ke “My love for you is…” could equate her love with something concrete, just as the qualities of her lover could equate to a true proclamation of love. Except the irrational nature of the situation cannot allow the speaker to come to resolve. The Shakespearean sonnet form Millay uses furthers the speaker’s confining situation. The presence of a “physical yet intuitive” moment is the driving force of indecision in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Loving you less than life, a little less”. In Wallace Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at Key West”, the “physical yet intuitive” moment is realized by the speaker when a woman’s song is juxtaposed with the sounds of the sea. Stevens’ begins the first stanza with a contrast between man and nature: “She sang beyond the genius of the sea” (1). In the very first line, Stevens delves into a “brilliant Irrational” statement. The contrast between nature and man is extended because “the water never formed a mind or voice, like a body…[and] made constant cry…that was not ours although we understood” (2-6). The second stanza shows the unharmonious relationship between man and nature; “The [woman’s] song and water were not medleyed sound” (8). The reason behind this discord is the presence of language “since what she sang was uttered word for word” (10). Again, poetry is used to describe an experience “outside the provinces of logic and reason.” There is no definitive way to evaluate how out of tune one sings with the sea, but Stevens contends “it was she and not the sea we heard” (14). Once the physical comparison between the woman’s voice and aquatic noise is established in the first two stanza, the poem takes a predominately intuitive tone. The central question posed in the third stanza is “whose...
