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The Idea of Order at Key West -- Wallace Stevens

Guest poem sent in by Kimbol Soques
(Poem #988) 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 the 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.
-- Wallace Stevens
Mr. Wright's theme of 20th century American Modernist poets focusing on
the sea called Wallace Stevens' lovely _The Idea of Order at Key West_  --
though the poem is as much about the singer as the sea.

This was one of the first poems I read after becoming serious about
being a poet (at age fourteen) -- that, and _Thirteen Ways of Looking at
a Blackbird_.

In the interest of speed I have little more than that for you -- other
than I link the Modernist idea of poets having an "innocent eye" with
Stevens, though I can't find a citation on the Web to prove he really
did say something about it.

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Kimbol Soques                     Net:

9 comments: ( or Leave a comment )

Ravenel Richardson said...

I think you would find reading Lisa Ruddick's article, 'Fluid Symbols in American Modernism: William James, Gertrude Stein, George Santayana, and Wallace Stevens' in Morton W. Bloomfield (ed.) Allegory Myth and Symbol, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981, pp. 335-353 very helpful in analyzing this poem.

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