In Wallace Stevens’s “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,” a solitary speaker descends through a purple western evening and what “you called / The loneliest air,” but he insists he is not less himself. He finds strange things around him—ointment on his beard, hymns buzzing at his ears, a sea-tide passing through him—and asks where they come from. Then the poem reverses direction: the ointment rained from his mind, his ears made the hymns, and he was the compass of that sea. Everything he saw, heard, or felt came from himself. The mood is at once dreamlike and triumphal: solitude becomes a private kingdom, self-creating and almost godlike. Yet it is also uncanny, because the world he walks in is entirely his own. The closing phrase “more truly and more strange” catches that mix of self-discovery and estrangement.
Tea at the Palaz of Hoon — Summary
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.