The Idea of Order at Key West Literary Elements

An unidentified person on the beach at Key West who watches the woman singing. Most of the poem is narrated in the plural "we" - presumably the speaker and his companion, Ramon Fernandez, whom he addresses in the last two stanzas. Though we don't learn anything specific about the speaker, he effectively acts as a stand-in for the poet Stevens, who, as an artist himself, is fixated on analyzing the woman's creative process and the effect of her song on his own perceptions.

Iambic pentameter (five beats or stressed syllables per line, usually ten or eleven syllables), only occasional rhymes

"like a body wholly body, fluttering / its empty sleeves" — combination of a simile and metaphor for the ocean as a mute physical entity with the empty sleeves being its waves or wind

"The ever-hooded" sea — a metaphor for the curling waves, or perhaps the sky and clouds, having the appearance of a hood

"sunken coral water-walled" — water-walled is a metaphorical image for the underwater pressure

"body wholly body" — word repetition, and assonance of "-y" endings

"mimic motion / Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry" — alliterative /m/ and then /c/ sounds

"grinding water and the gasping wind" — consonance: sonic parallel of two g-w word pairs

"water-walled" — alliteration

"heaped / On high horizons" — repeated /h/ sounds

"emblazoned zones" — internal assonance of "zoned zones"

At several moments in the poem, the speaker verges on irony by over-stating what should be obvious, or by nitpicking minuscule distinctions in meaning.

As an example, in stanza two, "it was she and not the sea we heard." Presumably, the speaker can hear both, or if he's talking solely about the song then this statement should be obvious, but by emphasizing it he draws attention to the distinction between singer and nature.

Similarly, saying the sea "was merely a place by which she walked to sing" makes the sea seem so unimportant that we might wonder why he is bothering to write about it at all—but understating its importance is an ironic way to overcome the cliches of the "voice of nature" speaking through the artist, etc.

When the speaker asks "Whose spirit is this?" he is ironically posing a rhetorical question, because the poem rejects the belief that there is some greater cosmic or natural spirit behind the woman's singing. In doing this, the speaker dismisses that entire category of assumptions.

The command to Ramon Fernandez, "tell me, if you know," is also ironic, like another rhetorical question: Fernandez cannot tell him anything, and the 'knowing' what is going on is left up to the reader, based on the clues the speaker has given.

Modernist poetry

The beach in Key West, Florida

Reflective and analytical. At times, slightly daunted or threatened by the inscrutability of the sea. Towards the end of the poem, a tone of wonder and awe at the human mind and its powers of perception.

The speaker struggles with his own assumptions and preconceptions about what it means to be a creative artist, and what the sea 'means' as a symbol.

The speaker tries to make sense of the connection, or lack thereof, between the woman and the sea. He is trying to reconcile two seemingly opposed ideas: that on the one hand the woman's song might be 'inspired' by the ocean, while on the other hand she is an independent creator whose song can create a world entirely separate from the sea. He is marveling at how much power the human mind has to reshape the world as it appears to us, specifically through art, and is trying to understand how it is possible for us to make sense of the world solely through thought and perception.

The poem's major climax, or turning point, is at the end of stanza four, when the speaker addresses Ramon Fernandez. The singing ends, the men turn back towards the town, and the speaker marvels at how the lights now seem to organize and master the night, and how humans have an insatiable drive to make order out of chaos, and create systems of knowledge and meaning. The poem hinges on this moment because the revelation in the last two stanzas relies upon the careful thought-work that has been done earlier, in analyzing the artist's power to create new worlds within our minds.

The sea "Was merely a place by which she walked to sing" — understatement of the sea's importance, in order to help readers question any inherent link we might assume between sea (inspiration) and woman (artist).

The name "Ramon Fernandez" is likely a reference to a critic of the same name, prominent in the 1930s—Stevens denied it, but the connection appears too well-documented to have been a coincidence.

Frequent descriptions of the sea and nature as having a voice (although the humanness of this voice is constantly in doubt): the sea's "constant cry," "the dark voice of the sea," "the outer voice of sky and cloud," "The heaving speech of air."

Also, the "gasping wind" has the human quality of breath.

"a summer sound / Repeated in a summer without end" — in this description of the empty sound of the wind and sea, the hyperbole of an endless summer evokes the sense that nature, without human systems and timekeeping, is timeless. The setting of Key West also emphasizes this, as it is a hot, tropical season all year round.

"there never was a world for her / Except the one she sang and, singing, made." — the speaker says that no world has ever existed for the woman except the one constructed by her present singing, which is factually untrue, but demonstrates the feeling that her singing manages to make a completely new world, and that for a moment that world is all that exists.

The fishing boat lights "Mastered the night and portioned out the sea" — this entire image sequence is hyperbole, giving the lights nearly divine power to command and reorganize the night, in order to show the power of human perception.

"grinding water" and "gasping wind"