We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns
That fall upon it out of the wind.

In these lines Stevens contrasts the pull of the “real” (the ordinary, material, human-made—figured as a hotel) with the allure of transcendent or idealized meaning (the “hymns” that arrive like windborne music). The repeated “coming back” suggests a cyclical return from imagination, religion, or aesthetic rapture to the stubborn facts of lived experience. Yet the phrasing does not simply dismiss the hymns; it registers their beauty and inevitability even as the speaker insists on the primacy of the actual. The passage exemplifies Stevens’s modernist preoccupation with how imagination and reality continually revise one another, and how meaning is made in the tension between them.