The World as Meditation

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1952

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

Trees

In Lines 2 and 10 of “The World as Meditation,” the trees have been “mended,” altered and improved. From the beginning of the poem, the “savage presence” (Line 6) on the horizon and Penelope’s “barbarous strength” (Line 21) from imagination and desire affect the landscape materially and metaphorically. Stevens’s diction indicates a deliberate but homely action; the trees could be changed or transformed, they could be revised, but mending indicates purposeful, domestic care. Within the Classical epic, Penelope’s character fashions a garment that she unravels at night, the opposite of mending. In the poem’s context, her creative energy influences a wider scope; it creates both the subject and the world around her.

Sun and Fire

The potential Ulysses figure rises from the east like the sun; this figure remains associated with the sun throughout the poem, as well as with fire and warmth. In Line 2, the figure becomes “a form of fire,” both a metaphor and an accurate visual description of a shadow on the horizon backed by the rising morning sun. In Line 16, “the warmth of the sun” on Penelope’s pillow doubles for Ulysses. In that same stanza, these events occur when “it was only day” (Line 18), associating Ulysses’s presence, generated by Penelope, with the hours of daylight. Penelope responds to her imagined Ulysses as the earth does to the sun. She draws creative energy and emotion from her construction of his identity and from the possibility of its arrival. While she may have to wait for the man Ulysses to appear, her ideal Ulysses constitutes her own reality, one that endows her with a power almost greater because it is her own.

Winter

Stevens’s early poem “The Snow Man” begins by saying “one must have a mind of winter” (“The Snow Man.” Poetry Magazine, 1921. Line 1) in order to look at the hard winter landscape without connecting it to an inner bleakness. In order to see the nothingness of winter, a man would have to be nothing himself (note the punning title “The Snow Man” sounding like this-no-man). Decades later, “The World as Meditation” offers a matured perspective at the end of the poet’s life, placing Penelope in the heat of creativity and generation. Her landscape fills every morning with the fire of the sun on the horizon. Line 3 expresses, “That winter is washed away,” specifying that winter, not just winter itself. This tableau requires no separation of the self from the world, embracing instead the heat of day, the heart and thought “beating together” (Line 18), harmonious, continuously remaking with “a planet’s encouragement” (Line 20).