Stevens’s Poetics of Atmosphere in “Sea Surface Full of Clouds”

Bo Ya the qin [zither] player strummed, his thoughts on climbing tall mountains. Ziqi the woodcutter, happening nearby, said, “How splendidly you play! Soaring like the mountains!” Another day, Bo Ya’s thoughts turned to flowing waters, and Ziqi said, “Your qin! It roils and washes like a river!” The two became fast friends, and years later when Ziqi died, Bo Ya smashed his qin and cut its strings. Till the end of his days he never played again because nobody in the world could hear his tone.¹

A PLACE, whether a mountain slope or a river side, evokes an im- pression characteristic of that place. A melody evokes an impres- sion characteristic of that melody. It is possible for these impressions to resemble one another. A hard-to-describe aesthetic quality unifies places and works of art alike, and watches over their correspondences. We sometimes call this quality “atmosphere,” a metaphor old enough to have achieved the consistency of a term. We are used to speaking of the serious atmosphere of a meeting room or the tense atmosphere of a family reunion. Even restaurant menus or hotel brochures showcase their venues’ cozy, relaxed, or professional atmospheres. When we speak of atmosphere in this way, we indicate the aesthetic impression of an environment as a whole.² Unlike other aesthetic effects, atmosphere is not confined to a part or a subset of parts: everything in an environment tinges the atmosphere, no matter how minute. To paint the walls a different color, to change the music playing, to rearrange the furniture, necessarily alters the atmosphere of a given room.

The work of the German philosopher Gernot Böhme has recently initiated a surge in the critical analysis of atmosphere. What distinguishes Böhme’s work from earlier investigations is that he theorizes not only the nature but also the production of atmospheres. It is now possible to consider not only what atmospheres are, but also how artists consciously orchestrate them. The past twenty years have seen studies of atmosphere in fields as diverse as architecture, cognitive science, and anthropology.³ Although literary studies is somewhat late to the game, critics have already begun to develop the promise of atmosphere as an enabling term for such fields as ecocriticism, affect theory, post-Marxism, critical race theory, and new formalism.⁴ With the exception of Anna Jones Abramson’s 2018 article on Joseph Conrad, however, most of these studies treat atmosphere thematically, at the level of the text’s ideational content. We still lack the critical apparatus for analyzing the specific formal strategies that authors devise to generate a distinct, pervasive sense of atmosphere. Yet I can’t imagine any debate in literary studies that wouldn’t benefit from the development of this apparatus. Any stakes literary criticism pursues necessarily draw upon textual data, and these require attention to atmosphere. Thus, although my interest here will be mainly formalist, I want to undertake the following investigation with an eye to extending established approaches to atmosphere in the field of literary studies.

Ever since the New Critics set the terms of the debate in academic poetry studies, atmosphere has been considered too nebulous for analysis. In Seven Types of Ambiguity, William Empson is blunt about the limits of its usefulness: “Criticism can only state that it is there” (qtd. in Stanley 121). In Understanding Poetry, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren admittedly read Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ulalume” as a case study in atmospheric style, yet they approach atmosphere only implicitly, as a side effect of more definite formal variables such as rhythm and imagery (358–62). More recently, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature investigates how literary texts “soak up the atmosphere of their times” and then release it into the air of later generations, so that when we read Shakespeare’s sonnets we cannot help but experience the atmosphere of Shakespeare’s London (40). However, like the New Critics, Gumbrecht remains “skeptical about the power of ‘theories’ to explain atmospheres and moods,” and doubts the “viability of ‘methods’ to identify them” (17).

Gumbrecht and the New Critics are undoubtedly right insofar as analyzing atmosphere directly is a bit like trying to catch smoke in a net. The phenomenon is so vague, pervasive, and ubiquitous as to elude methodical procedure. But I would like to suggest that it is still possible to analyze how authors write atmospherically. Atmosphere is a property of literary texts, just as character, plot, meter, rhyme, assonance, style, and metaphor are properties of literary texts. The problem may be that we often, even usually, do not notice atmospheres. They inflect our moods as readers, filter the light of our reception, but seldom erupt fully into consciousness. Upon occasion, nevertheless, authors deliberately foreground atmosphere as a salient compositional feature. I would suggest that they have two formal strategies at their disposal for this. First, atmosphere is foregrounded whenever a large number of literary characteristics (image, meter, tone, character, etc.) evokes a similar set of mental associations in the reader. Second, atmosphere is foregrounded when other strategies for achieving textual cohesion (theme, narrative trajectory, etc.) are de-emphasized or even dispensed with.

