Not less because from Georgia I ascended
The Charleston day through what you called
The balmiest air, not less was I myself.
What was the laughter ringing in the halls?
What were the oak trees that crept before my eyes?
What was the rain whose flood swept through Calhoun Street?
Out of mind my absent thoughts reigned,
And my voice made the whistling wind they heard.
I was myself the only student it felt:
I was the Cistern Yard in which I walked, and what I touched
Or breathed or desired came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
“Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” by Wallace Stevens really resonated with me as a poem with great psychological depth. When researching the poem, I came across the term solipsism which, according to Webster’s dictionary, means:
“a theory in philosophy that your own existence is the only thing that is real or that can be known”
I tried to keep this theme central to my own creative representation of the poem. As everything goes on around me at the College of Charleston on a given day, I understand it only in terms of my own existence (at least within this poem). I tried to re-create the opulence of Wallace’s original description of the Palaz of Hoon, which is not too difficult to do with a setting of the College of Charleston’s beautiful campus.
Taylor, I think it’s very interesting you’ve chose to connect Stevens’s experience within the piece, “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” with your personal experience at College and the beauty that the campus embodies. It seems as though your creative piece dabbles with the existential questions of “what is existence” and how our perception is in fact our reality. Like Ramazani mentions in our anthology, you have, like Stevens, tried to write a poem that fills a spiritual void and gives “a sense of the freshness or vividness of life.” You, the poetic speaker, do a nice job of reflecting the poetic content back onto your personal experience and the connectedness to that experience, which I find very true to the aim of “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon.”