Girl in a Nightgown

The nightgown-wearing girl is a character in the poem, “Girl in a Nightgown.” It appears in Stevens’s Parts of a World (1942). Eleanor Cook suggests that the title is “painterly,” with a somewhat confusing relationship to the text (143), since neither girl nor nightgown are mentioned except in the title. The Letters contains no gloss. One interpretation is suggested below.
==Interpretation for "Girl in a Nightgown"==
A girl is inside her house, lights out and shades drawn, listening to the silence of night, “full” of stars and the images of stars—a silence that is described as if it is a storm, even though the girl knows that mere “phrases” (line 14) are making her imagine the silence as a storm. The nightgown of the title perhaps indicates the girl’s vulnerability before the world of imagination. The girl believes that the night or the world used to be (Stevens doesn’t specify when) a tranquil place, a place of warmth and the songs of flutes, but now the night or the world is a place of budding apocalypse, ready to “burst into flames, / Either now or tomorrow or the day after that” (lines 19-20). 
This change may be the result either of modernity or the second world war.
Cook, Eleanor. A Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens.Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2007. Web. 26 Feb 2014