In a 1916 letter of thanks to Harriet Monroe for a $100 prize he won for his one-act verse drama Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise, Wallace Stevens makes atmosphere the center of his compositional attention: “What I tried to do was to create a poetic atmosphere with a minimum of narration” (L 194). Here Stevens seems to identify atmosphere as his primary principle of aesthetic cohesion. And he recognizes that to foreground atmosphere he must de-emphasize competing principles of cohesion, such as plot. It was, I’d like to suggest, an experiment he would return to seven years later after the inspiration that a 1923 cruise through the Gulf of Mexico gave him. Cruises strip the experience of rising in the morning down to a few bare constants—sky, cloud, ocean, light—that nevertheless afford profuse permutations, each building a subtly different atmosphere. In “Sea Surface Full of Clouds,” that very cluster of recurrent elements—sky, cloud, ocean, light—combines and recombines to form five distinctive atmospheres.

Toward a Theory of Foregrounding Atmosphere

Any given locus or instance of perception—an object, a sound, a smell, a person, a situation—has a particular affective character. It is common to describe this character using emotionally charged adjectives. A cloudy sky is dreary while a sunny sky is jovial; the color blue is sad while the color yellow is happy. We do not really mean that a sunny sky necessarily makes us feel jovial or that the color blue necessarily makes us feel sad, though they may. What we mean is that we associate joviality with sunny skies, sadness with the color blue. These affective characters, or associative resonances, are the constitutive variables of atmosphere—what Böhme calls “generators” (32). In works of art as in everyday life, it is possible to manipulate such generators to elicit certain atmospheric effects. Wood as a material, for example, can “create a particular atmosphere—whether to achieve a sense of easiness and warmth or of prosperity and solidity” (144). There is nothing intrinsically easy or warm, prosperous or solid, about wood; the material is associated with ease, warmth, prosperity, and solidity. Such associations soak into the environment and inflect its distinctive atmospheric hue. Thus, it is possible for an interior designer to orchestrate an atmosphere of grandeur by bringing together generators that carry grandeur as one of their primary associations: dark stained wood, leather, the color maroon, marble, and so on.

Some associations are culturally encoded—what Böhme calls the “social character” of atmospheres (129). Wood is likely to suggest prosperity only during those times and in those places where it happens to be one of the more expensive building materials available. Other associations appear to hold consistently across cultural backgrounds. Charles Spence and Ophelia Deroy have shown that, by and large, people from all over the world associate brightness with high pitch (317). In another study, coauthored with Andy T. Woods and Natalie Butcher, they found that lemons are associated with “fast,” prunes with “slow” (Woods et al. 369). Hyun-Woong Kim, Hosung Nam, and Chai-Youn Kim found that most participants associated high and front vowels, such as [i] and [e], with green and yellow (430). In a study conducted by Roberta Etzi, Charles Spence, Massimiliano Zampini, and Alberto Gallace, participants consistently associated “Kiki,” a made-up word, with the texture of sandpaper, and “Bouba” with the texture of satin (143). Qian Wang and Charles Spence even found correlations between certain red wines and specific pieces of classical music (4).

I do not mean to suggest that an atmosphere is reducible to a set of associations. An atmosphere is, at the end of the day, a whole that exceeds the sum of its parts. It would be silly to try and determine that the affective character of the color blue is however many parts “calm,” however many parts “cold,” and however many parts “sad.” Yet associative overlap does allow us to trace congruities, affinities, and resemblances among generators. And these allow us, in turn, to advance certain claims regarding the foregrounding of atmosphere. In a literary text, a generator is any textual feature—imagery, cadence, rhythm, meter, setting, tone, a speaker’s or character’s personality, and so forth—that may be considered in light of its capacity to contribute toward establishing a distinctive atmosphere. When all or most of a text’s generators elicit a similar affective response, this foregrounds the aspect of atmosphere. Atmosphere, therefore, follows a principle of foregrounding that is analogous to the composition of verbal music. Assonance, alliteration, rhyme, and meter thrust the sound of language into saliency. This is because assonance, alliteration, rhyme, and meter depend on the repetition of certain sounds. When a sound (pattern) repeats, we can’t help but notice it. In the same way, when a large number of generators all elicit a similar mood or affective tenor, atmosphere arrests our awareness as readers.⁵

Thus, the dark, dreary atmosphere of Wuthering Heights would have been less salient if Emily Brontë had set her novel in humid, sunny Florida. William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! would have called up the atmosphere of the mid-nineteenth-century American South less adequately if he had written the novel in short, clipped mono-clauses. His long, drawling sentences capture something of the slowness that extreme heat induces and of the heavy burdens of history that weigh the characters down. Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian conjures up the atmosphere of the nineteenth-century American frontier in a focused family resemblance among generators:

See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.

