18 pages • 36 minutes read
The World as Meditation
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Themes
Recurrence and Doubling
In “The World as Meditation,” action suspends perpetually as one character ostensibly waits for the arrival of another, one who remains in transition between spaces. While the state of suspension serves as a metaphor for the creative process, the poem’s imagery evokes repetition to underscore the daily ritual of waiting for this expected arrival that never comes.
The poem’s narrative itself is a recurrence, an echo of an epic in part: Penelope in the aftermath of The Odyssey. The poem’s few events, too, constitute repetitions: In Line 23, Penelope repeats Ulysses’s name as she combs her hair. Language also repeats throughout the poem in words and phrases. Key images repeat, shifting context and at times reflected in aural or physical form. “The trees had been mended” in Line 10 repeats “The trees are mended” from Line 2. “Friend and dear friend,” a phrase representing Penelope and Ulysses but also any corresponding relation, appears first in Line 9 and again in Line 20.
Ulysses functions as an image rather than a character in this context. He approaches, potentially and repeatedly, from the east. His double then becomes the rising sun, and both images return to Penelope in the poem. The speaker mentions Ulysses in the first, sixth, and seventh stanzas, but only to ask if the “someone” (Line 3) approaching can be identified as Ulysses, then to assert that it both “was Ulysses and was not” (Line 19). Ulysses is doubled not only by the sun but also by his shadow, the not-Ulysses. His figure most importantly serves as a mirror for Penelope, her perfect counterpart by virtue of his potential existence: “Two in a deep-founded sheltering” (Line 9), Penelope and Ulysses represent a complete entity, even if this Ulysses is not actual but a projection made by Penelope’s desire.
The sixth and seventh stanzas reveal the doubling as central to the poem’s meaning. The two questions in Lines 16 and 17 relate Ulysses directly to the “warmth of the sun” (Line 16), characterizing the presence of each “[o]n her pillow” (Line 17) as equivalent. Line 17 introduces the most significant pairing—thought and feeling—as Penelope’s “thought kept beating in her like her heart” (Stevens explores this intersection in many other poems and essays). Unification comes in Line 18 as “the two kept beating together”; this meeting between thought and feeling, “friend and dear friend” (Line 20), along with “a planet’s encouragement” (Line 20) results in Penelope’s “barbarous strength” (Line 20) to create.
Decoration and Ornament
A few particular decorative elements in “The World as Meditation” stand for artifice, objects created for beauty’s sake. In Line 5, the unidentified approaching figure nears as “a form of fire” toward “the cretonnes of Penelope” (Line 5). Stevens’s penchant for esoteric vocabulary manifests in the anachronistic “cretonnes” (Line 5), a heavy, rough, printed cotton fabric often used for household purposes, especially upholstery. This diction removes Penelope from her Classical context, placing her outside traditional narrative interpretations. Choosing a homely fabric with a fanciful name invites the reader’s imagination to create Penelope in any form, as decorative as imagination can manage, while still preserving her identity as the woman of the house.
The “form of fire” (Line 5) also presents a threat to stiff cotton, and its “savage presence awakens” (Line 6) Penelope’s surroundings. But the figures of Ulysses and Penelope in the “deep-founded sheltering” (Line 9) of the poem exist as Penelope’s creation: “she has composed” (Line 7) her own self as his companion, but also “his self […] which she imagined” (Line 8). As a result, Penelope takes no interest in any ornament the actual Ulysses might deliver. In the fifth stanza, the speaker explains that she wants “nothing he could not bring her by coming alone” (Line 13), “no fetchings” (Line 14). Instead of adornment, “his arms would be her necklace / and her belt” (Lines 14-15). Penelope is the craftsman in the poem, the imaginative constructing force. Her memory and desire constitute her world and its beauty.
Creation as Process
The poem’s very title—“The World as Meditation”—emphasizes creation as a process more than a consummate aesthetic form. Accordingly, this poem returns to language and actions that evoke the process of making. In Line 2, the “trees are mended,” as if nature is never in its finalized form but welcomes intervention and improvement. Penelope “has composed” her identity, the self that will meet the approaching figure, yet the approach is perpetual; it is never finalized. In Line 7, when the mending of the trees comes up again, the speaker explains the mending as “part of an essential exercise / In an inhuman meditation” (Lines 7-8), harking back to the language in the poem’s epigraph. Georges Enesco calls “la méditation” (Epigraph, Line 2) the “l’exercise essential” of the composer. In this poem, Stevens calls Penelope the “composer” of herself, but that composing is a function of desire that is unmet and therefore ongoing. The process of composing supersedes any final composition.
The idea of process is epitomized in Ulysses’s liminality and indeterminacy, his endless approach without arrival. This dynamic is what creates desire, and desire elicits creation—meditation. Penelope’s meditation, her composing, fully realizes its potential as her mind and her heart unify: “The two kept beating together” (Line 18). Ulysses corresponds to the sun’s presence, interchangeable with its warmth, as anonymous and unwitting as nature. In the final stanza, Penelope “would talk a little to herself” (Line 22), composing, meditating alone. Ulysses exists because the words she speaks create him: “Repeating his name with its patient syllables” (Line 23).
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By Wallace Stevens
