20 pages • 40 minutes read
Thom GunnFrom the Wave
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1971A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Play
Surfing is part sport, part play, but the surfers in “From the Wave” appear to be engaging more in the latter. They don’t appear to be competing with each other; there’s no description of anyone judging or evaluating their performance, and no description of any family, friends, or spectators watching (other than the speaker). Perhaps the surfers are practicing for a competition, but it seems more likely they are surfing for pleasure. The speaker does say that “[b]alance is triumph” (Line 19), and the word “triumph” may suggest competition—but, unlike in competitions, no surfer triumphs over another. Instead, all the surfers triumph since they are all able to stand up and ride the wave. Finally, the way two surfers “splash each other” (Line 30) in the last stanza also suggests play. Moreover, since the speaker is presumably thinking about both the surfers riding the wave and himself writing the poem at once and drawing subtle parallels between the surfers and himself (See: Poem Analysis), the implication is that—since riding the wave is play for the surfers—writing this poem about surfers riding the wave is also play for the poet.
Art
The speaker’s description of the surfers evokes statues and myth (note also that myth is the subject of many statues and other works of art). The surfers’ feet are described as “pale” (Line 9) and their bodies as “still” (Line 12) and “marbling” (Line 13). Those words—“pale,” “still,” and “marbling”—evoke images of white marble statues. The surfers are also described as “[h]alf wave, half men” (Line 14), which evokes centaurs, mythical creatures that are half horse, half man (additionally, many statues depict centaurs). Finally, in Lines 19 and 20, Gunn alludes to John Keats’s famous ekphrastic poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” a verse that meditates on an urn as well as the scenes depicted on that urn (See: Poem Analysis). Works of art are, therefore, an important motif in “From the Wave.”
Celebration of Male Bodies
The poem’s celebration of male bodies appears in its descriptive terms, which evoke a mythical creature (the centaur) and works of art. Additionally, the repeated use of the word “triumph” (Lines 19-20) also extols the form and skill of the surfers’ bodies. This celebration of male bodies is an important motif in “From the Wave” and in Gunn’s larger body of work.
When Gunn published his first book, Fighting Terms, in 1954, he was not open about his sexuality. But later in his career, Gunn lived as an openly gay man and wrote explicitly—and exquisitely—about gay sex in his poetry. Moreover, in addition to the poems he wrote that are explicit about gay sex, Gunn wrote many more poems that celebrate the male form and male bodies. “From the Wave” falls into this latter category, because while the poem revels in the surfers’ form and skill, there’s nothing overtly sexual in the poem. While perhaps it is possible to read sexual innuendo into some of the word-choices in “From the Wave”—Weiner writes that there is a “patina of sex and violence in words such as ‘mount,’ ‘slice,’ and ‘possession’” (Weiner)—the poem is about surfers, not sex. Yet, the attention to and celebration of male bodies is a motif common to Gunn’s work.
