Day one My first look at the poem

Hello to all! My name is Rosanna. I will start right in with the poem by Wallace Stevens. This is my first reaction to the poem, I just wrote what came to mind.



She sang beyond the genius of the sea.

Immediately we are asked to imagine a woman. When I start with she, I picture a beautiful woman. I think goddess, mother earth, roundness, cyclical, gentle, powerful... And this woman has already done the act. She sang. What was her song? Was it just lyrics and rhythm? Was it a story? Was it a feeling she had, her imagination, her immortality? We must remember that she had already completed her song. Was the song one of beauty, sadness, rejoicing, creation? Was she keeping a record of something? Was she remembering a loved one? What was her song about? If she sang further than (beyond) the sea, then was her song in flight, over the water, reaching far beyond the sea's stretch? Was the song more sophisticated than that of nature? Or perhaps her song was deeper, with more life, with notes randomly swimming in the bottomless ocean.

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.

What does it mean to form to mind or voice?

Okay, is this really a woman who is singing a song, walking by the ocean? Does she wear a dress with empty sleeves? It seems that she and the sea exist separately, as the water remains as it is, instead of turning into her song; hence, she did not create the sea by speaking it so. She is not yet the creator. "Like a body wholly body, fluttering its empty sleeves" is a metaphor, a comparison , of the sea being complete, yet missing something the same way that a body with all its limbs intact could have a fluttering sleeve. A powerful body fluttering it's "empty sleeves" is also a personification of a wave. We can hear the descriptive language of the waves crashing and rolling by, and we feel something. Just the memory of the sound of waves elicits an emotional response, although we know the ocean is not human.

Yet the sea makes a song of its own with its "mimic motion". Somehow, the sea's movement creates a feeling of the human condition.

There are two songs: the woman's and the sea's. Both songs are real, yet very different. The songs are not cohesive as a melody, nor are they depending on each other.


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.


Literacy and imagination. Words have layers of meaning. The word fear has very different meanings to each person, depending on his or her own life experiences. The act of speaking seems to trump the power of nature and its sounds; thus, we heard her song, and she was able to create the grinding water and the grasping wind by giving it meaning.

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.

Reality depends on the individual. For the sea, it's own waves and storms and life may always be a source of deep and profound wonder. I love the image of the ocean as an"ever-hooded, tragic gestured sea". I imagine everything underneath the surface as chaotic and beautiful, and frightening and magical. Yet the hood is often deceivingly stoic. And sometimes the hood can be fraudulent as it gives away the storm underneath.

And here, in this poem, we can see that these images are all real and alive, but only when brought to our attention. Because she only walked to the ocean so that she could sing. And the sounds of nature do not apply meaning, and the many miracles and anomalies of nature are lost on her if she does not recognize them. We create our own realities.

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.

Her imagination is just as inventive in her own reality as her reality is inventive in her imagination. Awareness.

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.

How interesting that we went from needing her song to explain our sights, to needing Ramon's explanation. It's almost as if we had an epiphany in the middle of the poem, where we understood that we are always alone in our perceptions, and should trust our own experiences, and that we have the potential to accept poetry as truth. And then we turn around and have an inner conflict blocking our vision again.

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.

I am left questioning everything. Is blessed rage a good thing or a bad thing? Are we happy with what we have done with language? Are we celebrating that as humans, we get to map meaning into everything? Or are we screaming blessed rage in a desperate appeal to the world of the supernatural? How can we explain things like the sight of an evening, dark, with lights painting portraits of secrets... Or the the nuances of our origins?