Magnolia Shoals
Magnolia Shoals - meaning Summary
Winter After Summer's Abandonment
The poem sketches a wintry shoreline where summer has departed and the landscape shows relics of former abundance. The speaker observes gulls, crabs, mussels and warped sea-gardens, noting both decay and persistent patterns of life. A solitary gull claims territory while a watercolorist, bracing in cold air, records the scene. The poem contrasts seasonal loss with ongoing natural rhythms and the human effort to capture them in art.
Read Complete AnalysesUp here among the gull cries we stroll through a maze of pale red-mottled relics, shells, claws as if it were summer still. That season has turned its back. Through the green sea gardens stall, bow, and recover their look of the imperishable gardens in an antique book or tapestries on a wall, leaves behind us warp and lapse. The late month withers, as well. Below us a white gull keeps the weed-slicked shelf for his own, hustles other gulls off. Crabs rove over his field of stone; mussels cluster blue as grapes : his beak brings the harvest in. The watercolorist grips his brush in the stringent air. The horizon's bare of ships, the beach and the rocks are bare. He paints a blizzard of gulls, wings drumming in the winter.
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