In accordance with the theme of this poem, I find it difficult to classify my disorganized thoughts into a few coherent paragraphs. So here are some thoughts…
On a simple level, Stevens seems to pose the question “why does humanity feel compelled to create art?” and answers with “to create meaning out of chaos”.
While the meaning inspired by reality is more powerful or influential in the minds of the human witnesses (“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”), the water “never formed to mind or voice” and so the song remains unable to affect reality. Even though the song is inspired by the sounds heard, the power believed to be held in song is not acting upon reality but the perception of reality in the human mind.
Why look for the human in nature? Is what is “human” really representative of meaning in a disorganized world? The sea is both personified as a body without body “fluttering Its empty sleeves” and as a self devoid of real self but reaching “whatever self it had” through representation in song (“became the self That was her song”). To personify is to make human—to be kin to the maker—in order to reach understanding. However, I would argue that the poem seems to present the chaos seemingly inherent in nature as nothing more than a projection of the human mind. In the last two stanzas, the human witnesses turn away after the end of the singing to find that the man-made lights have “mastered the night and portioned out the sea Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles, Arranging, deepening, enchanting night”. The light intended to illuminate night and its unknowable “chaos” seems to interact with it in a way that serves only to romanticize it—to create art. The personification and artistic rendering of the sea emphasizes the reader’s knowledge that the reality he experiences is eternally colored by his own nature—his own inherent chaos and his own song? Maybe…but a sort of a stretch.
When does sound become song? What is the difference between the two? The last line of the poem seems to suggest that the relation between “ghostly demarcations” (which google tells me is the action of fixing the boundary of limits or dividing line) and “keener sounds” will lead to more order? That in drawing the line between what is order/possible to order we can distinguish what is “keener” and more beautiful in sound without simply projecting our own interpretation of sound (song) onto reality. At this dividing line—where our interpretation of reality stops and reality begins—the projected order ceases to obscure and a greater understanding is attainable? ...sure.
