Sherry Chandler

If, as I mentioned in my last post, West Point graduates are reading Wallace Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West” on the battle ground, I hope they understand it better than I do. And even in using the word understand, I am showing myself ignorant before this poem. It is not a poem you understand so much as one you inhabit. Or let inhabit you.

Reading David Orr’s essay on “Beach Reading” in the July/August issue of Poetry last week made me think that a big part of the problem lies in the fact that I am such a landlocked being.I’ve spent very little time on the beach or on the coast. My knowledge of water is in rivers and streams, lakes and ponds. Not the same thing at all.

The gist of Orr’s thought is that the beach is a place where two worlds meet and borders blur:

whatever else the shoreline may be, it’s a boundary between one thing and another… And boundaries, as all poets know, are meant to be tested, probed, and when necessary crossed.

As the prime example, Orr cites Book IV of the Odyssey in which Menelaus tells of his capture of the shapeshifter, the Old Man of the Sea, Proteus. Once he has caught hold of Proteus, he must hold him while he goes through his changes:

And, of course, it all takes place in an area that’s sometimes bare land, other times covered by water. That last fact matters too—just try imagining this scene in, say, the middle of a broccoli patch.

[Not in a broccoli patch perhaps but in the mountains of Scotland a young woman named Janet rescues Tam Lin from the fairies by holding onto him while he goes through protean changes. But then Fairyland is another border-blurring concept.]

There are many other examples of poets confronting the ocean, including the mermaids which show up at the end of “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” and which I have always considered among the most longing lines in modern poetry:

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Orr sites other examples from Stevie Smith, Matthew Arnold, Robert Lowell, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Paul Muldoon. But it is in his longish discussion of Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses” that he illuminates for me one of the most puzzling parts of “The Idea of Order at Key West,” the sudden appearance at the end of Ramon Fernandez.

The answer is so simple I think I only missed it because I had never looked at the poem in the right context, as a beach poem. Ramon is like Eliot’s mermaids, Paul Muldoon’s merman, and Elizabeth Bishop’s seal:

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me. He was interested in music;
like me a believer in total immersion,
so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.
I also sang “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”
He stood up in the water and regarded me
steadily, moving his head a little.
Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge
almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug
as if it were against his better judgment.

Says Orr:

What’s a joke about a seal doing in this deadly serious meditation? For the most part, critics have tended to put the seal off as “comic relief”… But it’s not—or at least, not entirely. In order to see why, it helps to remember that “At the Fishhouses” is, among other things, one of the great beach poems. And just as the beach is neither land nor water —neither self nor other—beach poems often involve a figure that represents or comments on the possibilities that are going to be set in relation with necessarily being committed to any of them.

And so we have come full circle, like the turning of the tides, back to Proteus, who was captured when Menelaus and his men hid under seal skins on the beach.

But in travelling the circle with David Orr, I have spent some time with some great poems and have had a moment of enlightenment about “The Idea of Order at Key West.” I have come a little closer to inhabiting the music of that poem:

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 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.