CHARLOTTE WARD


 "It was my child, my jewel, my soul" must have referred to his only child
Holly, conceived during the voyage, after some fourteen years of marriage.
As the light changes, the colors of the scene and the mood change: I. "swim-
ming green," "glistening blue," II. "jelly yellow," "sham-like green," III. "pale
silver," "uncertain green," "sapphire blue," IV. "mallow morning," "too-fluent
green." V. "motley green," "freshest blue." Instead of the hard, Imagist varia-
tions of "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," we have Impressionism,
claimed by Hernan Galilea to be his dominant mode.49 The poet John Crowe
Ransom, who sometimes found Stevens too esoteric, made this poem the
centerpiece of his book The World's Body (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP,
1964). Stevens could not collect art on the scale of his friend Arensberg, but
he did continually buy minor French artists. Cavalles, C6te d'Azur, was ac-
quired by him in 1954 and renamed Sea Surface Full of Clouds, to recall the
poem and a turning point in his life (Letters 814).
 The key poem in the volume Ideas of Order (1936) is "The Idea of Order at
Key West," which is a dialogue between the Modernists with the Romantics.
Bloom considered it a Wordsworthian crisis poem (93), but John Hollander,
A. Walton Litz, and Kenneth Walker see it as a rejection of Wordsworth's
spirit in Nature.50 In a similar vein, Daniel T. O'Hara thought it a rejection of
Emerson's "Over-Soul."51 Brian Barbour said it reversed the order of
Coleridges's "Primary Imagination" (human perception) and "Secondary
Imagination" (human creative power), as described at the end of Biographia
Literaria I.52 Typical of Stevens is the musing dialogue, also reflected in the
tension of iambic pentameter in the first two lines, followed by looser lines
structured by the traditional alliteration of the Anglo-Saxon "Seafarer."

 She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
 The water never formed to mind or voice,
 Like a b6dy wholly b6dy, fluttering
 Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic m6tion
 Made constant cry, cAused constantly a cry,
 That was not ours although we understood,
 Inhuman, of the veritable ocean. (11.1-7)



49 El mundo impresionista de Wallace Stevens (Santiago de Chile: Editorial
Universitaria, 1965).
50 Hollander, "The Sound of the Music of Music and Sound," Wallace Stevens: Modem
Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (NY: Chelsea House, 1985) 134; Litz, Introspective
Voyager (NY: Oxford UP, 1972) 193; Walker, "Stevens' The Idea of Order at Key West',"
Explicator 32.8 (1974): 59.
s5 Emerson: Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982).
52 "Coleridgean Ideas and Stevensian Order at Key West," English Language Notes
26.1 (September 1988): 48-53.