered
 Like the leaves themselves
 Turning in the wind.
 I saw how the night came,
 Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks
 I felt afraid.
 And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.