You are the view, you are the view,

Everything and the sparkle of a hue.

I am the horizon, with a glimpse,

Past the dash and the haze--

Falling and freeing into glittering blue,

A picture perfect sea of new.

.

We hold for the cue--

A breath in a moment, slowed by time.

Then the silence and swelling of unstoppable tides

And the tumble and trouble

And bubble and double with toil

As ropes of water sway and coil.

.

Our messages in bottles still seem to go through,

Deep beneath the rumble of riptides

While the stars and the moon stand aside

And a sprinkling of sparks dances along the water.

The currents fight to loosen my hold

But our hands clasp tight against the arms of the welcoming cold.

.

Light breaks beyond the boundary--raw and true,

Beams beckoned and drawn to the depths

Of an unknown place beneath all the sea.

Fathoms below the current and crashing waves,

We find a different haze and a shifted view

But all still are a sparkling blue.

.

I had an interesting experience writing this poem. I don’t write poetry often but decided to push myself to try and imitate a few critical concepts of Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy.” Plath utilizes the “I-you” style for addressing audience and self in relation to the audience. She also has intense imagery and uses the structure of her lines to invoke a sing-song rhythm. In my poem, I worked to connect the me/I to the you of the poem. My goal of the poem is for it to be addressed to my partner and describe the feeling of falling in love compared to an ocean. I maintained the imagery of the ocean throughout the poem and used word choice to emulate the flow of the ocean one might experience. I also tried to use a similar rhyming pattern that Plath uses as a point of inspiration around sentence structure to evoke the feeling of flowing water.

The first stanza addresses the beginnings of falling in love like the ocean on the horizon while driving towards it. The second stanza works with the initial shocks and confusions that come with the process of falling in love, particularly how getting caught in the waves can leave you disoriented and unsure. The third stanza addresses the settling in of a new love and the factors of society or internal thoughts that question the feelings of love, which are then reassured in the comfort of the depths. The final stanza works to portray the new perspectives that are gained during the process of falling in love, and how it is the same as first anticipated before it is experienced but also better than could ever be expected. Overall, I think writing this poem forced me to look at the structural choices, such as word choice, and the artistic influences, such as imagery choice, that Plath uses to determine a good starting point for my own poem.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons -- File:Cerulean Blue (230845580).jpg