Stanzas 5-6: "Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know," through "In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds."
Summary
Stanza five begins with a dramatic shift: the speaker leaves behind the singing woman and addresses his heretofore unnamed companion, Ramon Fernandez. The stanza is an outward shift of perspective: having witnessed the woman on the beach, the speaker turns to his friend in order to reflect on it. He asks Ramon to help explain to him why, after they turned back towards the town, the nighttime harbor suddenly seemed miraculously beautiful and orderly. In his vision, which spans the rest of stanza five, the speaker sees the fishing boat lights carving orderly lines out of the darkness and making the night seem alluring, organized, and harmonious. Specifically, it is the sea that is tamed by the lights.
In the final stanza, the speaker muses rapturously on humans' "blessed rage for order," giving abstract but powerful images of how humans create systems of meaning out of nothingness: "Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred," "ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds." The poem therefore ends in a broader reflection on how 'makers'—potentially referring to artists, writers, or anyone who exercises creativity—shape the world around them, and indeed feel a compelling innate urge to do so.
Analysis
Although the speaker has already described abstractly how powerful the woman is as an artistic "maker," these two stanzas finally show her power in practice in the lives of the speaker and his friend. Perception is the key here: the harbor has presumably not changed physically, but it now appears in a completely new way to the speaker, because the woman's song and his own thoughts have renewed his faith in the creative powers of people. The sea's role in the poem is still significant, as it is the sea that is "portioned out" by the fishing lights. The meaning that has traveled from the sea through the woman's song is now projected back onto the sea, as its vast unknown waters are turned into something familiar and accessible to humans. The anxiety surrounding the sea is temporarily neutralized, at least for the span of the song's effect on the speaker. Crucially, this effect is only seen through the eyes of the woman's audience; thus, the poem asserts that artistic creations are meaningful based on how they alter their audience's lives. In other words, songs or artworks that go unheard or unseen are wasted.
Moreover, in this poem specifically, this audience effect has special resonance for the speaker because he himself is a poet (or at least, Stevens is). When he waxes rhapsodic in the final stanza about "the maker's rage to order words of the sea," he is partly describing his own need to write poems that help him make sense of life. Words "of ourselves and of our origins" are the types of writings that humans have been creating for millennia, collective histories that form each civilization's identity as they accumulate. This poem then becomes part of a creative chain started by the woman's song. The implication is an empowering one for artists: the profound effect of the original song does not need to end with its immediate audiences, as long as there are other makers listening: i.e., artists can keep inspiring one another and continue shaping the world around them in ways that make it more manageable for humans.
The speaker's experience is transcendent, and hard for him to describe in full: this is likely why Ramon Fernandez, though he is asked for an opinion, never speaks. The speaker's command, "tell me, if you know," becomes rhetorical, and the absence of a reply seems to suggest that some art is better without further explanation. Many scholars have seen Ramon Fernandez as symbolizing a literary critic, one whose mediating opinion is asked for, but in this case would be unnecessary or would fail to truly capture the experience. The odd use of the phrase "pale Ramon" may suggest that Fernandez is weakened or stunned by the song, so as to be unable to comment yet, so powerful is the woman's creation.
The final line gestures towards the temporary nature of art: if a writer's words are "ghostlier demarcations," they are faint markings overlaid on nature, but within their fleeting lifetime they have the power to change people's perceptions of the world. This ending turns towards a type of humility that was lacking in the rest of the poem as it deified the artist. As the poem ends, the speaker is deep in his own thoughts, and the experience as a whole seems to have given him a firmer and clearer sense of who he is as an artist, and his role in making meaning out of the vast world.
