Memsy, I completely agree with you. There are too many words. The power should be where the words aren't. And if the words are taking all the space, the whole thing deflates. And I do feel the same as you about believing. I do! I know it spontaneously, in my very soul. And I, too, think the keeper part of the revision is the "in".
My heart has returned to the original. It has that feeling of inevitability about it. Thank you so very much for your persuasive advocacy of the original!
Oh, and what you say about the last line. How true and perceptive. It feels like my whole literary soul suffuses that line. What you say reminds me of Virginia Woolf saying "All literature is one mind". A great truth.
Thank you, John, for venturing here!! I never would have come here in the olden days. I remember I did once, and it was just too scary. But those days are gone, and these halls are empty, and I was encouraged by the presence of Rick and Siham and Mary! Almost everything about this poem feels musically inevitable for me now, but for those two lines in the second stanza. Something might tweak there, but I'm not sure what or how. I don't need to rush. I do like "the hollow of the green swell". It sounds lovely, and it's accurate, too.
I love "muscular". That's a huge thing for me. Thank you!!!
Sharkey -- I hear you. See what I said to Mary about the last line. Its antecedents go back way further than Eliot, although I think 'Dry Salvages' is impossible for me ever to escape, as is Wallace Stevens 'Idea of Order at Key West'. In my heart and mind, I've gone back to the original albatross line, with the hope that time and tide will show me some small, yet huge, way to tweak it. I can't help it. Since I was a child, there is something that believes in love. This is not a hippy-dippy thing. It's more like geological.
Ha! I hadn't thought of Patti Smith or Jim Morrison! But it's great to have them onboard!!
Others have misread the horses for rocks because of the title. I wonder if I should tweak it—something like 'Near the Hippolyte Rocks'. As a local, I think of the Hippolyte Rocks as a region which includes the water all around that area. I'll think about it.
Hi Deborah!
First I want to apologise for not responding to your comment on my last poem. It had slipped down the board, and I didn't want to drag it up, but I had fully intended to PM you, but LIFE does what it does—gets in the way! Which is no excuse. So, I'm sorry!
I'm so glad you're enjoying the poem. Interesting to hear your take on the rhymes. I, too, adore creative rhyming. The two words 'mouthed' and 'loved' have a very similar feel in my mouth as I say them, with the actual sound being very similar too. So I suspect it is a closer slant rhyme for me than it is for you.
I do see what you mean by following the opening with action. I felt, in the midst of composition, and still feel now, that the delay of action is necessary. It actually is very abstact, in a way, floating alone on the ocean, and waves don't come regularly. There can be long waits. And then they'll come in sets of 3 or 5. It gives you dreaming time out there, meditative. And then this SUDDEN rush of force and overwhelming MOMENT. I am trying to get something of that.
I'm so glad you love the horses. I think I mentioned earlier that I always imagined the waves as horses since I was a child. I've never actually called them horses in a poem before. I think it must have been their time.
All, I fairly sure I'm going with the original, for the most part. Still wavering about the last two lines, S2. So I'll leave the two versions where they are. If any changes occur, I'll let you know.
Thank you for all the help! It made me experiment with lots of things.
Cally
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