"The Curtain in the House of the Metaphysician" is a poem from Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens 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 a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar",...

's first book of poetry, Harmonium

Harmonium (poetry collection)

Harmonium is a book of poetry by U.S. poet Wallace Stevens. His first book, it was published in 1923 by Knopf in an edition of 1500 copies. He was in middle age at that time, forty-four years old. The collection comprises 85 poems, ranging in length from just a few lines to several hundred...

. It was originally published in 1919, so it is in the public domain.

The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician  It comes about that the drifting of these curtains  Is full of long motions, as the ponderous  Deflections of distance; or as clouds  Inseparable from their afternoons;  Or the changing of light, the dropping  Of the silence, wide sleep and solitude  Of night, at which all motion  Is beyond us, as the firmament,  Up-rising and down-falling, bares  The last largeness, bold to see.

An image like the one in "Curtains" is the "crisp lettuce" that
Stevens sought in a poem. The motions of curtains are associated with motions seen of an afternoon and the motions of transition to evening. These associations charge the scene with an air of mystery, leading the reader to a splendid vision of the firmament.

The poem is spare and says little, yet it shows a great deal about a perspective that could seem empty without the imagination's activity, which invests it with depth and ineffability. See Gubbinal

Gubbinal

"Gubbinal" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It is in the public domain according to Librivox.It can be read as one of his "poems of epistemology", as B. J. Leggett styles it in his Nietzschean reading of Stevens' perspectivism, a minimalistic statement of his...

 and The Snow Man

The Snow Man

"The Snow Man" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. "The Snow Man" was first published in 1921 in the journal Poetry, volume 19, October 1921 and is in the public domain.-Overview:...

for other experiments in perspective.

Buttel is struck by "Stevens' fondness for the word 'motions', as an abstract word for the flux of the physical world as well as for the sympathetic movement of the mind." He also remarks that Stevens makes us experience the motion from afternoon to night "as a felt ambience".