Here’s a question: If you take a raft and sail in one direction Let's say towards a star that way you’ll never need a course correction How long until lost inside a forest of angry towering waves Til terror leaves you mute, although to whom would you speak anyways? And then you see it, in the dark, it doesn’t really matter what A shine, a splash, a flickering light it certainly won’t save you but It’s beautiful, and shows you what’s there waiting for you when you fall And sink into the waves and end up chewed and swallowed bones and all. And maybe down there maybe even while you still have breath remaining You’ll be shown a glimpse of something new this spot of sea’s been saving Something never seen before at least by eyes of those up here, But waiting patient nonetheless for something new to venture near Remember, when you meet it what arachnophobes can’t quite admit, It is just as scared of you as you are scared of it.
Why did I do this? The whole point of our descriptive essays was to create a dominant impression. I would argue that the strongest way to make an impression is through emotion, but prose that conveys emotion is honestly beyond me. But when you can rhyme, that little bit of oomph at the end of each line, and the lulling of a constant rhythm makes emotion easy, and thus impresses on the reader ever so dominantly. Once you have the basis, the heightened emotional state just from the form, you can take it wherever you want, And in this case, in line with my original essay, I took it down the path that marks the border between terror and excitement, the path that leads to anything that’s truly unknown. What I want to convey (and not just tell, I suppose, but impress upon) is how the ocean as a whole embodies this mix of emotions, where fear of death is contrasted with hope of wonder. That’s the big point, but there are other, smaller ideas from the essay I wanted to sneak into my poem. The first one is solitude. Not that discovery must be solitary, but that is can be, and that the most special kind of meeting is one on one, just you and “it”. I also wanted to convey the idea of the equality, the dichotomous newness if you will, of this type of encounter, and how that must be considered, so no rash action turns the situation sour before it can turn sweet. I would suggest reading the poem a few times in order to get the full sense of both what it's trying to evoke, and what it's trying to say.