Listen to Wallace Stevens read his poem The Idea of Order at Key West.

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard.
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.

If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

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Insanely slow. Slow poetry.

And why? So that we can attend to the world and what we make of it. Listen carefully. And remember my post about the Yvor Winters poem, The Slow Pacific Swell. Remember in particular this line:

The sea is but a sound.

This seems a theme of the Stevens poem too.

Listen. Listen because there’s something in the Stevens poem that isn’t in the Winters. And that thing is art itself. Winters is all about the mind struggling to impose order on the world. Our rationality, which seeks precision and stability, has to keep its distance from the enigmatic, undermining, powerful chaos that the sea represents. But Stevens introduces another element into our relationship with the world — one that enables us to remain close to sources of chaos and mystery. Listen.

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The Idea of Order at Key West

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.

[The poet, walking along a beach, watches and listens to a woman also at the beach, singing. Her singing is brilliant – more brilliant than the singing of the sea.]

The water never formed to mind or voice,

[Why more brilliant? Because the sea is just a sound. It doesn’t have a mind, and it doesn’t have a voice. No words. Just sound. Same formless chaos Winters describes.]

Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves;

[The sea is merely its physical reality on the globe. It is a body of water, and when its arms wave to us — when the water moves — its gesture is empty, without content.]

and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

[See how he calls it “tragic-gestured” a few lines down? Although it’s empty of content, we do intuit, in the sound of the sea, the sad futility of human existence. Matthew Arnold in Dover Beach describes it as “the turbid ebb and flow of human misery.” We hear, writes Stevens, a constant cry — emanating from the alien inhuman sea, but nonetheless in some sense our own, because we understand it in a certain way as mimicking the truth of our being.]

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard.
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

[Both human artist and inhuman sea, then, are authentic expressive realities. Yet they do not interact. Her song and the water do not, together, make a medley, even if the singer is trying to imitate the sound of the ocean with her voice. She’s using words, after all, and the ocean is speechless, empty gesture. Even if, in a fine low voice, she’s doing Elgar’s Sea Pictures, it’s the human artist we hear, not the ocean.]

For she was the maker of the song she sang.

[In the world of Winters, we are far less powerful than in the world of Stevens. With Stevens, the artist has dominion over the world — the world only has existence in the artist’s work, which shapes the world as something meaningful and beautiful. If we have any idea of order at all, we’ve gotten it from the artist.]

The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.

[He agrees with Winters that the sea is a permanent and unsettling mystery – ever-hooded – and that it signals to us — or rather we respond to it as signaling to us — the truth of our tragic condition. But it’s not the threatening mystery it is for Winters; for Stevens, the sea is “merely” a location, merely a physical attribute of the world. It needs us – our formal artistic expressivity – to be anything more, really, than a place-holder.]

Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.

[To be human is to be unsatisfied with mere physicality. We seek meaning, beauty, spirit; and we seek it in art.]

If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone.

[We’ve been contemplating the level sea so far; now our view takes in what’s above and below it — takes in all of the world. And even if we do include all of the non-human, non-aesthetic world, we merely deepen the sense of nothingness – deep air, the “speech” of mere air. And there’s another feature of this physical world. It does not move forward in time; it does not, like our lives, make a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. Rather it is a “summer without end,” a droning constancy that is therefore inhuman, alien to us and our experience. Only the artist can both interact with this atemporal world of nature and convey our temporal humanness to us.]

But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.

[The poet walks with a companion. He notes that the artist transcends herself – her singing is more “even than her voice,” and more than whatever the poet and his companion, in their speech, add to her song. Now we get a few lines amplifying the idea that the natural world is merely physical, and that while it can gesture to us in ways we interpret as meaningful, it is only the artist who can take that interpretation as it were back to the world, and vivify and order the world aesthetically. Without her, the world remains meaningless, a stage set.]

It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.

[As day ends and a spectacular Key West sunset of bronzes emerges, we need the singer to sharpen and clarify and order that sunset.]

She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang.

[Again, the artist owns, lives inside, the temporality that makes the world something other than a grinding pointless redundancy. As she sings, she forms the world in which she sings.]

And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town,

[The poet turns to his companion to ask a question as they walk away from the beach and toward town at the end of the day and as the singer concludes her song.]

tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,

[We make songs, but we make other things too. Those lights in the boats also represent a form of ordering the world. They aren’t charged with artistic brilliance, like the singer’s song, but they are another powerful form of human creation — the lighting up of the dark world — and they have a similar effect: They master the night. They portion out the sea. They make the world. And they order the world. So even when the singing ends, we remain in a beautiful humanized world.]

Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

[Gorgeous writing. See how the word zone playfully inheres in the word that precedes it? We make of the otherwise undifferentiated world zones; we mark these zones with fiery poles, always arranging, deepening, clarifying darkness. This is a poem not merely about the triumphal powers of the artist; it is about the powers of all human makers.]

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

[Our divine fever to be makers of a world whose vastest and most powerful attributes seem disorder — in this mania we discover that the “spirit” the poet sought in the singer is his own spirit, our collective human creativity. The world comes at us obliquely, fragrant with implicit meaning, dimly starred with significance. We are always, as with the boat’s lights, illuminating and setting in motion and speaking the dark mute lifeless stage set of the world. But aesthetic creation is the very best thing we do, for it confronts the sea, the sea that repels as much as it attracts Yvor Winters in his own slow poem.]