[발췌: P.L. Mariani] The Idea of Order at Key West: 1934-1936

• 출처: Paul L. Mariani. The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens. 1st ed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016. 구글도서 
• 관련 검색: http://hsalbert.blogspot.kr/2017/09/wallace-stevens-idea-of-order-at-key.html
• 관련 발췌: Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing (Bart Eeckhout. University of Missouri Press, 2002)

※ 발췌 (excerpt):

( ... ... ) that poem was an announcement ( ... ) that Stevens had once again found both his voice and his subject; now only death would be strong enough to stop him. It is a threshold piece, with the poet on the shore, the tenuous sands of the known beneath his feet, facing the immense uncharted depths before him. Here is Crispin, come back to face once more the sublime immensity of a sea which had nearly drowned him even as it baptized him into the knowledge of just how little we really know. "She sang beyond the genius of the sea," the poen begins, thus announcing Stevens's reinvigorated muse, and surely not the paltry nude of his earlier verse.

Nature, in the guise of the ^genius loci^, the genius or spirit of the place (in this instance the world in and about Key West), contains its own reality, the speaker realizes. But so does the woman, the singer, the poet, the one who would render reality in a language supple enough to contain reality's ever-changing fluctuations. And when she sings, she has the ability to sing ^beyond^ what the sea is capable of singing. For the sea is like some uncouth giant who makes recurring slapping sounds, slurping sounds, sea sounds, C sounds, much as Crispin the Comedian once heared, even as this speaker understands that humans need something more: a meaning, a music, subtle registers to satisfy the restless mind. And yet a music that somehow contans the real, for without a sense of the real undergirding one--shifting as that foundation may be--one sings mere nonsense, however modulated and beautifully arranged.

Though we speak of it as an entity with a self, the sea is never really that, can never be that. We give it a self, and if a self, a spirit, a ghost, whether we call it Nature or Neptune or Proteus. The truth is that "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 vertiable ocean.^

In its mimicry the sea seems to cry out constantly, as if pleading to be understood or at least acknowledged. That cry, that sound of the sea in its various shapes, creates in us a cry as well, as if it called out to us and we answered with our own cry, our own words, the human addressing the inhuman. Nature, not in the sense of harmful or cruel, but simply a thing apart, though we depend on it for our very being.

If we, islands in ourselves, are to provide a meaning for things which can be communicated to other human islands all about us, we will have to use signs of some sort, and these will for the most part entail sounds, and, if sounds, words. Therein lies the difficulty, for the sounds of a song or a poem can never be one with the sounds of water, "even if what she sang was what she heard / Since what she sang was uttered word by word." That is, even if the poet could re-create the sensation of the sea, "the grinding water and the gasping wind," still it would be the poet, the maker, the ^maker^ we would be hearing, not the sea. Can the poet, no matter how skilled, ever actually embody the real? No more than the element of air can ever embody the element of water. Or human sounds, however modulated, contain the "dark voice of the sea," with its "meaningless plunging of water and wind." Or poems ever be moe than "bronze shadows heaped / On high horizons," mere still lifes--^mortes natures^--of the ever-fluent Real.

All poetry is by its nature elegiac, so that it is the song that makes "the sky acutest at its vanishing," that captures an emotion, a feeling, a gesture, a living thought, even as these slip from us and vanish, or remain behind to taunt us with what we have lost. Only the poet, the woman singing, remain as

         ^the single artifice 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.^

We speak of the world, but there is no world for us except the one we create in our imagination and which is constantly being created--and re-created--only as we sing or write, composing our world even as we attempt to compose ourselves.

In closing stanza the speaker turns to the one beside him, Ramon Fernandez, the philospher, and dares him to tell us, if he knows (and he doesn't, any more than the poet fianally knows)

^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 are,
Mastered the night and portione out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.^

We are witness to an order here a song sung note by note and word by word by the poet, and now, as we watch the lights on the Lilliputian fishing boats tied up in the harbor, much as the old seamen sought out the stars, forming them into constellations and assigning them myths and stories to try to tame the terror of the dark and the vastness of the sea, we do so by "arranging, deepening, enchanting" what cannot be so ordered except as the capable imagination is able to ward off, for the moment at least, the depths of darkness and death. "Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon," the speaker ends his mediation, because it is the romantic's one weapon against the encroaching chaos not only without but, more frighteningly, within us, as we keen in ever-keener sounds, crying out for a fiction that will sustain us, at least for now, in

^Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.^

What, after all, can the poet offer by way of comfort in the midst of the calamitous 1930s? What song should he play? It is a question central to Stevens's second book of poems, ^Ideas of Order^, and the very question he asks in "Mozart, 1935."  ( ... ... )