HOME | DD
neonsquiggle —
Polaris is Dead.
Published: 2015-04-04 11:04:24 +0000 UTC; Views: 3368; Favourites: 74; Downloads: 0
Redirect to original
Description
windbound,we were caught and cornered,
keelsons crushed
underneath the weight
of rocks and hard places
and hurricanes
that tore us all but
apart -
in this and every maelstrom
we were just waiting
to crumble,
holding hands like they were
lifelines
and locking palms in prayer ;
we knew an introduction
to the edge of our little world was
inevitable,
and said our goodbyes
every time the ocean's belly
swelled with Neptune's angry squall,
our mouths filled with salt and
all the breathlessness that came
with keeping a weather eye
on that horizon.
you were the light of my life -
every smile a star
and every star a sentinel,
keeping us from keeling over
or charting courses
hellward bound ;
polaris,
that angel stern,
casting starshine
on every map and
on every midnight journey,
and making sure
we always knew
which way was north,
or a new world,
or danger,
or home.
but darling,
the storms got the best of us,
our little ship stricken
from bow to stern,
from mizzenmast to bowline,
every stemson,
every scuttle,
every sail.
our little ship in irons,
grounded at sea.
and you, o my captain,
lost,
and lost to me.
polaris is dead.
I am the light of my life -
I am charting a course
for that horizon,
hell and hurricanes
be damned.
Related content
Comments: 32
👍: 1 ⏩: 0
IM GONNA CRY THIS IS SO GOOD WHY AND HOW IT'S NOT OK
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
Congrats on the Daily Deviation!! ^__^
May you continue to excell in your writing talent.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
This is a late response but thank you so much!
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
You certainly earned the DD; this poem is original, complex, and spectacular, and we feel it down to the bone.
But "the light of my life" is still a cliche, even in this amazing a context, and it jarred me out of the metaphor a bit. Which is MADDENING in such a strong poem, dammit!
Never let us--never MAKE us--blink and look away, even for a moment. NEVER!
Your ferocious fan,
--Nonie
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
Thanks so much, love!
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
-The imagery effectively forced me into the scene of a great tragedy where hope seemed all but lost. The use of a nautical theme is quite effective because I really can't imagine a greater instance of man vs. nature then sailors in a hurricane going down with their ship. Needless to say it kept me on the edge of my seat and allowed me to conceptualize your emotions into a familiar scene, and by doing so I felt a mixture of pity, horror, reverence, and empathy. ( I think that answered the first three questions)
- I loved the title. It's simple and eye catching, yet greatly important to the theme of an important figure/guiding light passing in the storm. Please keep it the way it is.
-The metaphor, as I stated earlier, works wonderfully. This piece is a damn good example of poetry at its finest. "Hell and hurricanes be damned" is one of my favorite lines in any poem I've ever read.
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
Connected with this piece more than I care to explain. An exemplary rendition of a love lost and of moving on. Simply wonderful <3
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
Love the incorporation of jargon and beautiful metaphor!
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Thank you so much!
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
- How did the imagery affect you? How did it affect the story?
It added to it quite nicely, I'd say. It's blatant, which works for this piece.
- What kind of story did you get from this? How did it make you feel?
I think it's a retrospective on some kind of love, now that said love has gone (in some sense).
- How did the naval language affect the poem?
It's pretty conventional, but it works; "every time the ocean's belly / swelled with Neptune's angry squall" was the most eye-catching image, IMO.
- What would have been a better title?
The title is perfect
- How does the metaphor work out?
Nicely
-
Also, pedantic grammar point but in "hellward bound ;", the semicolon shouldn't have a space between the word and symbol itself.
But nonetheless, congrats on the DD! :meow;
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
Inspiring! I enjoy the forlorn tone that tells of tragedy throughout, and especially the powerful reversal at the end. The naval language is artfully weaved in, though "grounded at sea" is a jarring choice for me. I am the light of my life is very affirming, tragic and true.
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
Seriously, I love this!! You paint a very haunting image with your words, and I found it engaging and exciting to read. I like the use of naval language although I have no idea what a stepson is - I think it is very fitting for this poem, when the ship and what it represents is such an essential thing. I am at a loss for a different title...
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
Stunning work - love the imagery!
Congrats on the DD
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
Exceptional!! Congratulations on a much deserved DD!!
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
To some extent this poem reminded me of Robert Lowell's "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket", in Lowell's poem there is a symbolic connection to the sea that is religious, familial, bleak and untamed. I just don't think your symbolism is all that deep or novel, the same goes for your metaphors. They are rather standard and cliché, e.g., "holding hands like they were lifelines," or "swelled with Neptune's angry squall" another "the storms got the best of us/ our little ship stricken/ from bow to stern..." I think that when one tries to uses the ocean and naval language symbolically in a poem there is an expectation already there in a reader's mind. In terms of classics, readers will probably think of, Virgil and Homer (the Odyssey) etc Whitman's "Sea Drift Elegy", Lowell, Hemingway, "Muntiny on the Bounty", Patrick O'Brian's novels etc. The sea is brutal, the men who try to tame it are coarse with windburn and salt, they are desperate and half crazed pieces of beef jerky who chose a life of sea labor, instead of being thrown in jail, and so on. There is also the nautical expressions (that always seem alien and rustic when one first reads them) that are found in seafaring novels. The reader might think of ketch like Titanic, "don't let go Jack!" (Something else that your poem reminded me of). Therefore, when using the ocean and those things associated with it figuratively in a poem, one must really work to break outside of those expectations. I'm afraid that your poem does not quite do that, but that does not mean it is a bad poem. I think it is a poem that could either use some work, or you could take ideas out of it and expand on those ideas making a new poem.
