"Sea Surface full of Clouds" is a poem from the second, 1931, edition of Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium.
Each section repeats the description in different terms but uses recurring words (slopping, chocolate, umbrellas, green, blooms, etc.)
Section III, quoted here, figures in Joan Richardson's reading of "Sea Surface" as having Stevens's sexuality as its "true subject".
"For him, the piano and other keyboard instruments are always attached to something magical connected with the idea of beauty and the allure of the female, as, for example, in "Peter Quince at the Clavier," Richardson writes, " Accordingly, the machine of ocean, his projection, is now `tranced,' carried away by the rapture of the `uncertain green... as a prelude holds and holds.
The female is felt by him as "silver petals of white blooms/ Unfolding in the water," and he, in his maleness, is "feeling sure/ of the milk within the saltiest spurge."
The verse moves fluently from line to line, and the variations intensify the exultation in the open-air vividness and splendor of the seascape and skyscape....the combination of accents and alliteration in "clouds came clustering," with "came" in this context picking up a stress, heightens the impressiveness and drama produced by the image of the "sovereign" cloud masses "clustering" -- just the right word in meaning and sound -- into transitory form.
The suspended moment of turning is caught in the hovering emphasis on "green blooms turning," even though the long spondee adds an extra accent to the line; and this prepares for the immense satisfactionn of "clearing opalescence" -- the jewel-like iridescence dissolving into an instant of transfiguring clarity.
The series of unstressed syllables in the penultimate foot not only increases the force of "freshest" but also helps to convey the ongoing quality of the transfigurations which are not static, even at the moment when poetic insight draws heaven and sea into a unity.
[3] Buttel's foregrounding of Stevens's craftsmanship, especially with reference to syntactic and semantic innovation, is also the approach favored by Helen Vendler and those inspired by her scholarship.