[Mary Meriam]

I still prefer the effortless original: "a deep green swell conceals an albatross".

[Mark McDonnell]

Stupid me kind of skimmed over the title the first few times I read this, so I didn't see the connection between the "horses" in the poem and the name of the rocks. I still think it's deliberately tenuous. I don't know what the horses are but they feel more elemental than approaching islands. I love the poem. I heard Eliot's sea-girls "riding seaward on the waves" in the last line. I seemed to hear echoes of a dozen things but with the power of hearing something for the first time.

I think the line "heading for the ice sheet, old, severe and loved" is a little crammed and busy now. Perhaps "believing he is loved" was a bit much but maybe the speaker could believe that he (the albatross) is loved. Funny how an albatross believing he is loved seems a little too sentimental but water understanding the need to part feels just right.

Edit: I've just read all the crits properly. The horses are waves. Thought so. On a slightly less erudite note, along with Eliot I had Patti Smith and Jim Morrison in my head too.

[Deborah J. Shore]

Hi, Cally,

Good to read you here. I'm enjoying this poem. Just a couple of thoughts to take or leave:

I'm a lover of slant rhymes and creative takes on rhyming but struggle with mouthed/loved. I wonder if this would be any different, however, if I were from your part of the world. And perhaps it sets the stage for the radical bolted/altered.

Also I wondered if it might feel fresher to actively show how it unfolds and feels to lose the land were the currents pull someone out rather than piling up the passive theoreticals. The abstract "other laws apply" might be better followed up by action?

I love the horses.

I've been to an ocean a handful of times but have never properly swum in one. Your poem is a fine experience.

Thanks for this!
Deborah

[Cally Conan-Davies]

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

[Roger Slater]

"I think I mentioned earlier that I always imagined the waves as horses since I was a child."

As you may already know ( though I just found out a moment ago), breaking waves are often referred to a "white horses" or "horse's mane waves." Google "waves as horses" and you'll see.

[W T Clark]

Choppily sea-like, Cally. The metre is a furious machine, always not quite balanced: like the sea.

[Deborah J. Shore]

No apologies needed, Cally. I get that! And, of course, the bottom line in forums like this is seeing whether your choices hold up even after someone questions them. So it sounds like you’ve got the right track.

[R. Nemo Hill]

Re: horses and the sea.
In the midst of the furious horse-rushing of the waves, I get another image: the poet herself, suspended in perfect stillness, upright, in the storm's-eye center of continual agitation—a motionless sea-horse.

Nemo

[Cally Conan-Davies]

Hi Roger! I've never thought to google that before! I've been lucky enough in my life to have lived on some of the wildest coastlines with magnificent horses. The best place I've found is the Oregon coast; waves there have the full white manes, the sprindrift flying back, and the pounding sound. The way it all comes together in my imagination is the connection between waves, horses and emotions as found in Euripides' play. Because he refuses to honour emotional life, Hippolytus' own horses/waves smash him against the rocks. I remember my shock of recognition when I first read this play.

Hi, Cam! And thanks for "furious machine"! The sea has many moods. It's all weather.

Deborah, hi! And thanks! And you're absolutely right. To have one's choices challenged, and then to scrupulously examine them—this is the real value of the Sphere.

Nemo. Yes. That's the heart of it. Living at the heart of the "constant never" --- it's amazing how calm it is. Beautiful calm.


Still dreaming on those unsettled lines, watching for something to resolve . . .


Thank you!

[James Brancheau]

I love this, Cally. My favorite part is probably the first stanza, though it’s all terrific. I think Mary referred to a part as “effortless” (and I agree with her there), but that’s how I feel about the whole poem, especially that opening. The line breaks there are really swimming. Gliding and turning. Graceful, precise, beautiful. And I love “Other laws apply.”

I would stick with the original. The albatross lines come across as more immediate and meaningful there. In the revision, they are a bit overthought, imo. And, yeah, sure, the albatross doesn’t believe it is loved, but might this tell us more about the speaker? In any case, I think it’s a very human thing to attach our own thoughts and feelings to animals and objects. Yeah, I wouldn’t mess around much (if at all) with the original.