(3)

Every generator—from imagery to cadence and setting—suggests a similar mood. And such a mood, again, is the product of mental associations. The “rags of snow” in the landscape and the father drunkenly quoting forgotten poets are not associated directly with one another. They are not analogous, nor do they correlate in everyday experience (fathers don’t get drunk and quote forgotten poets any more often in the winter than in the summer). But they do share a great deal of associative overlap: decline, deterioration, despondency, depression, decrepitude, death, illness, abandonment, filth, unwholesomeness, poverty, sin, vagrancy, violence, ruin, darkness—to name the most striking among them. If McCarthy had diluted his prose with incongruous generators—if, for instance, he had set the scene in summer, or had the father quoting limericks—the atmosphere would not seep into the reader’s consciousness so forcefully.

It is clearly possible, then, for atmosphere to function as a principle of aesthetic cohesion in a literary text. By “principle of aesthetic cohesion,” I mean any telos that helps the author organize multifarious textual elements into a whole. Theme is a prominent example: diverse textual elements converge upon a single hub of reference—an emotion expressed, a thought revolved. Chronology is another: textual events may be set up so that they follow a linear progression through time. Atmosphere depends on how diverse textual elements conform to a unified affective tenor. Usually, multiple principles of aesthetic cohesion in a text collaborate. A single sonnet can have a theme, a rhyme scheme, and a speaker’s personality, and all of these can hold the sonnet together. Sometimes, principles of aesthetic cohesion compete: to strengthen one, the author must weaken another. Atmosphere is almost never the dominant principle of cohesion. And so when it is, it stands out.

Another way authors foreground atmosphere is by eliminating or weakening other principles of aesthetic cohesion. Take, for instance, Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd: / Petals on a wet, black bough” (82). The colon implies some relationship between an otherwise arbitrary pairing. The second line does not follow from the first logically or analogically or chronologically. The two lines probably don’t describe the same setting, since the first draws exclusively on urban, the second on natural imagery. Yet it is precisely the arbitrariness of the conjunction that brings the atmospheric relation into salience. The first line suggests a certain mood; the second line suggests a certain mood; and the two moods manage to overlap. The reader’s attention is directed toward atmosphere as the main or sole unifying principle. My second example comes from Jan Zwicky’s poem “Kinderszenen,” where Zwicky draws an intentional analogy between two terms that, on the face of it, are not analogous: “The red in the willows like forgotten laughter” (16). This simile foregrounds the one element the two images do have in common, which is the associative constellation they build. The color red and the experience of laughter share associations with life, vitality, warmth, and positivity. But in this case the red in the willows is a sign of the approaching autumn, and the laughter is forgotten. Both images, in other words, suggest an atmosphere of decline, loss, diminishing force.

“Sea Surface Full of Clouds” takes atmosphere as at once its theme, its primary aesthetic effect, and its dominant principle of cohesion. In the poem’s five numbered sections, Stevens unites generators under common atmospheric moods and weakens competing principles of aesthetic cohesion. The content markers typical of the lyric—an intense emotion, a deep philosophical question—are conspicuously absent. There is no clear sense of narrative direction, chronology, or the speaker’s personality. Some might object that repetition holds things together, though I would respond that repetition doesn’t reconcile diverse textual elements into a whole so much as it minimizes diversity among them. That is, repetition doesn’t harmonize so much as it suppresses difference. It can perform a subsidiary function for a larger principle of cohesion (as in a sestina), but does not function as a principle of cohesion in and of itself. In “Sea Surface Full of Clouds,” repetition serves to foreground atmosphere as the only variable that consistently evolves across the poem’s symmetries and permutations.⁶

Atmosphere I

No trees redden here, and the equatorial climate leaves the time of year ambiguous.⁷ Liberated from their characteristic emblems, seasons trade places in the natural order of time. Thus it is “summer,” not autumn, that “hue[s] the deck” this fine “November” morning. Perhaps Stevens simply means that the light is warm and has a summery tinge to it. Yet summer is more than warmth and brightness. It comes associatively with a certain mood, a sense of vitality and freedom, the relaxed, blissful, carefree disposition of a day at the beach. A subtle change in light brings about a change in atmosphere, and a subtle change in atmosphere effectively alters the sense of time and place, as though we left one season and entered another. Besides referring to the deck’s wooden boards, “hued” puns on “hewed,” as if the summer dismantled and remade the entire setting with chromatic carpentry. Atmosphere has a way of precipitating sudden transformations in the presiding quality of a locale. Our sense of where and when we are refreshes beneath our feet.

