From the Wave

Originally from Thom Gunn’s 1971 book Moly, “From the Wave” is also included in Gunn’s 2009 Selected Poems.

In “From the Wave,” the titular wave builds and a group of surfers ride it into the shallows. The speaker of the poem watches and draws many subtle parallels between the surfers riding the wave and himself writing the poem. The speaker observes the surfers’ skillful balance, and he prizes such balance as a virtue of his own poetry: The poem itself is written in four-line stanzas, or quatrains, and each stanza features the same alternating metrical pattern and alternating rhyme scheme. Like the surfers the poem describes, the form of Gunn’s verse is precisely balanced. The poem is, on one level, a small drama of formalist aesthetics.

Gunn is known for being a formalist poet, meaning he employed meter and rhyme; he was among the foremost formalists writing in English in the 20th century, and many of his most celebrated poems are formal.

Poet Biography

Gunn was born William Guinneach Gunn. He was nicknamed “Thom,” and this is his nom de plume.

Gunn was born in 1929 in England. His parents, Herbert Gunn and Charlotte Thomson, had an unhappy relationship and divorced in 1939. In 1944, Charlotte died by suicide, and Gunn and his brother discovered her body, an event Gunn could not bring himself to write about until very late in his poetic career.

After completing his National Service in the Army, Gunn was educated at Cambridge. He published his first book, Fighting Terms, in 1954. That same year, he was awarded a creative writing fellowship at Stanford University; moved to Palo Alto, California; and met his Stanford mentor, Yvor Winters.

Yet, Gunn’s reasons for coming to the States were primarily personal, not poetic: “I found the only way to get to the United States, where I intended to eventually join Mike [Kitay, an American Gunn had met at Cambridge] was to get a fellowship at some university” (Gunn, Thom. “My Life Up To Now.” The Occasions of Poetry, Faber & Faber, 1982, p. 175).

The following year, in 1955, Gunn followed Kitay to San Antonio, Texas, but the couple found San Antonio dull, so Gunn returned to Stanford in 1956 and Kitay joined him there shortly after. Both the San Francisco area and Kitay would remain incredibly important, if not entirely constant, presences in Gunn’s life until his death, and it is in the San Francisco area that Gunn likely saw surfers like those described in “From the Wave.”

Gunn taught off-and-on at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1958 to 1999. He also published steadily. His books of poetry include The Sense of Movement (1957), My Sad Captains (1961), Touch (1967), Moly (1971), Jack’s Straw Castle (1976), The Passages of Joy (1982), The Man with Night Sweats (1992), and Boss Cupid (2000).

Gunn’s life was profoundly and tragically impacted by the AIDS epidemic as Gunn lost many friends to AIDS-related illnesses. The Man with Night Sweats closes with a sequence of elegies Gunn wrote for friends who died of AIDS-related illnesses, and Boss Cupid also includes AIDS elegies. Some critics consider Gunn’s AIDS elegies to be some of the most heartbreaking and harrowing poems of mourning ever written in English.

Over the course of his career, Gunn won many awards for his poetry, including prestigious fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation.

Gunn died of heart failure in San Francisco in 2004.

Poem Text

Gunn, Thom. “From the Wave.” 1971. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

“From the Wave” begins as the titular wave “mounts,” or rises, “at sea” (Line 1). The wave is C-shaped and is described as a “concave wall” (Line 1). (The word “concave” means the wave curves inward, like a sphere’s interior.) The wave is ribboned by sunlight, or “[d]own-ribbed with shine” (Line 2). It “pushes forward” toward the beach “building tall / [i]ts steep incline” (Lines 3-4).

A group of surfers in wetsuits, or “[b]lack shapes on boards” (Line 6), spring up from their boards (Line 5), catch the wave, and begin to ride it. The surfers position themselves just before the wave’s foamy crest, which is described as a “fringe of white” (Line 7) that the wave “mottles” (Line 8), or marks and stains, as it moves forward.

The feet of the surfers are “pale” and “curl” (Line 9) as they balance on their boards with a “learn’d,” or practiced, “skill” (Line 10). These are experienced surfers, and the speaker of the poem observes that the curve of the surfers’ stance on the board—the way they bend their knees and lean forward—mimics the curve of the wave and keeps the surfers upright, or “still” (Line 12), as opposed to falling (Line 12).

The surfers “have become / [h]alf wave, half men” (Lines 13-14). The wave and the surfers are “[g]rafted,” or joined, by what look like “feet of foam” (Line 15). In fact, the foamy water is simply curling around the surfers’ boards, lapping at—and occasionally covering—the surfers’ feet. The surfers hold their upright position on the wave as long as possible without wiping out (Lines 16-17).

At the last possible moment, the surfers turn into, or “slice the face” (Line 17), of the wave. Since the surfers are each riding a slightly different point on the wave, they each reach the last possible moment of riding the wave at slightly different times and end their rides “[i]n timed procession” (Line 18). In surfing, the speaker tells us, “[b]alance is triumph” as well as “possession” (Lines 19-20). In other words, the surfers’ balance allows them to triumph and possess the wave.

The wave is a “mindless heave” and “fluid shelf” (Lines 21-22). It “[b]reaks” as the surfers peel off, then “falls and, slowed, / [l]oses itself” (Lines 23-24), meaning once the wave breaks, it is flat, so it is no longer a wave.

The surfers are still “sheathed” (Line 25) in their wetsuits and “slick as seals” (Line 25), but they are “[c]lear” (Line 25) of the breaking wave, so, like the wave, they also relax, “[l]oosen and tingle” (Lines 26). The “bare foot” (Line 27) of a surfer dangles beside his surfboard and feels the ocean’s current pull, or “suck” (Line 28), the board, which is referred to as a “shingle” (Line28) because of its thin construction.

The surfers “paddle in the shallows” (Line 29) near the beach, “[t]wo splash each other” (Line 30), then they “all swim out” (Line 31) to catch the next wave.