The Idea of Order at Key West - Essay Example

Wallace wrote the poem in free verse and it contains 56 lines with 8 stanzas. Throughout the poem, the narrator uses perception to understand the context of his own life. He tries to imagine the balance of things from the girl’s singing. This paper tasks itself at explaining the poem and understanding the main point that the poet tries to make to his or her reader. Body From the first stanza, the narrator immediately sets out at trying to understand the balance around his life through imagination or meditation.

The narrator does not see the face of the girl, but he imagines that she is beautiful just as her singing (Stevens, 2013). To him, the ocean copies the girl’s singing by making its own cry, which is constant. In the second stanza, the narrator again thinks that the girl is listening to something and thus singing it. This pinpoints the confusion within the thoughts of the narrator. The narrator tries to imagine who between the girl and the ocean is in control of the other. Who is making the sounds and the other the reverberations?

The narrator proceeds further to meditate on the balance between the girl’s voice, the sea, and the sky. To the narrator, it appears as the girl makes the song, but beyond that, there must be something much significant than her voice, the sea, and the sky. . But, the girl appears to have no other world other than that which she creates through her imagination. She appears detached and in her own world positioning herself as a solitary figure. The narrator intimates that they knew the girl was in her own world which she sang in, and that her song created.

The girl appears to be at the middle. She is on an island, which the narrator describes as thin silver between the sea and sky. The girl is also at Key West, the farthest part of south US, the land tipping the ocean. This implicates that the girl creates her own environment which the narrator imagines. The narrator and the girl are both imagining and perceiving their worlds’. In the seventh stanza, the narrator meditates on why the appearance of the town looks different to what it was like while the woman was singing.

This occurs when the narrator experiences an epiphany and asks his companion who is Ramon Fernandez (Stevens, 2013). The narrator asks Ramon why the lights in the town get gloomier after the girl stops singing. At this point, the reader gets to understand that probably the narrator was imagining the girl’s beautiful singing made the town to come to life and appear brighter (Stevens, 2013). The reader also gets to understand that the narrator has encountered a stark realization of his thoughts.

The narrator, by questioning Ramon, he is meditating. He tries to understand the balance between the woman’s singing and that of the world becoming brighter. The poet also uses the stanza to brighten up the readers minds. It is through this stanza that most readers may get to decipher the poem through the narrator’s question to Ramon. By employing literary devices throughout the