Critics don’t quite know what to do with the next two lines. Why, Joan Richardson asks, do the summer hues bring to mind “chocolate” and “umbrellas”? “The juxtaposition of the two is perplexing” (61). Phoebe Putnam calls this the poem’s “most inexplicable moment. . . . Why does the lyric digress so quickly into what appears to be merely eccentric association?” (48). I would propose that the jarring quality of this abruptness serves a very particular aesthetic purpose: it foregrounds atmosphere. Stevens ignores every possible strand of relation except associative overlap. Summery hues upon the deck of a ship, “rosy chocolate,” and “gilt umbrellas” all suggest the exotic, the decadent, the aimless sampling of tourists on a summer vacation. The adjective “Paradisal” that immediately follows at the start of the second sentence imbues the warm, relaxed vitality of the “suav[e]” summer fling into the “perplexed machine. . . .”

“[M]achine” rhymes with “green” (at the end of the previous line), the adjectives have found a noun to modify, and all the stanza’s tensions seem to have come to a close. We expect a break, a pause, a breather—but don’t get one. The phrase staggers on into the next line and stanza. The “perplexed machine” is not the cruise ship but a “perplexed machine // Of ocean” (emphasis added), which is far more difficult to compute. A cruise ship is at least mechanical. The ocean, by contrast, is emblematic of the world’s most natural, spontaneous rhythms. What’s mechanical about those? Stevens could have softened the transition had he wanted to. He could have exchanged his “ocean” for a “sea,” responding in soft assonance to “machine” and “green.” Instead, he prefers to roughen the jolt. This amplifies the metaphor’s internal dissonance. Stevens deliberately overturns several of the ocean’s most characteristic associations: while oceans are supposed to be natural, cool, and soothing, machines are artificial, hot, and clanging. Thus, he empties the ocean of natural life and tranquility, emphasizing instead the clockwork regularity of its waves, the metallic glint of its cold, slate grays. It is difficult, moreover, to imagine a “machine // Of ocean” being “perplexed.” Machines command forceful, ruthless momentum; insensitive to their surroundings, they suggest the sort of blind confidence that immunizes against perplexity. Likewise, oceans drive their waves with power and indifference. And yet, this machine, this ocean, is “perplexed.” Something light and fine has dumbfounded even the world’s most implacable forces, as, in an earlier poem, three girls “check” a giant with “civilest odors,” “abash” him with “Arching cloths,” and “undo” him with “Heavenly labials” (CPP 5–6).

Atmosphere, that finest, lightest thing, recalibrates nature’s most stubborn engineering with the gentle interference of a mood. Under its influence, the ocean lies “like limpid water.” Isn’t an ocean by definition composed of water? Is water not by definition limpid? Stevens infringes upon one of the more obvious taboos of poetic composition: never compare something to itself. Where is the imagination in comparing an ocean to “limpid water”? Isn’t this like comparing a dog to a brown furry creature that barks? Stevens clips all threads of dissimilarity except one: atmospheric mood. An “ocean” and “limpid water” feel different, derive different generators from an identical substance. An ocean is sublime, dark, rough, vaguely threatening, symbolic of the precariousness of human life in nature’s volatile company. Limpid water is docile, bright, smooth, benign, suggestive of safe, soft streams and refreshing wells. Perplexity causes a self to go limpid; it pacifies and makes vulnerable—a perplexed face is easy to read. Perplexed in the subtle intimations of atmosphere, the ocean goes limpid: it becomes passive, soft, transparent.

The clouds, like white “blooms,” are “evolved” from the “light,” radiating from the sun as petals radiate from a bud. In turn, “sea-blooms,” the petal-like contours of the water, are “evolved” from the bloom-like clouds. Stevens draws an Emersonian chain of correspondences, a sequence of resemblances among natural forms that intimates a common spiritual origin. But where Emerson tends to route all correspondences back to the Over-Soul, Stevens posits an altogether more mysterious origin: “C’était mon enfant, mon bijou, mon âme.” This enfant seems to descend from contested parentage. Does the speaker claim the child as his own? Or does another voice intrude here? The child is, after all, a romantic symbol of the poetic imagination, which has always been haunted by some strange alterity—an inspiring demon, a God confiding otherworldly realities. It is hard to tell to what precise extent Stevens subscribed to Emerson’s vision of the poet-prophet, but enough of it persists to imbue atmosphere with a degree of spiritual significance. Some secret impetus, neither alien nor congenial to the poet’s habitual self, weaves the light into the clouds and ocean in a harmonious atmospheric texture.