If we take this basic plot, that these lovers are in their little boat (their abode, domus, home or whatever) and they are holding hands (they are each other's lifeline) the speaker sees their lover's smile like a guiding star/light (not a bad idea) then there is an unbearable storm (problem incident that the two could not withstand like the others, apparently worse than when 'swelling Neptune squalled, angrily') that blasts the boat (or home etc.) apart, and now the speaker follows their own light (I find this awkward, why is the speaker not in the dark instead?) some ideas can be expanded. As is, it is a bit bland, because it feels standard, like a poetry by numbers...Why not expand on what the final storm is? Is it not important? What is it symbolically, metaphorically? What does it look like? Is it anthropomorphic, is it an emotion? Also, the lover's smile being like a star is good but it can be extended even more. Think of how you can make it more stylized, for instance what about those stars? Well, stars die; they do so in stages, which ends with a black hole. I think you can take ideas like the smile, and 'unpack' them a bit more, try to push yourself towards new metaphors, complex stylized metaphors, verse that jumps out of your purest creativity. The best example of this stylized verse is found in the works of Hart Crane,
"And yet this great wink of eternity,
Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,
Samite sheeted and processioned where
Her undinal vast belly moonward bends,
Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love;
Take this Sea, whose diapason knells
On scrolls of silver snowy sentences,
The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends
As her demeanors motion well or ill,
All but the pieties of lovers' hands."
-From "Voyages"-
Another example is Wallace Stevens, a writer with stylized verse, who was seemingly self-aware of his poetic (as he called it) strangeness/'selfness':
Tea at the Palaz of Hoon:
Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.
What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?
Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:
I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
I'm not saying to write like them per se (meaning, copy them), I'm saying look at how they wrote poetry that could not be written by anyone else. They did not write verse that (as Orwell once put it) looks like it 'came out of the machine the writer is using' instead of 'the writer's own brain' e.g., 'moving towards the horizon'. Is the horizon more special for your speaker than it is for all of those other speakers in innumerable other poems? Alternatively, you could work off of, how it is not as special... "Hell and hurricanes/ be damned" to me seems like a cheesy way to end the poem. Presumably the speaker has had a rather dramatic alteration in their life, and livelihood. I myself would expect a more raw and primal last stanza, something that bellows from the chest (if you know what I mean) and those last lines should not be quite as terse unless the supporting verse is already rhapsodic (it's not quite there), and you feel like the last few lines need to slow it down (but that is just me). To give you a better idea of what I mean, listen to Richard Burton read the last two stanzas from Dylan Thomas' "Fern Hill" starting at 2:18
www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z-Zug…
Some technical things: you might want to work on the poem's flow. In the last stanza, "and you, o my captain, lost" I think the vocative 'o' breaks your rhythm (it also looks like a bad allusion to Whitman lol), I would take it out. I did not like the full stops on "and lost to me"/ "Polaris is dead", also you already said lost in a more general sense, why add "and lost to me"?
This is what I would do with your final stanza, to make it flow like I would want it to (which you need not pay any attention to):
but darling
the storms got the best of us,
our little ship stricken
from bow to stern,
from mizzenmast to bowline,
every stemson,
every scuttle,
every sail!
Our little ship is in irons
grounded at sea,
and you my captain,
lost;
Lost to me,
O light of life,
great Polaris dead!
I am now charting a course
for that horizon, *if it's a 'that' instead of 'the', then it needs to be special. lol
hell and hurricanes
be damned.
As I said, the poem is not a bad one, my primary advice is that you push your imagination (watch out for cliché) and develop your poetic voice some more. Something that you can try is making an allusion to another work of literature, but use it like a metaphor, as Lowell does with the story of Moby-Dick in "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket." As an exercise, it may or may not work for you, try this: I will sometimes write down a line (the first thing that pops into my head) that makes no sense whatsoever, but it will have a nice rhythm to it. Honestly, the sentence can be garbled nonsense. I will then take that one line and work it until I have a subject, then I will build the poem around that rhythm and subject. When doing the exercise, it is paramount that you maintain the rhythm from the first line throughout the poem. I find that spontaneity can help bring about interesting writing, but it is better to have a rhythmic structure. Let the ideas, images, figurative language flow freely from your imagination onto a rhythmic plane where everything sort of coalesces.
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
I loved this poem greatly. The imagery is very effective, I felt like I could picture myself standing on a boat or floating aimlessly in the ocean, it left this little ache in my heart. I think it fits a story of lost love very well because our lives really are a tossing sea and we've got to steer ourselfes through it. It made me feel lost somehow, but in the good way, and the ending grounded me back again. I like how you gave the idea of picking yourself back up and being the one to guide you on your own, a lot of times the ends of love poems talk about finding someone else, or being depressed/alone, rather than being self-sufficient. The naval language gave it an almost ancient feeling. However, I do feel like maybe your title doesn't tell what your poem's really about, maybe a better title would be "Polaris is Dead"? Overall this was a very satisfying read, I feel like I'm gonna remember this poem for a long time.
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
A wonderfully tumultuous tale. The imagery is brilliant and I find that the nautical bits really add colour and finer details to the images you've presented. The story itself progresses very naturally from the tension of the storm to the calming hints of optimism leading to the beginning of the next untold journey. I really enjoyed how the ending isn't too specific about whether it's reckless, hopeful, empowering, or otherwise. It leaves me asking myself more in depth questions about the character and the internal change that has taken place. A very interesting read.
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
Flows great. I picture an image. I love how you written it A+
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Thanks, dear. Your support is appreciated!
👍: 0 ⏩: 0