Postcard from the Order at Key West

When we were all given Wallace Stevens' poem "The Idea of Order at Key West", i was given another poem of his that Dr. Sexon handed out as an extra little gift, the poem was titled "A Postcard from the Volcano". And i sort of stored it away in my notebook until we began to get deeper into Wallace's poem. When i pulled it out and read it, it was obvious that the same artist composed both pieces of work. While both pieces of work have multitudes of aspects that could be examined and analysed , there was one aspect that seemed to stick out to me more than the rest, the aspect was the parallel between hearing and seeing. In the Idea of Order, there is an obvious emphasis on hearing the singer's song, where as similarly in the the Postcard there seems to be an emhasis on seeing things.

A Postcard from the Volcano

And least will guess that with our bones

We left much more, left what still is

The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow

Above the shuttered mansion house,

Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.

We knew for long the mansion's look

And what we said of it became

The Idea of Order at Key West

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

I would like to believe that Wallece Stevens knew something that we still try to grasp in regards to poerty and literary critisism. he seemed to know there is so much more than reading the piece of literature. One must hear it and see it with poery seeing eyes and poetry hearing ears. and in that i would like to think poetry takes on another form, maybe even a form removed from critisism. maybe...