 The poetic conceit here may be contrasted with Descartes' philosophical proposition that a person must always be thinking when asleep, on pain of ceasing to exist.Day-dreaming, sleep-walking, catatonic X is fixated upon the showy canna that fill the terrace of his capitol, his consciousness.Buttel forgoes this interpretation in favor of the idea that the poem celebrates the poetic counterpart of a painter's "primitive eye".