She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The poem's first line introduces the key players in the scene the speaker observes: a woman ("she"), the sea, and the song that the woman sings. The line is somewhat unclear at first, as "beyond the genius of the sea" is a highly abstract image, but if we unpack it, it tells us a couple things: the sea has an intellect or "genius" of its own, despite how we may think of nature as unthinking, but the woman's song surpasses, goes "beyond," that genius. Her song is able to achieve real communication in a way that the sea cannot. This sense in the poem of going "beyond" the sea summarizes how artists create work that ultimately goes beyond the thing that inspired them.
The water never formed to mind or voice, / Like a body wholly body...
These lines tell us that the sea does not have the human qualities of the artist: it has no mind nor voice, and is entirely and only a physical body. At first, this seems to contradict the first line's idea of the sea having its own "genius," but having a mind and voice are specifically human ways that we talk about communicating: the sea has its own form of knowledge, but we cannot communicate with it the way we would talk to another person. For this reason, the act of creating art, like the woman's song (or Stevens' poem), is in many ways an act of translation or re-creation: art attempts to create a human 'voice' in place of nature's unknowable essence.
The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
This line, with its powerful syntax of two short sentences, asserts that the sea and the woman are two separate, independent entities. The sounds and swells of the water, and the woman's song, are two distinct sounds, each full of significance in its own way, and neither one is just a superficial copy or mask of the other one. This emphasizes how artists like the singer, even if they are inspired by nature, can create something that stands alone, apart from the thing that inspired it, as its own unique statement.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea / Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
These lines drastically minimize the sea's importance, saying that the ocean just happened to be nearby while the woman was singing, and the two are unrelated. The speaker seems to be doubting that a link even exists between the sea and the woman's song. This reduction seems melodramatic, especially since the speaker starts by mentioning the sea's "genius," but in stanzas two and three the poem rejects more and more the idea that the woman's song is directly inspired by the sea. The images "ever-hooded" and "tragic-gestured" personify the sea, hinting that it has human emotions, and this falls in line with a long tradition of poetry superimposing human feelings and meanings onto nature. However, these lines now raise a warning sign against that impulse, rejecting the traditional notion that the artist or singer is nothing more than a conduit through which nature, or some divine spirit, speaks.
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.
Here, the speaker is reflecting on how students and readers have usually been taught to think about art: we are told that we should automatically try to discern the "spirit," or inspiration behind the artwork, or song, or poem. The speaker is being subtly sarcastic by saying that he "knew / That we should ask this often as she sang," because if a listener spends the entire time trying to identify some greater "spirit" that exists outside the singer, they will unfairly ignore the singer's own independent ability and craft that goes into their work.
It was her voice that made / The sky acutest at its vanishing. / She measured to the hour its solitude.
These lines highlight the power of the singer (artist) to actually create emotional meaning in the natural world around them. The sky becoming "acutest at its vanishing" likely means that the horizon (vanishing point) appears meaningful or poignant in some way, and the "solitude" of the sky is felt immediately and presently "to the hour." The poem suggests that if we have these reflective or poignant thoughts while looking at something like the ocean horizon, these emotions are not something directly caused by nature but are rather a product of the human imagination. In the poem, it is the powerful, original creativity of the woman's voice that creates these emotions and situates them within nature.
And when she sang, the sea, / Whatever self it had, became the self / That was her song, for she was the maker.
These lines again assert the creative power of the artist to shape the world around her. Whether or not the woman's song is 'inspired' by the sea (and that question is never truly answered by the speaker), in the act of creating art she creates a new reality in which the parts of nature around her become reflections of herself. This is what the human mind does, in an attempt to make sense of the world: we project our emotions and perceptions onto it. For the woman, and her listeners, the sea and everything else around becomes a reflection of her song, or her creative mind.
Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know...
This line marks a dramatic shift in the poem, when the speaker addresses his heretofore unnamed companion. As the singing ends, the friend Ramon Fernandez functions as a third-party spectator, an outside voice (compared often to a literary critic) who is called upon to give some explanation of the song, and of the speaker's full experience in which the world appears transformed because of the song. Crucially, however, Ramon is never given an opportunity to answer, most likely indicating that any critical analysis or summary of the experience would be incomplete, unnecessary, or would fail to capture the whole feeling.
The lights in the fishing boats... Mastered the night and portioned out the sea, / Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles, / Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
These lines come from the passage describing the speaker's vision of the harbor, after the singing ends. The speaker turns the poem's attention from the woman's song to his own experience, and powerfully demonstrates how his perceptions have been altered by the art. Because the song has affirmed his belief in the human mind's power to reorganize and assign meaning to the world around it, the speaker now sees the harbor as miraculously ordered and comprehensible, in a way that nature (and especially night) usually are not. The fishing lights symbolize the human mind, helping to impose an "idea of order" on the void of night.
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon
This line, launching the final stanza, begins the speaker's exclamation in which he marvels at humans and their "rage to order" nature around us. He is reflecting on the creative process he has witnessed on the beach, in which the woman creates her own ordered world through singing, and the process in which he is now taking part by writing a poem about the experience. It is the unavoidable human impulse to create systems and symbols that assign the world meaning—abstract things like art and language, or physical things like networks of lights or streets. And even though these systems are only "ghostlier demarcations"—i.e., temporary and superficial—they give our minds the tools to make life make sense.