The unusual transitive use of “evolved” suggests a loosening of the boundaries between self and nature. The verb is almost always used intransitively: internal laws generate gradual change. But here evolution comes from outside through an agent. It happens to, is acted upon, the clouds. Had Stevens wanted the clouds to receive the poet’s imaginative transformations passively, like clay, he could have used a different verb: “unfolded” would have gone well with “morning blooms,” and Stevens could have kept the meter consistent by dropping that superfluous “the” in “the morning blooms.” Why use “evolved,” then, when “unfolded” is both more idiomatic and economical? Is Stevens mangling English for a cheap surprise? His use of “evolved” as a transitive verb suggests a collaboration between the poet’s imagination and the secret nature of the blooms. Just as organisms evolve interactively with their environments, so do the light, clouds, and ocean evolve interactively with the environment of the poet’s imagination. Things divulge the way they are, yet the way they are is evolved upon the poet’s blue guitar.⁸

The first two stanzas of the poem’s first numbered section set the scene with distinct, concrete images: chocolate, umbrellas, the “machine // Of ocean.” We have a clear sense of place and time: that specific “November off Tehuantepec,” that particular “night.” With the middle two stanzas, sky and sea begin to trespass beyond the bounds of the horizon. The imagery loses focus, but it still remains anchored in the relaxed forms of clouds and blooms. In the last two stanzas, however, form diffuses altogether in a blur of shades and radiances. It is difficult to say what is in the sky and what is in the sea, what is on the surface and what hangs in the depths. The “sea-clouds” could be the clouds in the sky above the sea, or their reflections on the surface of the water. They “[whiten] far below the calm,” but where is the “calm”? Is this the calm air between the sun and the clouds, or between the clouds and the sea, or the calm water between the ocean’s surface and its depths? If these “sea-clouds” are, in fact, reflections, then they should be floating on the waves. Why, then, do they move not on but “in the swimming green”? All five sections of the poem follow this same pattern. They all progress from clear to vague, from concrete to diffuse, from distinct to shapeless. Stevens takes us from the discreteness of objects to the formless immersiveness of atmosphere.

Atmosphere II

The same warm light returns to the same cruise-ship deck, eliciting the same associations with chocolate and umbrellas. Yet the atmosphere in the poem’s second numbered section is strikingly different. Where the soft ambers of summer suggested blithe, relaxed meandering, the appearance of “jelly yellow” is boisterous and upbeat. Among poetic synonyms for color, “hue” ranks among the most tranquil—William Wordsworth opens his pastoral sonnet about transcending “earthly care” in the beauty of nature with “The fairest, brightest, hues of ether fade,” not “The fairest, brightest, streaks of ether fade” (emphases added), and for good measure. The word “streaked” to which Stevens turns sounds reckless and abrupt. It connotes irregularity. Windows sloppily washed leave behind streaks—not hues—of Windex. The word suggests speed and abandon. Authors commonly describe race cars and airplanes and anything else that moves too fast for the human eye as streaks. To go streaking means to run naked through a public place. And all this haste and recklessness compose exactly the sort of atmosphere in which a jar of jelly is likely to get knocked down and tracked across a floor.

Where “rosy” in the previous section stretches the o of “chocolate” into a long, soothing sound, “chop-house” reduplicates the short o and emphasizes the jagged alliteration. Where “rosy” keeps the iambic pattern smooth, “chop-house chocolate” almost forces the reader to stress three syllables in a row with an overbearing, choppy rhythm. Where “rosy” suggested the carefree quality of youth and romance, “chop-house” suggests the hasty functionalism of a busy downtown diner. “[R]osy chocolate” sounds exotic, expensive, deluxe; “chop-house chocolate” cheap, an association that carries over, furthermore, into the tawdriness of “sham umbrellas.” The preponderance of hyphenated compound words—“chop-house,” “sham-like,” “summer-seeming”—gives to the passage a colloquial air. We have swerved from an atmosphere of aristocratic comforts to the blind rush of, perhaps, the working class, in which there is little place for beauty. In a rich house, opulence is tasteful; in a poor house, gaudy. In the atmosphere of the previous section, the rich greenness of the sea seemed “Paradisal”; against the gritty, blue-collar backdrop of the “chop-house,” the greenness of the sea seems all too extravagant, like a “sham.” It must be fake.

The previous section characterized the ocean as a ruthless, implacable giant conquered with the subtle instruments of beauty—a triumph on the side of fine, redolent things. The stillness of the water then was the stillness of astonishment: a wonder that seizes, silences, and pacifies. Here, the stillness bespeaks a more “malevolent” cause: a lurking threat, a shark or other approaching danger sheathed beneath the silver surfaces. Two antithetical moods shimmer from images with identical components. A subtle change in atmosphere suffices for a sense of threat to take over. The adjective “mortal” to which Stevens turns in the phrase “mortal massives” commonly modifies nouns such as “threat” and “danger,” while “massives” suggests the looming sides of whales and sharks, an association answered in the broad blades of white, malignant flowers.

