Ocean

The Pacific is inconstant and uncertain like the soul of man. Sometimes it is grey like the English Channel off Beachy Head, with a heavy swell, and sometimes it is rough, capped with white crests, and boisterous. It is not so often that it is calm and blue. Then, indeed, the blue is arrogant. The sun shines fiercely from an unclouded sky. The trade wind gets into your blood and you are filled with an impatience for the unknown. The billows, magnificently rolling, stretch widely on all sides of you, and you forget your vanished youth, with its memories, cruel and sweet, in a restless, intolerable desire for life.
--W. Somerset Maugham


Read the second and fourth sentence. I can feel the pulsing of the sea in the sentence. It is the pacing and the brilliant use of the commas. For example, "..., with a heavy swell, and sometimes, it is rough, capped with white crests, and boisterous." Then after a simple "it is not so often that it is calm and blue." It goes on to "Then, indded, the blue is arrogant." I really need to take that grammar class. I want to be able to construct sentences like these. And I admit I have a love for the word "Then" followed by a comma. It is so full of possiblities. Lee thinks I have a problem with punctuations. I want to go back to basics and relook at them when I take a grammar class in Spring, but punctuations are full of possibilities. I have seen how Virigina Woolf uses semi-colons. I have always hated semi-colons, because they feel pretentious and disruptive, but in the hands of a great writer it felt nothing but sincere and absolutely apt.



Sometimes when I think of the sea.
It is blank, wordless.
It is too burdened by the weight of many memories
the distance between the same big body of water
tied sea to sea, river to clouds, rain to tears
I try to give it a shape, a sensation
I am left trying.
It is a comma, a pause,
a suspense
of something left hanging
a thought in mid formation
a wave
before it approaches