"Colloquy with a Polish Aunt" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium.
Thus, on the basis of the common drudge, You dream of women, swathed in indigo, Holding their books toward the nearer stars, To read, in secret, their burning secrecies....
The scholar Helen Vendler writes of this poem that "Some readers have seen his subject as an epistemological one, and have written about his views on the imagination and its uneasy rapport with reality.
"[2] Stevens did not often bother with justifying his aestheticism, and the term "hedonism" diminishes his artistic ambition to lift himself and his reader from the daily ennui to at least a temporary heightening and intensification of life, an aesthetic experience.
Also, the speaker's exchange with his Polish aunt seems to occur in a world far removed from the American wilderness (which one encounters, for instance, in "Earthy Anecdote".
She tells him that the women he dreams of are "common drudges," whom his imagination dresses exotically ("swathed in indigo") and pictures as figures in a pre-Raphaelite painting, who burn secretly for otherworldly saints.
The Polish aunt in this way teaches the speaker a wise lesson about the "uneasy rapport" between reality and the imagination.