"Sea Surface full of Clouds" is a poem from the second, 1931,edition of Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry,Harmonium. It was firstpublished in 1924, so it is restricted by copyright. However, briefparts of it are quoted here as fair use, and the whole poem is available elsewhereon the Internet.[1]
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 "SeaSurface" as having Stevens's sexuality as its "true subject". Theprelude describes ("most hermetically") the period preceding sexualclimax. The reference to a piano is explained by the fact that hismother and his wife, Elsie, played the piano. "For him, the piano andother keyboard instruments are always attached to something magicalconnected 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 preludeholds and holds."[2]
Richardson continues:
He imaginatively records both his sensations and those of hiswife. The female is felt by him as "silver petals of white blooms/Unfolding in the water," and he, in his maleness, is "feeling sure/ ofthe milk within the saltiest spurge." He goes on to express thefeelings of both of them throughout this section and in part of thenext. The climax itself is described as, "The sea unfolding in thesunken 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 truesubject of a poem and the poetry of the subject, in order to justify areading that dwells on what she takes to be the true subject. She writes,
In closing, I offer the following observations taken from "TheIrrational Element in Poetry:" "One is always writing about two thingsat the same time in poetry and it is this that produces the tensioncharacteristic of poetry. One is the true subject and the other is thepoetry 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 thepoetry of the subject, the "Poetry of sky and sea" in the concludingtwo stanzas, discussing not deep psychology but rather the syntacticaland semantic features of Stevens's style.
The verse moves fluently from line to line, and the variationsintensify the exultation in the open-air vividness and splendor ofthe seascape and skyscape....the combination of accents andalliteration in "clouds came clustering," with "came" in this contextpicking up a stress, heightens the impressiveness and drama producedby the image of the "sovereign" cloud masses "clustering" -- just theright word in meaning and sound -- into transitory form. The metricalregularity of the following sentence, abetted by the repetition ofsound in "conch" and "conjuration," contributes to the majesticauthority of the note sounded by Triton. The suspended moment ofturning is caught in the hovering emphasis on "green blooms turning,"even though the long spondee adds an extra accent to the line; andthis prepares for the immense satisfactionn of "clearingopalescence" -- the jewel-like iridescence dissolving into aninstant of transfiguring clarity. Such effects lead up to thetriumphant finality of the concluding line, where the partial stresson "Came" and the accents on the syllables beginning with fheighten the finality. The series of unstressed syllables in thepenultimate foot not only increases the force of "freshest" but alsohelps to convey the ongoing quality of the transfigurations which arenot static, even at the moment when poetic insight draws heaven andsea into a unity.[3]
Buttel's foregrounding of Stevens's craftsmanship, especially withreference to syntactic and semantic innovation, is also the approachfavored 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]