Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

John Frederick Nims’ "Seamusic" explores the ocean as a metaphor for love, desire, risk, and mortality, using the movement of waves to mirror human experience. The poem’s title suggests both the literal music of the sea—its rhythmic crashing, the slapping of kelp, the sound of water meeting land—and the figurative music of human passion and fate. The epigraph from Aeschylus, though cryptic, invokes the ancient weight of tragedy, setting the poem in a mythic register. Throughout, Nims contrasts those who surrender fully to the forces of life and love with those who remain hesitant, pale, and irresolute, never plunging into the depths.

The poem’s opening questions—What word in the deep mind swimming, goldfish word / Or arrow of eel, or sharkblunt, or what sailword—suggest a search for language capable of capturing the ocean’s force. These lines enact their own fluidity, moving in a stream of images that blur distinctions between marine life (goldfish, eel, shark) and the mechanisms of human experience (sailword, suggesting travel, ambition, or perhaps poetry itself). The poet is attempting to seine from the blood—as one would net fish from the sea—a vocabulary to elevate this dream to stature.

In the next section, the poem establishes a contrast between the ordinary, earthly world and the elemental, oceanic one. Words for daily human needs are clear-cut and tangible—woolen, iodine, bread—but what language exists for the surf and the fascinate hours, for moments of wonder, immersion, and transformation? The poet describes the shifting scenery of a coastal landscape, where beams reel with the sea and shear the foam up, / Dizzy but decade-deep in the spinning sand. Here, the interaction of light, water, and time produces a hypnotic effect, reinforced by the sense of rain fine as meal on the cheek and the tossed horizon filled with the smoke of voyage. This section suggests a yearning for movement, for journeying, but also a hesitation, as the speaker leaves with backward eye and absent answer, unwilling or unable to articulate the depth of experience. The ocean, however, remains vast and unbroken, continuing its slapping in the night.

The pivotal meditation on falling—this dare-all that studies the one law: falling—reframes the ocean’s endless motion as an existential principle. Waves do not simply crash; they fall forever on forward, utter and done, expending their brightness and power. The wave’s trajectory is likened to the arc of human striving, to the acropolis hung for a trifle of time / Precise in the sun, an image that suggests both the grandeur and impermanence of civilization. Just as the wave must collapse, so too must human ambition, beauty, and life itself. The difference, the poem suggests, lies in how one meets this fall—whether with abandon, as the wave does, or with resistance.

This meditation leads into a reflection on love and death: Happy who die in love, in fire at midnight / In a shore hotel, or in roadster’s crash made meteor. Here, passion and destruction are entwined. The phrase roadster’s crash made meteor transforms an automobile accident into a celestial event, emphasizing the sudden, burning quality of an intense, fleeting life. Those who see the whole globe sailing to embrace them at the moment of death are elevated, their demise rendered sublime. Even in falling, there is a grandeur—a sense of love’s Atlantic that hurtles on the dangerous air. The best lives, according to the poem, are those propelled by momentum, where life [is] a single wave / And death a music in the ultimate sedge. This suggests that the true fulfillment of existence comes not in hesitation or restraint but in yielding fully to passion and fate.

Yet, the poem does not end in celebration of this reckless immersion. Instead, it turns to pale men irresolute, those who never fully surrender to love or risk. The poem acknowledges that to most in youth / Comes love, the windy midnight and great stars, and yet even in such moments, most remain only half the sea. They experience the rise, the clear and terrible-quick, the initial thrill of passion, but not the giving-over of all, the downward crash or eagle-steep / The onward ruin of the glint descent. This hesitation marks the difference between true abandon and mere participation. The final lines drive home this distinction: Only the flat collapse, this undiscerned: / Sea’s weight is in the falling wave alone. True force, true meaning, lies not in standing still or in rising temporarily but in the full and final plunge, the total commitment to the fall.

"Seamusic" thus becomes a meditation on risk, love, and the nature of surrender. The sea functions as a vast, inexorable force, its waves embodying the full arc of passion and collapse. Nims’ language enacts this movement, shifting between moments of lyricism and abrupt crashes of insight. The poem ultimately argues that the weight of experience—the full intensity of life—resides not in careful hesitation but in the willingness to fall completely, to hurl oneself toward love, destruction, and whatever comes after.

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