Where Once the Waters of Your Face
Where Once the Waters of Your Face - meaning Summary
Sea-dryness of Loss
This poem describes the absence of a beloved through maritime imagery transformed into barrenness. Waves, mermen, corals and tides become dry, ghostly, and unravelling, suggesting the erosion of love and memory. Life and fertility are inverted: children haunt empty shores, instruments of the sea lie idle, and traditional sea-faiths decline. The tone is elegiac and uncanny, using physical decay at sea to evoke emotional loss and the end of mythic sustenance.
Read Complete AnalysesWhere once the waters of your face Spun to my screws, your dry ghost blows, The dead turns up its eye; Where once the mermen through your ice Pushed up their hair, the dry wind steers Through salt and root and roe. Where once your green knots sank their splice Into the tided cord, there goes The green unraveller, His scissors oiled, his knife hung loose To cut the channels at their source And lay the wet fruits low. Invisible, your clocking tides Break on the lovebeds of the weeds; The weed of love's left dry; There round about your stones the shades Of children go who, from their voids, Cry to the dolphined sea. Dry as a tomb, your coloured lids Shall not be latched while magic glides Sage on the earth and sky; There shall be corals in your beds There shall be serpents in your tides, Till all our sea-faiths die.
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