Hello, Julie!
This is wonderfully cohesive, and you handle the complexity of the glosa form with real grace. The meter, rhyme, and tonal control are impressively fluid—everything reads as if it were effortless, even while the architecture behind it is clearly intricate.
One thing I wonder about is the opening stanza’s focus on Kipling’s technical metrics. While clever and witty, it feels slightly disconnected from the tone and imagery of the rest of the poem, which leans into oceanic and psychological motifs. Perhaps there’s a way to bridge those registers more directly? For example, shifting focus from Kipling’s metrical irregularities to the sea’s own unpredictable rhythms might help better integrate the beginning with the whole.
For the third stanza, I feel commas would work better to separate the list elements, especially since there’d be no resulting ambiguity:
The sea’s letting everything go:
the thing that it wants to divorce,
poetic convention,
and attention to critics — when three
Finally, in the last stanza, the inclusion of multiple fragments from the Kipling quote before the final full line somewhat diffuses its impact. So, we now have
Ever persistently (fourth line, last stanza);
silent deeps (third stanza, last two words of the second line);
We will lay this thing here. (repeats from your first stanza, from the first line of the reference poem). Thus, there’s no logic to what’s getting repeated from the source poem. If those fragments were tied to a more intentional scheme (e.g., appearing at specific structural turns, or referencing contiguous lines from the source poem), they might feel more deliberate. Also, as it stands, the repetition of “We will lay this thing here” earlier in the stanza feels a bit too prominent, since it lessens the impact of the required final line.
That said, this is already a smart, confident poem. I especially admire the interplay between the literal sea and the psychological “tide.” Just a few suggestions in case they’re helpful as you continue refining!
Cheers,
…Alex