While “mon enfant, mon bijou, mon âme” suited the earlier atmosphere of blithe touristic meandering, the more rough-and-tumble Whitmanian demon of “mon frère du ciel, ma vie, mon or” aligns more with the back-slapping fraternity of the chophouse. The cherishing of a bijou, small and sparkling, corresponds to a father’s cherishing of his enfant, whereas bright radiant gold (or) corresponds to the buoyant amity between brothers. We tend to speak of the soul (âme) as a vulnerable presence within the body—locked, secret, perhaps jealously guarded—as a jewel is locked and jealously guarded in a case. Conversely, we tend to speak of life (vie) as a force that radiates outward, that is in the first place vital and warm, like sunlight or the sheen of gold. Person corresponds to place, soul to environment, mood to atmosphere, and it is unclear which precedes and which follows, which determines and which receives. In the previous section, it was the obscure impetus of “mon enfant, mon bijou, mon âme” that “evolved” the “blooms,” suggesting that the inspired poet projects his own private mental content on the setting. But here “mon frère du ciel” simply beholds, as if the poet received his affects, his moods, his feelings, passively, from his surroundings.

Although it is possible that the reference to “gongs” in the next stanza tropes on the sound of the wind, this seems unlikely. Gongs and wind don’t sound anything alike, and Stevens could easily have selected an instrument from the woodwind family. Besides, “The gongs rang loudly as the windy booms / Hoo-hooed it” (emphasis added) implies a distinction. These gongs are more likely sounding in the poet’s soul; they reverberate the or, the cherished gold of poetic inspiration, from the previous line. In the gongs’ loud, vibrating music, the atmosphere resounds. Sharp, clangy, bright, golden, they play along to the clamor of “chop-house chocolate” and “jelly yellow.” “Hoo-hooed it” may sound to some readers like the outdated idiom that a corny uncle might try to resurrect. It carries overtones of certain colloquialisms, such as “we footed it” (meaning, we hurried) or “we hit it off” (meaning, we had a fun time together), thus chiming in with the jovial chord that unifies the rest of the section.

And then, abruptly, the wind changes direction. “The gongs grew still”: the vitality settles, the buoyancy cools, the vast malignant bodies of the “macabre . . . water-glooms” flee like monsters at the first rays of dawn, and a cooler atmosphere blows in off the next November night.

Atmosphere III

The first few times I read the poem’s third section, I mistook “patterned” in “a pale silver patterned on the deck” for “pattered.” Even as I was preparing to write this essay, I realized that I couldn’t help but picture the moonlight pattering across the deck like mice or rain. I dismissed my response as idiosyncratic, but now, with the sharpening of reception that comes with engaged critical attention, I’m no longer sure. Readers take words in by chunks. Before we’ve even processed the word “patterned,” we already know that “on” is the preposition. And “on” is an unusual preposition for a word like “patterned.” Usually, things pattern through or across or they drop the preposition altogether and simply pattern. The phrase “patterned on” makes it sound as if patterning were a brief activity carried out on the deck, more like a dance than embroidery. There is, then, something about the preposition “on” that can trick readers into reading the verb as “pattered.” I picture the moonbeams pattering on the deck in a rainlike pattern, and I wouldn’t say such a response is entirely anomalous. It is even, perhaps, richer for the mistake. A patterned pattering has a tactility that a pattern plain and simple lacks—a tactility that brings in the soothing sound of late-night rain.

The contrast between the “pale silver” of the moonlight and the dark brown of the cruise-ship deck sets the color scheme for the rest of the section. Chocolate is most often brown, porcelain usually white.⁹ And just as moonlight smooths all roughness in a surface, so “porcelain” emphasizes the smoothness of chocolate, bringing out clear, cool associations of refinement, sophistication, and restraint while downplaying associations of decadence and indulgence. This chocolate is a rich man’s food. The adjective “pied” in “pied umbrellas” originally meant black and white, especially with reference to a friar’s habit (according to the OED)—a meaning that, though anachronistic, finds support in the pale silver on the dark wooden boards, the associatively white porcelain in the dark chocolate, the piano’s ebony and ivory. The “tranced machine // Of ocean” reproduces the consonantal outline of the “tense machine” from the previous section, foregrounding the shift in mood: from malignant forces crouching in tense preparation to a tranquil pacifying wonder. Entranced, the subject takes on machine-like qualities; silent, passive, they await the hypnotist’s occult administrations. Yet “trance” also carries spiritual associations. To be entranced is to forget oneself, to be so taken up with something outside oneself that all trivial, selfish concerns fade away. Here the recurrent “machine” brings out the trance’s sense of self-effacement, and the trance deemphasizes the machine’s dehumanizing associations. Together, “tranced machine” captures the divine automaticity of grace, a state of mind consonant with the generators that populate the third section’s two opening stanzas. The “pale silver” of the moonlight, the “porcelain chocolate” and “pied umbrellas,” the “Piano-polished” sea, the colors black and white, web together associations of tranquility, quietness, softness, and contemplation—an atmosphere antithetical to the rowdy bustle of the previous section.

