Stanzas 1-3: "She sang beyond the genius of the sea" through "That we should ask this often as we sang."
Summary
The first word of the poem introduces a "she," a nameless woman who becomes the poem's focal point for the first four stanzas. She is singing, and in so doing she sings "beyond the genius of the sea," meaning perhaps that she sings with exceptional wisdom, and although her song is connected to the sea in some way, it surpasses the sea's brilliance. The rest of stanza one puts the woman aside for a moment to contemplate the sea, wondering, what kind of entity is the sea, really? As line two says, the water has no "mind or voice," at least, not in the sense that humans do: it is a "body wholly body," a clever way of saying that it is merely a physical form, lacking any abstract spirit or consciousness. However, ("and yet"), the sea and the motion of its waves still emit a "cry:" it has a sort of call of its own that, while not human, communicates something to us that the speaker says he "understood" in some way. Stanza one may leave us more confused by the end of it, because the speaker is thinking through this paradox just as we, the readers, are: how can the sea, inhuman and voiceless as it is, still have something to say to us?
Stanza two begins rigorously investigating the relationship between the singing woman and the body of water, beginning by firmly separating them as two distinct entities, saying neither one is merely a "mask" for the other. Their sounds (or songs) are also separate, "not medleyed sound," and this is important to specify because, given the poetic setting of a woman singing by the ocean, a reader may already be making assumptions about the woman's song flowing from the sea, or the spirit of nature 'speaking through her.' Indeed, this is the assumption Stevens touches on in the third line of stanza two: "Even if what she sang was what she heard," they are still separate. That is to say, even if we do assume that the woman's music is directly 'inspired' (whatever that means) by the ocean, she is still fundamentally creating her own song. Her singing is different from the crashing waves because it is communicated "word by word," in a form of language that humans have created and can understand. The speaker continues to question how much of the sea's sound goes into the woman's song: even if the rough natural sounds of "grinding water" and "gasping wind" are perfectly conveyed in the singing, the speaker is still technically listening to a human voice, and words created by a human mind. Somehow a transformation occurs, in that the singer takes some pieces of essential meaning from nature and repackages it in a creative human expression. This is the somewhat miraculous process of artistic creation which the poem is interested in exploring: where does the sound of nature end and creative human speech begin?
In the third stanza, the speaker reaffirms the woman's creative authority, assigning her the title of "maker." He pushes further on the question of how the woman creates her song, and what the sea is in relation to her. At first, his solution to this paradox seems to be to discard the importance of the sea entirely: we might read poetic symbols into it ("ever-hooded, tragic-gestured") but ultimately, it is "merely a place by which she walked to sing." There just happens to be water nearby, the speaker says, but it's the woman's song that matters. To this end, he instructs himself and the readers to seek out the "spirit" that must be behind the woman's singing, as an answer to where her inspiration comes from. However, this is likely a red herring: the poem has already rejected the notion of the sea being the quasi-divine "spirit" forming her song, and to pinpoint one abstract "spirit," external to the woman herself, as the source of her song would be too easy and cliched of an answer for a poem so invested in the human creative process. Even if we spend as long as Stevens does trying to figure out where human art comes from, the eventual answer might simply be the woman's own powerful mind: nothing more and nothing less.
Analysis
In these three stanzas the speaker faces a set of questions and paradoxes. What is artistic inspiration (considering the singing woman as an artist) and how does it happen? How does nature, symbolized here by the sea, communicate with humans on some deeply-felt level while being nearly incomprehensible by the terms of language and knowledge than humans use? Why does the human mind rely on nature for inspiration, but then gain the power to create something (like a song) that exists completely independent of nature?
The poem progresses very slowly at first, because there are no easy answers to these questions. They are tricky semantic and epistemological issues that require careful thought and clear definitions, hence why the speaker goes to such great lengths to distinguish the woman and the sea from one another. Theirs is a highly symbolic encounter: the nameless woman and her nameless song are stand-ins for any artist and creative work; the sea represents any element of nature that inspires or informs such an artwork. The sea also thus represents the unknown: any force that cannot fully be rationalized or explained in human terms. The woman's creation of a song, then, represents one way that humans attempt to create meaning out of nature's often unsettling confusion and opacity.
The main takeaway message of these stanzas is that the woman's creative mind is powerful. She and the sea are two figures each with some inherent knowledge or meaning in them, but the sea is only able to communicate that meaning with listeners via crude sounds and inscrutable feelings. Thus, by singing a song that is still a reflection of the sea, but which makes itself clear in human words, the woman goes "beyond the genius of the sea." In celebrating this creative power, the speaker perhaps exaggerates when he says the sea was nothing but "a place by which she walked to sing," but this surprising statement shocks the readers into considering the woman just for a moment as an individual, taking the sea out of the picture, a removal that typical poetic sensibilities would make impossible.
When the speaker asks "Whose spirit is this?" he is perhaps alluding to how he has been taught to read poetry: to focus all your attention on finding one underlying inspiration or source, as if that will be the ultimate answer to the poem's questions. If this question here is ironic (which we can reasonably assume) rather than earnest, it is to point out that this single-minded approach only leads the reader to overlook the complex creativity at work in the artist's mind. Stevens' word choice and double repetition of "knew" as a line ending supports this irony, as the "knew" / "knew" evoke rote memorization, a process of reading that relies too much on certainty and tells the reader what he "should ask" without explaining why. The line break after the second "knew" creates the hidden phrase "the spirit that we sought and knew," also indicating that, in this line of thinking, the reader would presume to already know what kind of "spirit" or inspiration he was trying to uncover, before finding it. Stevens' poem pushes back against that entire approach to reading (or listening), and emphasizes the dynamic mind of the artist, rather than the source of inspiration, as the dominant player in the creation of brilliant art.
The poetic form that Stevens uses is significant in two ways: he keeps a strict iambic pentameter, unlike the free verse so common in his other masterpieces, and uses no standard rhyme except for carefully placed rhymes that sometimes come in a rapid flurry. The metrical form of iambic pentameter was dominant during the Renaissance, as in Shakespeare and Milton, and used heavily up to Stevens' time; however, by the early 20th century, it and other fixed meters were often considered antiquated. They are the forms of antique Romantic verses and eloquent soliloquies: i.e., the genres of poetry that would conflate the "spirit" of the woman's singing with the spirit of the sea without hesitation. Stevens likely chose this form for "The Idea of Order at Key West" in order to engage with that poetic tradition from the inside, so to speak. Iambic pentameter lends his poem formality and organization so it can act as a treatise on poetic creation itself.
Meanwhile, his rhymes and syntax routinely decelerate the poem, keeping it at a painstakingly slow pace, because Stevens is essentially telling readers and poets to slow down, to ask why we assume that artists and nature have some inherent link, and what actually happens when a person creates art. The simplest internal rhyme is the pairing of "she" and "sea," emphasizing this minimal pair that is so crucial to the poem's study. When end rhymes come in these first stanzas, it is often in repetitive clumps, such as "heard / uttered word by word / stirred / heard" in stanza two, and "sang / sing / knew / knew / sang" in stanza three. Both of these sequences subvert normal iambic pentameter rhyme schemes: instead of introducing new ideas and new rhymes with each line, they force the reader to return to the same words and ideas again and again. Sonically, the poem mimics what it is doing intellectually: examining one relationship (between woman and sea) and then refocusing and looking again, and again.
