Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock Explication

Katie Lopes-Raftery
Ms. Clapp
AP Literature and Composition
20 November 2008

Disillusionment Explication

In the poem Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock, the author, Wallace Stevens creates a contrast between white colored ghosts and ghosts with vibrant colors. His comparison between these two “colors” of ghosts along with his bitterly truthful tone suggests the disillusionment that life without imagination is just a blank piece of white paper.

In the first seven lines of the poem, Stevens introduces the topic with the idea of a boring, imagination-less character. He describes the house as haunted by “white night-gowns” (2). There is nothing interesting about a white sheet of paper; there is nothing creative about it. None of the “ghosts” are “green,/ or purple with green rings,/ or green with yellow rings…” (3-4). Stevens describes this type of people as having no color. There’s nothing vibrant about the way they live a mundane life. He stresses the lack of color over 4 lines, emphasizing how important it really is. He ends by saying that none of these people “are strange,” or different by wearing (or thinking) something other than a white gown (an imagination-less mind).

In the second part of the poem, where the shift occurs, Stevens uses descriptively connotative words to describe the fulfillment that a life with color has. Those who are “strange” and do use their imagination, have “socks of lace/ and beaded ceintures” (8-9). When one thinks about the connotation of lace, one thinks about the intricacy of the pattern, the attention to detail, and amount of labor or imagination put into the work. The same is for the beads; beaded ceintures were intricate designs that often were portrayed as beautiful. Stevens continues about how people won’t dream of “baboons and periwinkles” (11). Again, these subjects are not merely white sheets of paper; there is a lot of life to each of them. This last part describes those interesting people found “here and there” (12). Here and there, there is a sailor who “catches tigers/ in red weather” (14-15). This small amount of people are the ones that get to dream with color. The color red suggests such passion and life, yet only those few sailors are the ones that take the opportunity to dream about it at ten o’clock; they are the ones who are not disillusioned, or disconnected, at ten o’clock.

In the end, Stevens changed the meaning, or at least the connotation of the word “strange.” It no longer meant weird or uninteresting, but now meant that one was different in thinking about the world. He wanted the readers to identify themselves as a part of the poem, and suggests that “being a sailor” brings more color to one’s life.