Homborg, Mr.

Mr. Homburg is a character in "Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly." His name appears in two lines, though the entire poem is about him--or rather, about his ideas. The lines in which his name appears are:
*"Of Mr. Homburg during his visits home" (2).
*"Or so Mr. Homburg thought, the body of a world" (41).
==Isn't a Homburg a Kind of Hat?==
It sure is. The homburg is a felt hat characterized by the single dent running through the center of its crown, and by its round, curled brim. The hat was popularized by King Edward VII and became extremely fashionable in the 1930s. The hat would be common to any well-dressed gentleman from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century ("Homburg (hat)," Wikipedia).
==What is Mr. Homburg Doing in This Poem==
Thinking. Specifically, he is musing on one of "the more irritating minor ideas" to occur to him on one of his many return visits to his home in Concord, MA. The "irritating minor idea," it turns out, is not minor at all, and one must presume that it would only appear minor, and what is more only appear irritating, from the otherwise comfortably prosaic perspective of a level-headed middle-class American business person like Mr. Homburg, or like Wallace Stevens in his guise as insurance man. The idea is this: that the functioning of the mind, and of the self, is an echo of the functioning of nature; and that nature, while its ultimate being exceeds the capacity of the mind or self to contain it, nevertheless enters into and is caught by the mind, and in shaping the mind's responses, in a sense becomes the mind--it's weather. Thus selfhood is not separate from nature, but an intimate effect of nature. Here, Mr. Homburg, and Stevens, recall Wordsworth, who also imagined an intimate correspondence between nature and identity, as well as Coleridge, who rather famously identified perception, aka the primary imagination, as a "repetition in the finite mind of the infinite act of creation in the eternal I AM" (Biographia Literaria, chapter XIV).