From the Wave

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