A charm enchants, an enchantment charms. The spell and ritual is literally a spelling, spell casting. Language power. Incantation has the same roots. What we hope for when we think of singing, and how an encounter with a chanter, an enchanter, or a gendered enchantress changes the world by charming us.
An impassable segment of the Pacific side of Isla Magdalena
The Idea of Order at Key West
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
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.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
***
Enchanting night. The idea of order. Good luck with that, buddy.
Although simultaneously charming and ponderous (as only Stevens can be), the thing is-- his poem is not a very good song. Read it out loud and wonder at the basic ugliness of a lot of his diction. It never takes off. It repeatedly thuds to the ground. It is a fumble-fingered, clueless culturally male utterance, trapped in a rage for order, perversely imagining that the maker-poet makes a song that is what's left of the maker-singer's song. It's a perfect reflection of the 20th century, for that reason, and perfectly, it guts the moment that could have been an epiphany for "the maker" (the poet, the singer of the poem, not the singer in the poem) and turns it into almost-only cleverness and a sort of tortured, tortuous verbal grandstanding. A reflection of an age where we have impeccable technique and no imagination. This is truly "the idea of order," imposed on a charm in an attempt to demarcate its power.
Stevens was not willing to risk enchantment.
