I get a lot out of this poem, although I can't say I fully understand it. Part of what I like is the mood. Stevens is describing a profound experience of the beauty of the ocean illuminated by a woman singing. I love his description in the first paragraph of the sea's singing. Indeed, when I first read this poem, I thought perhaps the singer was not a person but a metaphorical embodiment of the ocean, or nature or the sun. Now I think when it says "She sang beyond the genius of the sea," it means that the sea's voice is beautiful, but the singer's song surpasses it. Later on, it says "Her voice made the sky acutest at its vanishing." The song she sang illuminated the beauty of the scene, and drew details like the horizon into focus.
There's not much I can say to add to the poem's beauty. That's sort of why poems exist I guess. They can express something that gets lost when it is translated into standard prose. I guess I'll let it stand as a testament to the beauty and power of spiritual experiences, for I would classify this as such an experience.
3 comments:
It occurs to me that Stevens's poem has had much of the same effect on me that the singer's song had on him.
I like how he seems to say that her experience and mirroring of that experience through song is an act of creation. She is creating the world around her, and the world that the listeners perceive through her.
The spell seems broken when they turn to the lights of the town.
I wonder who Ramon Fernandez is. It is an ineteresting choice he made to include the reader in the direct experience by using the plural inclusive pronoun.
This has got to be one of my favorite poems of all time, by the way. It really connects wioth me deeply in a hard-to-explain way.
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