I'm going to do the lame thing and straight up attribute the dreamy and surreal nature of the poem to it literally being a dream. Sometimes you have dreams featuring the deceased and you wake up and there is no party. Just a weird interlude in life.

It's interesting to note the stylistic differences to a similar theme. In Marvell's it's a dialogue, two different elements talking to each other. Body and soul criticizing each other. But even though there are separate stanza's and speakers, the entire poem is made cohesive by the AABBCCDD rhyme scheme. Within the stanza's, the lines often times end in some form of punctuation.

This is totally different. When it's just body, there's no set pattern, no stanza, and many of the lines are enjambed. Perhaps even when body and soul are pushing against each other, their more organized and uniform together? Or maybe it's that structure is rigid when accusing the other of imprisonment while when the body is defending it's freedom, the structure is more free form.

There's an effective use of assonance in this poem, look how many words have quiet, low vowels (house, was, world, calm, etc) in comparison to how few high action vowels there are ("ae" "ay" etc). Not a huge stretch thematically that a poem about quietness and calm when reading deliberately chooses quieter an calmer vowels.

So, did you strategically introduce the idea of "poetry about poetry" for Wallace Stevens?

To me, this is a poem a comparison, between the physicality of a mountain and a poem as well as a meditation on the creating of fiction

I mean it's all about a poem that takes the place of a mountain i.e something spiritual and literary taking the place of an actual physical option. I think the third stanza is about poetry, namely the effect of poetry. I also think the 5th and the 7th stanza talk about the place poetry gets you. (where he could be complete/his unique and solitary home)

On the nature of creation: the dude is literally living in the literature, even when the book is covered in dust he's breathing it in. (Does he need this oxygen to sustain himself?) The fourth stanza is pretty clearly talking about the nature of editing a work and how something as monumental (clearly Steven's believes that poetry can take the place of even a mountain) can just change. When you believe literature to be transcendent, the act of honing and editing takes on a new meaning. Dude's literally playing G-d in these passages. Although in a personal sense. There's no plurality in these poems. No viewer besides himself. He's looking for a place where he would be complete in the unexplained. He's looking for his "solitary home"

I find it interesting how this poem is made up of 7 stanza's (bibilcally, it took 7 days to create the Earth) and 14 lines (like a sonnet). So another possible intersection between poetry and creation? A comparison between literally creating something physical i.e the mountain like G-d and creating something transcendent i.e a poem like Stevens.

http://www.learner.org/catalog/extras/vvspot/Bishop.html

What's up with Gerard Manley's general rhyme scheme? This goes for both poems. For this one, we see ABCABC, next stanza ABCAC. Why the difference in stanzas? Is it to place emphasis on G-d, ending early with "him"? And there's also a lot of half rhymes-- dapple, stiple, tackle, rose-moles and fresh firecoal. The sound of the poem is supplemented by the constant alliteration (couple-coulor, fresh firecoal, plotted and pieced, fold, fallow) which gives it a strange rhythmic, lyrical feeling. Pretty, but odd. I would argue that this is typical of Romantic poets as a whole-- something about nature brings out music and/or weirdos. But isn't it fitting that this poem is filled with exceptions and couples, but fits together in a sort of melody?

Kelsey above mentioned asyndeton-- a lack of conjunctions, but this poem also features here polysyndeton-- extra conjugations. Hopkins can create an almost lyrical feeling by both adding and taking out conjunctions. Or to emphasize that the trees that were once in all these areas are now gone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goV57pGmiCk

(also all my notes were under the wrong tag, I swear I didn't write comments during class)

This conclusion (i.e immortalizing his lover's beauty through his words against the all consuming force of time) is the same he reached in Sonnet 16 (Shall I compare thee to a summer's day)

Power of three: O, hold, and strong(ish) are all used three times. Especially interesting because there's four stanzas. I don't know what to call these repeated words. Anaphora-esques? Anyways, if I had to guess what this was implying, I'd say something along the lines of an incompleteness. Or on the other hand a series of things broken and overwhelmed that form a complete picture when put together.

O is used three times, hold is used three times, strong is used 2.75 times which I'm rounding up to 3. Interesting especially since there is 4 stanzas. I'm not sure what that's called? like anaphora-ish?