[Carl Copeland]

Hi, Paula. I can tell I’m going to enjoy reading your work. Here are my first thoughts:

I tend to ignore titles, but this one grabbed me before I could get past it, and the image of you billowing on the prow of a ship will stay with me. I’m no sailor, but I looked it up and decided you’re on a pinnace, a small vessel with sails and oars that might have a coxswain.

S1L4 and S3L3 are quite daring metrically. You could smooth the former by adding an “and” between “river” and “boat,” but I’m not sure it’s necessary. Both lines work, I think, if read properly. I’m being slowly weened away from the mesmerizing regularity I’ve always loved, and here you come with all the variations and substitutions up and running in your first poem!

The “long / years” enjambment in S2 is a turn I can’t navigate—partly because the sentence could so easily end on “long” and partly because you want me to stress “long” before an unstressed “years.”

The language has a deliberately archaic flavor to it. I have a higher tolerance for that sort of thing than most here, but even I thought it might do with updating in places. Not sure why, but “stout” in particular struck me as a word I’d never use today to describe a friend (unless I wanted to insult them!).

I love your use of alliteration, but, while “courage whispers from within the wind” is gorgeous, “Willing some wilder way to wend the shore” went overboard for me. And can you wend a shore? The verb is hardly ever used except in the idiom “wend one’s way,” so I can’t decide.

I’m afraid the final couplet lost me a little. Now, instead of billowing, you want to walk the shore in some “wilder way.” Wild in the sense of wilderness? The final line is another daring one metrically, dropping a whole foot. I can’t decide whether that bothers me or not. Does it have some significance?

Congratulations on your first poem posting, Paula! It reminded me of Pushkin’s famous lyric “Arion,” except that his sailor-poet doesn’t billow. That’s all yours!