Meaning or semantics is fundamentally about word-world relationships, which are particularly problematic in Stevens' poetry. His syntactical innovations are employed to frustrate simple answers about the relationship between language and reality. For instance, his use of the verb "seem" gives priority to appearances or aspects: "Let be be finale of seem". Also orienting the poems away from certainties about an unproblematically given world are similes with "like" or "as", the hypothetical "as if", the modal "might", the conditional, sentence fragments, optatives, questions and protean usage of the verb "to be" (as when an observer beholds "Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is".