Stanza 4: "If it was only the dark voice of the sea" through "Except the one she sang and, singing, made."
Summary
In this long stanza, split by a broken line, the speaker delves even further into the identity and creative power of the singing woman. He has established her power as a "maker" of a song that transcends the rough sounds of nature; to emphasize that point again, he begins stanza four by returning his attention to the sea to examine what the "voice of the sea" would be on its own, without the woman singing, and perhaps without even the speaker listening. The summary of the stanza's very long first sentence is that nature's sounds would be mindless and meaningless if humans did not have the creativity necessary to generate language and art. This is true for the sea even when it is "colored by many waves"; it is true for the sky and clouds no matter how "clear" the sounds are. Without the woman's voice creating something that the speaker can understand, the noises of the ocean would be "deep air...a summer sound / Repeated in a summer without end / And sound alone." They would be not only meaningless but monotonous, as evidenced by the repetition of "summer" and the phrase "without end." Even time would lose its usual meaning, as humans have created the terminology to describe hours and days and seasons. Without our minds to interpret it, nature would simply exist as a fact, with no further meaning or symbolism.
"But it was more than that," the speaker continues, which we already knew: the woman's song adds above and beyond the sounds of nature. However, the next line makes an important concession: it was "More even than her voice, and ours." Just as the full experience of hearing a song on a beach cannot exist without the human component, it cannot exist with only the human voice either: the meaningful art is a product of the whole environment. The rest of the sentence pictures nature as huge, intimidating, and unknown, to emphasize the feat required of the artist to derive meaning from nature. The "theatrical distances" and "mountainous atmospheres" contrast sharply with the image of a lone woman standing on the shore, singing.
The second half of the stanza strengthens this testament to the singer's creative power. Though the sea's importance was dismissed in stanza three, it regains a direct relationship with the woman in the latter half of stanza four: now, her song is not just interpreting but redefining and reshaping nature. In the context of her song, the sky's "vanishing" (horizon) becomes acute and poignant to the speaker. He elevates the woman to a nearly divine status during this section, now naming her "the single artificer of the world / In which she sang," which, because of the line break, first reads as simply "the single artificer of the world." The sea's "self" becomes defined solely by the woman's, and the speaker goes so far as to say that the woman has never existed in any world except that which she is currently creating through song. This assertion, like the dismissal of the sea in stanza three, is hyperbolic, but the hyperbole demonstrates the power of the song or art to change its listeners' perceptions of the world, in that it makes the speaker believe this statement. As readers we might know that the "world" created by the singing cannot be infinite or all-encompassing, but what matters is that for the moment, the speaker believes that the world is entirely defined by and contained in the woman's song—and such is the power of art.
Analysis
Stanza four sees the speaker pushing his previous conclusions on the power of the human mind to their limits. First, he does this by imagining the scene without the woman present, and even tries to willingly suspend his own interpretive perspective in the process, in order to consider nature without any interpretive human mind. This thought experiment is predictably difficult for a human mind to achieve. The conspicuous uses of personification such as "dark voice of the sea," "outer voice of sky," and "heaving speech of air" are likely deliberate, to point out that it is nearly impossible for humans to conceptualize nature without using human descriptors.
In fact, one of the poem's main points is exactly that: the creative interpretations of the human mind are what give meaning and order to nature. This relationship between mind and nature is crucial to life as we know it. Art and song inspired by nature are a particularly strong demonstration of this, because they engage directly in a circular process in which the artist gleans some meaning from nature, interprets and communicates it to listeners, and in the process projects the reconfigured sense of meaning back onto nature, making it understandable and familiar to humans. While stanzas two and three looked merely at how the artist can create something that stands apart from nature, stanza four reveals that this artwork's true power is found in how it can be turned back on nature as a means for its audiences to understand nature emotionally and mentally. The divinity implied by the terms assigned to the woman—"maker," "single artificer," her creation of a world—even suggests that the human mind is godly. (Stevens believed this to a large extent, as he saw the modernist era as a post-theological or post-religious era in which human creations reigned supreme). However, the participation of audiences who experience and carry on the artwork's impact is just as crucial as the creator, and a key focus of the poem's final two stanzas.
