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)

Stevens’s contemporary Robert Frost’s “Never Again Would Birds’ Sing Be the Same” depicts the same artistic transaction as “The World as Meditation,” in which the artist’s imagination shapes and changes her environment. In Frost’s poem, the change takes a more literal form: The cadence of Eve’s voice weaves its way into birds’ songs as they imitate her. But both poets use extended metaphor and allegory to suggest the way in which artistic imagination sharpens and modifies reality. While Frost’s sonnet follows a more formal structure, both poems make use of interlinear cross alliterative patterns. The auditory echoes in each poem reinforce the theme that the artist’s surroundings mirror and correspond to creative impulse.

“Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver (2004)

In Oliver’s poem, the geese forever journey toward home, and the world exists as the source for the poet’s imagination. In the world’s continuity, the artist finds respite from despair, as Penelope’s desire and imagination not only console but redeem her loss. In both poems, the persistence of love in the face of absence moves and changes the artist and the artist’s environment. While Stevens depicts the human presence and imagination personified in Penelope, Oliver’s speaker addresses the reader directly, as if to call upon both reader and speaker to be the catalysts and creators within their respective environments: “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine” (“Wild Geese,” Line 6). in the next line, “the world goes on,” as does the poem—the speaker delivers the landscape, the wild geese, and the idea that “the world offers itself to your imagination” (Line 15), like the encouraging planet in “The World as Meditation.” The speaker of “Wild Geese” inhabits the dreamlike space described by Enesco in the Stevens poem’s epigraph, the essential exercise, the meditation necessary for creation.