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"Sea Surface full of Clouds" is a poem from the second, 1931, edition of Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium . It was first published in 1924, so it is restricted by copyright. However, brief parts of it are quoted here as fair use, and the whole poem is available elsewhere on the Internet. [1]
IIIIn that November off Tehuantepec,
The slopping of the sea grew still one night
And a pale silver patterned on the deck
And made one think of porcelain chocolate
And pied umbrellas. An uncertain green,
Piano-polished, held the tranced machine
Of ocean, as a prelude holds and holds,
Who, seeing silver petals of white blooms
Unfolding in the water, feeling sure
Of the milk within the saltiest spurge, heard, then,
The sea unfolding in the sunken clouds?
Oh! C'était mon extase et mon amour.
So deeply sunken were they that the shrouds,
The shrouding shadows, made the petals black
Until the rolling heaven made them blue,
A blue beyond the rainy hyacinth,
And smiting the crevasses of the leaves
Deluged the ocean with a sapphire blue.V...The sovereign clouds came clustering. The conch
Of loyal conjuration trumped. The wind
Of green blooms turning crisped the motley hue
To clearing opalescence. Then the sea
And heaven rolled as one and from the two
Came fresh transfigurings of freshest blue.
The poem comprises five sections, each of six tercets, describing the same seascape as viewed from the deck of a ship. Each section repeats the description in different terms but uses recurring words (slopping, chocolate, umbrellas, green, blooms, etc.) and often the same syntax. In each section the last line of the fourth tercet is written in French. Rhymes are used in somewhat changing patterns, but the final line of each section always rhymes with the final line of the preceding tercet. Essentially the poem is structured as a set of variations on a theme.
Section III, quoted here, figures in Joan Richardson's reading of "Sea Surface" as having Stevens's sexuality as its "true subject". The prelude describes ("most hermetically") the period preceding sexual climax. The reference to a piano is explained by the fact that his mother and his wife, Elsie, played the piano. "For him, the piano and other keyboard instruments are always attached to something magical connected with the idea of beauty and the allure of the female, as, for example, in "Peter Quince at the Clavier," Richardson writes, " Accordingly, the machine of ocean, his projection, is now `tranced,' carried away by the rapture of the `uncertain green... as a prelude holds and holds." [2]
Richardson continues:
He imaginatively records both his sensations and those of his wife. The female is felt by him as "silver petals of white blooms/ Unfolding in the water," and he, in his maleness, is "feeling sure/ of the milk within the saltiest spurge." He goes on to express the feelings of both of them throughout this section and in part of the next. The climax itself is described as, "The sea unfolding in the sunken clouds/ Oh! [marking the surprise of the moment of climax] C'était mon extase et mon amour." [2]
Richardson explicitly invokes Stevens's distinction between the true subject of a poem and the poetry of the subject, in order to justify a reading that dwells on what she takes to be the true subject. She writes,
In closing, I offer the following observations taken from "The Irrational Element in Poetry:" "One is always writing about two things at the same time in poetry and it is this that produces the tension characteristic of poetry. One is the true subject and the other is the poetry of the subject. The difficulty of sticking to the true subject, when it is the poetry of the subject that is paramount in one's mind, need only be mentioned to be understood."
Buttel does not draw the distinction, but he implicitly focuses on the poetry of the subject, the "Poetry of sky and sea" in the concluding two stanzas, discussing not deep psychology but rather the syntactical and semantic features of Stevens's style.
The verse moves fluently from line to line, and the variations intensify the exultation in the open-air vividness and splendor of the seascape and skyscape....the combination of accents and alliteration in "clouds came clustering," with "came" in this context picking up a stress, heightens the impressiveness and drama produced by the image of the "sovereign" cloud masses "clustering" -- just the right word in meaning and sound -- into transitory form. The metrical regularity of the following sentence, abetted by the repetition of sound in "conch" and "conjuration," contributes to the majestic authority of the note sounded by Triton. The suspended moment of turning is caught in the hovering emphasis on "green blooms turning," even though the long spondee adds an extra accent to the line; and this prepares for the immense satisfactionn of "clearing opalescence" -- the jewel-like iridescence dissolving into an instant of transfiguring clarity. Such effects lead up to the triumphant finality of the concluding line, where the partial stress on "Came" and the accents on the syllables beginning with f heighten the finality. The series of unstressed syllables in the penultimate foot not only increases the force of "freshest" but also helps to convey the ongoing quality of the transfigurations which are not static, even at the moment when poetic insight draws heaven and sea into a unity. [3]
Buttel's foregrounding of Stevens's craftsmanship, especially with reference to syntactic and semantic innovation, is also the approach favored by Helen Vendler and those inspired by her scholarship. About "Sea Surface Full of Clouds", she writes, "in his witty moments, Stevens practices legerdemain with the world's `reality' and produces a fantasia of shifting possibles, the brilliant changes of `Sea Surface Full of Clouds'." [4] Significantly, this reference occurs in the midst of a long discussion of Stevens's use of grammatical particles like "if" and "as if" in order to achieve the effect of "something half-glimpsed, half-seen, and that is, finally, what Stevens achieves over and over: if he has a dogma, it is the dogma of the shadowy, the ephemeral, the barely perceived, the iridescent." [4]
Wallace Stevens was an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems in 1955.
Harmonium is a book of poetry by American poet Wallace Stevens. His first book at the age of forty-four, it was published in 1923 by Knopf in an edition of 1500 copies. This collection comprises 85 poems, ranging in length from just a few lines to several hundred. Harmonium was reissued in 1931 with three poems omitted and fourteen new poems added.
"The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book, Harmonium. Originally published in 1919, it is in the public domain. Despite general agreement that it is indebted to Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, there is uncertainty about the nature of the debt.
"The Ordinary Women" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium.
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"The Doctor of Geneva" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923). The poem was first published in 1921, so it is free of copyright.
"The Comedian as the Letter C" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923). It was one of the few poems first published in that collection and the last written for it. John Gould Fletcher frames the poem as expressing Stevens's view "that the artist can do nothing else but select out of life the elements to form a 'fictive' or fictitious reality."
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"Of the Surface of Things" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923). It was first published in 1919, so it is in the public domain.
"Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923). It was one of the few Harmonium poems first published in that volume, so it is still under copyright. However, it is quoted here as justified by Fair use to facilitate scholarly commentary.
"Sunday Morning" is a poem from Wallace Stevens' first book of poetry, Harmonium. Published in part in the November 1915 issue of Poetry, then in full in 1923 in Harmonium, it is now in the public domain. The first published version can be read at the Poetry web site: The literary critic Yvor Winters considered "Sunday Morning" "the greatest American poem of the twentieth century and... certainly one of the greatest contemplative poems in English".
"Banal Sojourn" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was originally published in 1919, therefore it is in the public domain.
"To the One of Fictive Music" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. First published in 1922, it is in the public domain.
"The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. First published in 1921, it is in the public domain in the United States.
"The Death of a Soldier" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. The poem uses free verse to describe the death of a soldier.
"Tea" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1915 in the journal Rogue.