The poet’s imagination is invoked more cautiously, more thoughtfully this time, with the syntax this requires. Stevens delays the main verb across a series of gently unfolding clauses:

Who, seeing silver petals of white bloomsUnfolding in the water, feeling sure

Of the milk within the saltiest spurge, heard, then,The sea unfolding in the sunken clouds?

A sequence of participles—“seeing,” “Unfolding,” “feeling”—holds the action in suspense for a three-line aside until the main verb, “heard,” finally arrives, cloistered between two commas, next to an equally manacled “then.” The assonance of “spurge” and “heard” forces the reading voice to slow down, to press upon each word—“spurge, heard, then”—with a pensive, heavy touch. Stevens extends the predominantly blank verse to twelve syllables for the sake of a waste word, “then,” that doesn’t do anything except slow us down further and set the “heard” off from what it hears. The subject is separated from the verb, the verb from the object. The result is a sense of detachment, the kind of depersonalization that haunts people who think too much and don’t get enough done. The speaker sounds self-conscious and melancholy, as if expressing himself slowly and carefully, making sure he doesn’t leave anything out. Yet this is not an anxious kind of inwardness. The cadence also has the calmness characteristic of thoughtful, melancholic people. The participial clauses lap upon one another with the rhythmic solemnity of waves. This is not the kind of thoughtfulness that chews matters up into neurotic details, but the kind that grounds the self in unshakeable profundities, that can sustain its solace through rough times, holding firm in the knowledge that there is “milk within the saltiest spurge.”

Atmosphere IV

For the first time, the “slopping of the sea” does not “gr[o]w still one night.” Instead, “The night-long slopping of the sea grew still”—a subtle change in syntax that represents a drastic change in mood. “The slopping of the sea grew still one night” attenuates across a long decrescendo. The strongest stress falls on “slop,” a slightly weaker one on “sea,” a still weaker one on “night.” In addition, the phrase “one night” suggests the intimacy and friendliness of an anecdote. The effect is of a light, quiet optimism. By contrast, in “The night-long slopping of the sea” the strongest stress falls on “slop” in the middle of the line, strengthened further by the assonant [o] of “long.” The phrase “night-long slopping” leadens the iambic foot, stressing “night” and “long” and “slop” with an almost drunken plodding that leans hard into the “slop.” The line divides, moreover, right through the middle of “slop/ping.” While the first half is heavy, slow, and loud, weighed down with full-mouthed vowels pronounced toward the throat, the second half is lighter, softer, and quieter, composed as it is by a string of vowels pronounced closer to the palate. The result is a form of sonic turbulence. Whereas “The slopping of the sea grew still one night” softens the transition from the loud “slop” to the soft “night,” “The night-long slopping of the sea grew still” roughens the transition into a terse, jerky contrast. The possible association of “night-long slopping” with drunken debauchery seems to be taken up by the image of the “morning doz[ing]” deep into its shift “upon the deck,” as if it were too drunk to get itself to bed last night.

This time, the adjective “musky” brings out the chocolate’s associations with seduction and eroticism—overtones that, together with the “frail umbrellas,” suggest the moral dissipation of a brothel. The second stanza flutters with deceptive surfaces. The “too-fluent green” of the pimp or huckster anoints an otherwise “dry machine // Of ocean.” Why “dry”—for an ocean? Then again, what’s dry about wine? Stevens never mentions alcohol, yet he smuggles it in slyly, by association. It’s hard not to think of the only fluid commonly described as dry here. We might recall that “Sea Surface Full of Clouds” was first published in 1924, when Prohibition was in full swing. Alcohol would have carried associations of dark-alley handshakes and shady dealings. A “dry” machine is also a machine in need of oiling, suggesting deterioration beneath gaudy, “fluent” superficialities.

