you dweller in the dark cabin,
to whom the watermelon is always purple,
whose garden is wind and moon,
of the two dreams, night and day,
what lover, what dreamer, would choose
the one obscured by sleep?
here is the plantain by your door
and the best cock of red feather
that crew before clocks.
a feme may come, leaf-green,
whose coming may give revel
beyond revelries of sleep,
yes, and the blackbird spread its tail,
so that the sun may speckle,
while it creaks hail.
you dweller in the dark cabin,
rise, since rising will not waken,
and hail, cry hail, cry hail.
(from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose, pp. 71-72)
* * * * *
I love this poem, and characteristically, I can't find much on it. But Ronald Sukenick reliably gives us the basic gist: "Both reality, 'day,' and dream, that of the 'dark cabin' of the mind, 'night,' are products of the imagination; both are dreams. Why not, then, since 'rising will not waken,' choose the more tangible and various dream of reality,the real watermelon, rather than the imaginary one that is 'always purple?'" (WSMTO, pp.218-219) Good question.
Frank Doggett finds this poem sums Stevens up well enough to start off his book "Stevens' Poetry of Thought' with an exposition of it on page 2: "Imagination and reality, the blue guitar and things as they are, middling beast and mystic garden - all these dualities of his - are considerations of one kind or another of this theme of the mind and the world. The world is the not-self, that which is reflected on the surface of his consciousness. As for the mind, it is the conscious self, and Stevens usually takes this entity to be like a spirit and an indweller bound to the matter of its body. 'You dweller in the dark cabin,' he says, addressing himself to men of imagination, to poets, but thinking of the dweller as the self inhabiting the darkness of the body. Thus he opens one of his early poems to earth and in his amused fashion, characterizing his own gusto for living, names it 'Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion.'
"With earth a watermelon pavilion, with the mind a spirit, as dweller in the dark cabin, whose sense of reality is obscured as though in a dream but beside whose cabin is the vivid actual plantain of green reality and the sun: 'And the best cock of red feather/that crew before clocks...' with all the variety of earth, experience for the indwelling spirit is its happiness. 'We stand in the tumult of a festival,' he says in one of the later poems. In this way the self is 'the Dove in the Belly,' to whom 'the whole of appearance is a toy.' And yet the self, for all this pleasure in experience is still something apart from the physical reality that underlies the nature of appearance."
This sounds very close to Hindu philosophy to me, which teaches that we are 'here' to gather experience, in order to transcend it. But first we must have it.