spirit is this?” (18). The abstract inquiry of what is the cause of the experience is directly related to the “physical yet intuitive” moment that is described. The fact that “we should ask this often as she sang” (20) reaffirms the correlation between the physical act of singing and the cerebral act of questioning. The fourth stanza searches for an answer to the question posed in the third, but comes to no resolution. The narrator would have a sufficient answer “if it was only the dark voice of the sea that rose, or… only the outer voice of sky” (21-23) because the experience then “would have been deep air…and sound alone” (25,28). Unfortunately, the experience “was more than that, more even than [the woman’s] voice” (28-29). The narrator in “The Idea of Order at Key West” reaches a similar language barrier found in Millay’s “Loving you less than life, a little less”. He is unable to sufficiently describe the experience of nature with words just as the speaker in Millay’s poem cannot describe the amount of love that she experiences.The next stanza shifts the focus from the enigmatic presence of the sea to the definitive presence of the woman’s song. Though her voice and words, the singer affects her entire environment; making “the sky acutest at its vanishing… [and measures] to the hour its solitude” (35-36). The woman is described the “single artificer of the world” (37) and “the maker” (40) because she applies her “idea of order” to her surroundings that is alluded to in the title. Of course, this is not actual order because the narrator states in the prior stanza the woman’s surroundings are “more than her voice” (29). Her song is only the woman’s interpretation of order, just as Stevens’ poem is his interpretatio...
