Creativity and Inspiration
From its first line, this poem is obsessed with thinking about how artistic inspiration happens. The central example is the woman singing by the sea: her song is inspired by the sea, but her music draws on, masters, and reformulates the noise of the sea, transforming it to a new artistic form. The woman is not merely a mouthpiece for the voice of nature to come through; she is an independent, intellectual creator, "beyond the genius of the sea," as the first line tells us. The poem acknowledges a sort of translation process that happens, in which the raw 'language' of the sea is adapted into the human song: "It may be that in all her phrases stirred / The grinding water and the gasping wind; / But it was she and not the sea we heard. // For she was the maker of the song she sang."
This adaptive process is also visible in the relationship of Stevens to the woman: on that level, she is his inspiration, and now he is the creator. Like the sound of the sea, her song is taken and changed in Steven's poetic art: one clear indication of this is that we never actually find out what words the woman was singing. Thus the cycle of inspiration and transformation continues.
Good Artists need Good Audiences
Just as crucial as the relationship between artist and inspiration is that between artist and audience. The speaker of the poem serves as the singing woman's listener: by showing how compelled and changed he is by her song, and by adding his own interpretative thoughts, he demonstrates the vital role of the audience in receiving and expanding the meaning of a work of art. As critic Brooke Baeten writes, "without the narrator, the woman is a poet whose poetry is never read." In turn, Stevens equally depends on his readers; without us, his act of writing down his meaningful experience on the beach in Key West would have been in vain. As a writer himself, the speaker of the poem is furthermore able to put into words the extraordinary effect that the song has on him: the vision of order that he sees in the harbor in the last two stanzas.
The Power of the Artist
Closely related to these two previous themes is the poem's emphasis on the singer / poet / artist as a creator with the power to redefine or remake the world around themselves. The descriptions of the woman take this idea to the extreme, saying that, in the moment of her singing, she exists in a world purely of her own creation: "there never was a world for her / Except the one she sang and, singing, made." This idea of the artist's supreme power to remake the world operates at the level of human perception: if the world around us is determined simply by how we perceive it (a belief that shapes many Stevens poems), then a work of art that shifts or reshapes our perceptions also reshapes the world itself. Critic Albert Gelpi describes this process in the poem as the "apotheosis of the powers of human creativity," as the woman ascends to a divine role of mediator between the onlooker's perception and the natural world.
Humanity vs. Nature
The binary pairing of artist–inspiration in the poem also exemplifies and reflects upon a pairing at a larger scale: the humanity–nature duality. At different moments in the poem, the woman and the sea appear as two separate 'voices.' The former uses human speech while the latter is "meaningless" linguistically but is still "understood" on some level by the speaker. Nature is understood to have its own "genius," but appears to humans as a "body wholly body," an inscrutable physical entity that cannot communicate or be comprehended on our terms. The woman singer is not able to close the gap between human and nature, only to pull enough meaning across that gap to create a sort of bridge via her art; but it is tenuous one. Critics debate to what extent the poem asserts humanity's absolute creative superiority over nature: Jacqueline Brogan believes it does, that Stevens "places himself in a textual and hierarchical order above nature" and even above the woman, as it is the poet who gets the last word. Gyorgi Voros disagrees, believing that the poem argues for the necessary balance and interdependence between nature and human imagination. This debate hinges on whether we take the human creative dominance implied throughout the poem at face value: is Stevens / the speaker casting down nature as an inferior muse, or reveling in its power to inspire art?
Order vs. Chaos
The opposition of order and chaos underlies the tension between human artist and natural world. This is the "maker's rage to order words of the sea": the human urge to organize and assign meaning to nature. The woman's song appears to have ultimate power to inspire order: after the singing ends, the narrator turns and exclaims that the fishing lights "Mastered the night and portioned out the sea, / Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles, / Arranging, deepening, enchanting night." However, the poem also indicates that any 'idea of order' is limited: the ocean is an incomprehensible behemoth for much of the first half of the poem, and this newfound order is simply a change in perspective on the speaker's part, like a screen to see the world through. The world could appear just as chaotic as it did before, if the speaker's memory of the song fades or he is distracted. As James Longenbach writes, "the poem asks us to understand a world in which ideas of order are necessarily provisional and continuously changing." Furthermore, Victoria Shinbrot writes that for Stevens, the role of the artist requires a degree of "incomprehensibility" in the world, because it "compels him to generate a comprehensible, yet always provisional, world out of himself." Stevens thrives in these temporary, half-ordered worlds of the mind, and creates them using the words of his poems, which are the "ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds" mentioned in the last line: powerful, but also intangible and illusory.
Masculine vs. Feminine
A final aspect of the speaker / singer / nature creative chain is that of gender. Several critics have written about the role of the woman singer as that of the muse, a classically female persona, in contrast with Stevens, a highly masculine poet. Brooke Baeten sees the woman's absence from the poem's final two stanzas as a sign that Stevens has overcome and rejected the female muse, that he no longer needs her and is asserting his masculine dominant voice. Whether or not we believe this fully, some of the language in the poem is coded so as to align the human–nature binary with the masculine–feminine binary: the phallic "fiery poles" of the harbor lights dominate and deepen the natural night, and nature is associated in the next few lines with "fragrant portals," a floral and yonic image. After the woman masters and redefines nature in her own way, perhaps the poem's turn away from her and towards this kind of imagery indicates that the speaker feels a level of insecurity, or a need to reframe what he has witnessed in the somewhat more masculine terms that come naturally to him.
Nature as Frightening
A subtle undercurrent in the language of the poem, but one that emphasizes the speaker's urge to make nature orderly and familiar, is the idea of nature (and the sea) as inherently tragic or threatening because we cannot fully understand it. This fear of the unknown manifests in the sea's "constant cry" in the first stanza, and also the ghostly image of its "empty sleeves," making the sea appear like a tormented spirit whose language we cannot understand. This theme underlies Stevens' word choices in more key moments: the "gasping wind" and the "ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea." Among other things, the woman's song emphasizes the stark, forlorn aspects of the sea: the keen focus on the horizon in stanza four, as the woman's song makes "the sky acutest at its vanishing," has the effect that, in Janet McCann's words, "the tragic sense of life's evanescence is heightened." If nature is a specter of uncertainty and fear in the poem, even subconsciously, this helps explain why the speaker's turn back towards the human settlements of the town and the docks in the fifth stanza seems so marvelous and comforting to him: the woman's song has perhaps renewed his faith in humanity's ability to make sense out of the world.
