Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.

These lines present a surreal vignette in which the ordinary (an “old sailor,” drunk and asleep) collides with the impossible (“catches tigers / In red weather”). The image suggests that the imagination’s most vivid, predatory, or exotic creations may arise not from sober intention but from half-conscious states—dream, intoxication, fatigue—when rational control loosens. “Red weather” intensifies the scene into a charged atmosphere: danger, heat, violence, or heightened perception. In Stevens’s typical mode, the point is less narrative plausibility than the way language can make a new reality flare into being, briefly and strangely, through a single concentrated image.