Roaming the Redwoods
The Redwood Roamer is a character in Stevens' "Certain Phenomena of Sound," published in his 1947 collection Transport to Summer. The Roamer first appears in the opening line of the second canto, and his behavior, or more specifically his story telling, makes up the primary action of the scene:
"So you're home again, Redwood Roamer.... We must prepare to hear the Roamer's story... the sound of that slick sonata... [which] makes music seem to be a nature, a place in which itself is that which produces everything else, in which the Roamer is a voice taller than the redwoods, engaged in the most prolific narrative, a sound producing the things that are spoken." (ii.1-11)
What is A Redwood Roamer, Anyway?[]
Literally, the Redwood Roamer is simply someone with a penchant for walking around redwood forests. One might imagine that this person goes on such excursions rather a lot, so as to justify his or her having been thusly named. Given Stevens' deep engagement with the English Romantics, one might further speculate that the roamer is an echo of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, many of whose poems are set during hikes through the countryside.
What is the Roamer Doing in this Poem?[]
Like the singer in "The Idea of Order at Key West," the Roamer here serves as a bridge between nature and the human world. His story, like the singer's song, is an act of the purest poeisis, in which nature and art are fused, and the inchoate world of the senses comes to be refigured in human terms, thus acquiring an intellectual and emotional meaning, an order, which it would otherwise lack.