The World as Meditation

“The Idea of Order at Key West” by Wallace Stevens (1923)

The singer in Stevens’s much-earlier “The Idea of Order at Key West” shares much with Penelope in “The World as Meditation.” Both figures shape their natural surroundings with their own compositions. In “The Idea of Order at Key West,” the song constitutes the poem’s subject, with the world in the poem existing only in the song itself: “She was the single artificer of the world / In which she sang” (“The Idea of Order at Key West,” Lines 37-38). Her voice “made / The sky acutest at its vanishing” (Lines 34-35), and the sea, “whatever self it had, became the self / That was her song” (Lines 39-40). Like Penelope, who “composed” her own identity (“The World as Meditation,” Line 7), the singer’s reality now depends on the continuity of her imagination and desire. In “The Idea of Order at Key West,” Stevens stops the song and examines what is left in that space, the “maker’s rage to order words” (Line 53). Desire remains, no matter who the singer may be.

“Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same” by Robert Frost (1942)