The World as Meditation

From one of Stevens’s final volumes, 1954’s The Rock, “The World as Meditation” revisits some of Stevens’s most consistent themes: the imagination and its sources, the unification of mind and body, and the relation between ideas and objects. The poem not only comments on the Classical work Stevens re-envisions but also looks back at Stevens’s poetic career, crystallizing his ideas about the imagination and creativity into a luminous allegory.

From its first words, the poem unfolds an allegory of art and the artist. Desire moves the artist to action, but desire itself must emerge from stillness. Stevens introduces this idea as early as the poem’s epigraph from French composer Georges Enesco: The musician confesses having spent too much time traveling and playing, but that “la meditation” provides the source of his creativity. Quoting from the composer’s original French interview, Stevens adopts this wider meaning of meditation for the word in the poem’s title as well. If the poem’s title includes the French word méditation, the title might be translated, “The World as Thought.” Stevens relies on every flexible meaning in language, so this choice of epigraph, coupled with the title, reveals the importance of all kinds of meditation in the poem.

The epigraph’s last line can be translated, “I live a permanent dream, one that stops neither night nor day,” or “I live in a permanent dream, one that stops neither night nor day” (Epigraph, Line 3). The text following the epigraph takes place in a dreamlike tableau. On one level, the poem retells part of the Classical epic The Odyssey. But anachronistic detail and a more Modernist psychological approach to Penelope’s character make clear that the older text serves as a metaphor for the larger topic of inspiration and imagination. In one of Stevens’s best-known works, “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” an artist’s performance holds the power to alter reality, to change “things as they are” (“The Man with the Blue Guitar.” Poetry Magazine, 1937. Line 5). “The World as Meditation” offers a similar premise, though less directly. Apart from the final stanza, Penelope’s actions include only observing, meditating, and desiring. She “dwells” in Line 6, and she “has composed” in Line 7. She “imagined” in Line 8, and in Lines 13 and 14, she “wanted.” Her only tangible activities come in the final stanza, when “she combed her hair / Repeating his name” (Lines 22-23). Yet Penelope’s generative presence combines mind and body to create a “barbarous strength” (Line 21) independent of Ulysses’s presence.

The poem begins by asking a literal question: Is the figure approaching on the horizon the figure of Penelope’s long-missing husband, Ulysses? “Someone is moving” (Line 3), but the traveler is unidentifiable as the awaited “adventurer” (Line 2). In this first stanza, further anonymous activity creates an uncertain world around Penelope, one she will order with her own mind: “The trees are mended” (Like 2), and “That winter is washed away” (Line 3), but the speaker does not tell who or what has effected this change. The “form of fire” (Line 5) who comes closer changes this passive dynamic; its “mere savage presence awakens” (Line 6) Penelope’s world.

In the third stanza, the speaker explains how Penelope has spent her time. She has been creating “a self with which to welcome” (Line 7) the still-hypothetical Ulysses. But Penelope’s created self is real. For Stevens, the imagination must remain attached to reality for art to have relevance beyond the strictly personal sphere. Ulysses may be imaginary in the poem, but Penelope moves and breathes in her world; it is her perception and desire that continues to create while Ulysses remains absent. Her thoughts and her heart—“the two kept beating together” (Line 18)—are a joint force constituting Penelope’s version, her odyssey, a story with as much power and beauty because, like an epic, the strength in it “would never fail” (Line 21).

Like Enesco and like Stevens, Penelope lives an imaginative dream in which a figure in constant approach can be whatever she dreams it to be: “It was Ulysses and it was not” (Line 19). Absent his arrival, she remains the architect of her environment. This position resonates with Penelope’s power in the Classical text, in which Penelope resists a remarriage, one that would quell her independence with the installation of a new authority. She delays choosing a suitor by claiming she must weave a burial shroud for her father-in-law, but she unravels her work by night to prolong her independence. Penelope, then, is an artist in perpetual revision and meditation. She uses both feeling and reason to manage her world; in “The World as Meditation,” Stevens casts her as the modern incarnation of creativity that integrates world and imagination.