The adjective “dank” usually describes wet inland sites, such as wells, swamps, and basements. We associate it with staleness, mildew, and domestic neglect, the ocean with a freshness that can never expire. If the ocean is nevertheless “pondering dank stratagem,” this suggests that the impossible has happened and it has somehow lost its freshness. A similar associative inversion occurs in the next stanza. The simile “Like damasks that were shaken off / From the loosed girdles”—an image, possibly, of deflowering—breeds tawdriness into the “spangling must.” When I first read this line, I thought “must” had to be a typo. Someone probably hit the “u” key when they were supposed to hit the adjacent “i.” After some cross-referencing again, I was able to convince myself that “must” is indeed intentional. And yet, I would not eliminate “mist” from the reading altogether. We are, after all, on the ocean, and nothing “spangl[es]” better than mist. This is just a mist that has gone musty, as the ocean has gone dank, thickening the presiding air of neglect and dissipation.

Atmosphere V, with a Few Closing Observations

In the poem’s fifth and final section, the “day” that is “bowing and voluble” like a ringmaster, the “clown,” the “jugglery” of the clouds, the saucer-tossing “Sambo,” and the “conjuring” sea collectively assemble the familiar iconography of a circus. This prompts us to go back over the poem and see whether the other sections corresponded to any recognizable setting as well. They do, arguably, but not so overtly. Section I corresponds to the atmosphere of an upper-middle-class vacation, section II to the atmosphere of a mess hall, section III to the atmosphere of an orchestra, section IV to the atmosphere of a brothel or opium den—but all very roughly, loosely, indirectly. Stevens hints at each place not through distinctive emblems but through fine networks of associative overlapping. For example, instead of staffing section III with a conductor, a stage, and theater binoculars, he pairs images that share an orchestra’s associations with sophistication, refinement, tranquility, and rapture. Stevens elicits ghostlike ambiences severed of literal surroundings. His imagery exudes familiar yet unplaceable atmospheres as clouds effuse the vapors of far, exotic continents.

The closing stanzas of each section fade into a haze of indistinct yet plangent verbal play. Section V offers the most outspoken instance, approaching, at times, the brink of euphonious nonsense:

The sovereign clouds came clustering. The conchOf loyal conjuration trumped. The windOf green blooms turning crisped the motley hue. . . .

It is not at all clear what “The conch / Of loyal conjuration trumped” could refer to, or what’s so loyal about this conjuration, or what, exactly, it might trump. The next sentence, though anchored in a few discrete, familiar images, is difficult to visualize. We start off picturing the wind—which poses no problem, because oceans are windy places. But then we find out that this isn’t wind in the conventional sense, but “The wind / Of green blooms turning”—a phenomenon that is soft and fluid like the wind, yet somehow hard and solid enough to have “crisped the motley hue.” The “motley hue” of what? Probably the ocean again, whose “motley green” was evoked three stanzas earlier. But it’s almost as though a band of stray hues have detached from their objects and roam unruly, like a motley crew of pirates. And why not? The rest of the stanza seems to lapse into chaos. Sound has detached from sense, crispness has settled on uncrisp surfaces. Things swap qualities, shades evacuate shapes, meaning blurs into a verbal haze—yet a distinctly atmospheric haze. The generators of light, clouds, waves, and sky unite in a single harmonious atmosphere. It’s impossible to say where the light ends and the clouds begin, or where the clouds end and the sea begins. Atmosphere absorbs all apparent forms into an undifferentiated affective tone, a synthesis Stevens tropes in the colloquies of sky and sea. Since “the sea / And heaven [roll] as one,” their generators intermingle, and atmosphere transpires in “fresh transfigurings of freshest blue”—Stevens’s color of the imagination.

The ocean folds its surfaces into its depths, its depths into its surfaces, starting with the title. While a surface is flat, fullness implies depth, so how can a surface be full of anything? The reflections of the clouds “whitened far below the calm” (in the poem’s first section), but where is the calm? Is this the calm of the air or of the sea? If it is the calm of the sea, then how can these reflections be submerged? When Stevens describes “the blooms / Of water moving on the water-floor” (in the second section), does he mean the ocean floor, the ground beneath the water, or does he describe the surface of the sea as itself a floor? Either we imagine the reflections crawling like sea creatures across the rocky bottom, or we picture the ocean surface as a single depthless level. By the poem’s third section, the clouds have “sunken” so “deeply” that they turn “black” with the “shrouding shadows” of the sea, as shipwrecks darken with rot and algae. Stevens seems to trope the deep superficialities, or shallow profundities, of the poem itself. He suggests that “Sea Surface Full of Clouds” displays its deepest meanings openly on its surface, that poetic form, so often dismissed as superficial, divulges insight deeper than allegory knows to sound. He intimates that the meaning of the poem resides in its atmosphere(s), that the atmospheres float upon the surface, and that any would-be penetrative, point-mongering hermeneutic procedure misses the point. He also suggests that atmosphere may be, in itself, deeply profound, that simply to experience the atmosphere of a poem may be to obtain a form of insight as deep and moving as any philosophical inquiry or gnomic revelation.