"Domination of Black" is a poem in Wallace Stevens' Harmonium, first published in 1916 (and later in 1942), and selected by him as his best poem for the anthology This Is My Best.
The poem can be compared to imagist paintings of the period such as Klee's "Blaue Nacht",https://web.archive.org/web/20070310204811/http://imagesource.art.com/images/-/Paul-Klee/Blaue-Nacht-Print-C10078194.jpeg Klee's shades of blue replaced by Stevens' colors of the night. Stevens adds unsettling elements. The poem unfolds like a little horror show. A fire creates flickering images of the colors of bushes and leaves, which themselves turn in the wind. Also the color of heavy hemlocks "came striding", as from the river Styx ("the Stygian hemlocks", in Vendler's phrase). Ambiguous peacocks descend from the hemlocks. Then the poet notices outside his window the planets gathering isomorphically, "Like the leaves themselves", and the night came striding. The threat of darkness (death? suicide?) is palpable: "I felt afraid."
See also "Tea", which, like "Domination of Black", demonstrates "all the troping of leaves through the collection".
Musical compositions inspired by the poem include Tesserae F - "Domination of Black" for solo bass clarinet by Justin Connolly and Robin Holloway's Domination of Black op. 23 for symphony orchestra (1973-74), which was premiered at the BBC Proms by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Elgar Howarth.
The painter Joan Mitchell named an important work of hers Hemlock (1956) after what she termed "the dark and blue feeling" of the poem and its multiple references to the hemlock plant.