Themes
Balance as Aesthetic Excellence
The poem explores the idea of balance on several levels, and it offers different senses of the word—and while these senses are outwardly dissimilar, the totality of the poem unifies them for a fuller meaning.
The first sense of balance is both literal and kinesthetic, as the speaker celebrates the balance of the surfers. He observes their physical equipoise, noting how they arrange their bodily elements to achieve an artful velocity: “[T]hey poise their weight / [w]ith a learn’d skill” (Lines 9-10). This concept of balance pervades the poem, insofar as the poem celebrates the surfers’ mastery. But this mastery is symbolic and ultimately poetic, as the poem seamlessly parallels the kinesthetic with the aesthetic: Like the surfers, the poem is balanced. As a formalist, Gunn prizes balance as a virtue, so his poem would naturally parallel the surfers’ athletic balance with poetic excellence. Indeed, in artwork, poetry, science, and mathematics, symmetry has long been a traditional marker of beauty and coherence.
This is the second sense of balance—the aesthetic sense—and it is this sense that the poem formally embodies. The form of the poem is precisely balanced with each stanza following the same alternating metrical and rhyme pattern (See: Literary Devices). As with much formal poetry, this poem’s content and the form have a correspondence and mutual resonance; they co-constitute the poem’s meaningfulness. In the case of “From the Wave,” both the content (the description of surfers riding a wave) and the form are concerned with balance; this balance is ultimately a form of aesthetic excellence that the poem celebrates, even down to the syntax of individual lines: “Balance is triumph in this place, / Triumph possession” (Lines 19-20). Not only is this chiastic structure, as a structure per se, yet another incarnation of balance, but the lines themselves directly exalt balance as “triumph.”
Imitation as Creative Force
Like the theme of balance, imitation is a constituent theme of the poem’s larger focus on art and aesthetics. The two themes—balance and imitation—are also intertwined: The surfers achieve bodily balance by imitating the shape of the wave they are riding. Like the wave, the surfers’ feet “curl” (Line 9), and their backs curve as the stand on their boards: “It is the wave they [the surfers] imitate / [k]eeps them so still” (Lines 11-12). Further, this image ties into aesthetic balance, as the form of the poem also imitates the wave (See: Literary Devices). As with many formal poems, there is a correspondence between the poem’s content and its form; because both content and form imitate one another, both engage the theme of imitation.
However, the form’s imitation of the content goes beyond mere imitation; traditionally (and especially in formalism), a formal element both creates and represents a poem’s meaningfulness. In other words, when a poem’s form imitates the content, the form thereby gives meaning to the content, and it helps express that meaning. The formal balance of “From the Wave” helps give meaning to, and helps express, the balance of the surfers. This dynamic of imitation is an instance of mimesis (Greek for imitation), a broad-ranging concept in literary criticism, involving the premise that art imitates life.
Poetry as Unification of Disparate Elements
“From the Wave” is interested in creating and sustaining continuities between seemingly disparate things. On Line 1 of the poem, the wave is described in terms that evoke, at once, a mountain, a horse, a curve, and a wall (See: Poem Analysis). In the fourth stanza, the surfers are described as “[h]alf wave, half men” (Line 14), a description that evokes a centaur, a hybrid and mythical creature that is half horse, half man. In the sixth stanza, the wave is described in terms that evoke both its weight and its fluidity (Lines 21-22); and, finally, the surfers are described as both “sheathed” (as a sword) and “slick as seals” (Lines 25). Thus, several times in the poem, distinct and disparate things are yoked in order to further Gunn’s description of the surfers riding the wave. Outside of the poem, these things don’t fit naturally together—for example, it’s hard to think of a wall as ever being curved, or “concave,” yet this is exactly how Gunn describes the titular wave in his poem, as a “concave wall” (Line 1).
The poem brings disparate things together very naturally in its description of the wave and the surfers who ride it. Repeatedly, the poem creates points of connection between things that, outside of the poem, would seem very different. These points of connection drive the poem forward.
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