"Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, "Harmonium". First published in 1915, it is in the public domain.

The poem allows the reader to linger over the possibility of colors, strangeness and unusual dreams. Imagination that is absent from a mundane orderly life is represented by a dandified aesthete and an adventurous and exciting life by a drunken sailor dreaming of catching tigers in red weather.

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,

With socks of lace

And beaded ceintures.

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.

Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut.

His "Collected Poems" (1954) won the "Pulitzer Prize for Poetry" in 1955.

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